Jim and Jap Crow

by Briones, Matthew M.

• ISBN13: 9780691129488
• ISBN10: 0691129487
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-03-19
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government rounded up more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans and sent them to internment camps. One of those internees was Charles Kikuchi. In thousands of diary pages, he documented his experiences in the camps, his resettlement in Chicago and drafting into the Army on the eve of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his postwar life as a social worker in New York City. Kikuchi's diaries bear witness to a watershed era in American race relations, and expose both the promise and the hypocrisy of American democracy. Jim and Jap Crowfollows Kikuchi's personal odyssey among fellow Japanese American intellectuals, immigrant activists, Chicago School social scientists, everyday people on Chicago's South Side, and psychologically scarred veterans in the hospitals of New York. The book chronicles a remarkable moment in America's history in which interracial alliances challenged the limits of the elusive democratic ideal, and in which the nation was forced to choose between civil liberty and the fearful politics of racial hysteria. It was an era of world war and the atomic bomb, desegregation in the military but Jim and Jap Crow elsewhere in America, and a hopeful progressivism that gave way to Cold War paranoia. Jim and Jap Crowlooks at Kikuchi's life and diaries as a lens through which to observe the possibilities, failures, and key conversations in a dynamic multiracial America.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Preface: "Contraction and Release"	p. xi
Introduction An Age of Possibility	p. 1
Before Pearl Harbor: Taking the Measure of a "Marginal" Man	p. 18
"A Multitude of Complexes": Finding Common Ground with Louis Adamic	p. 49
"Unity within Diversity": Intimacies and Public Discourses of Race and Ethnicity	p. 74
"Participating and Observing": Dorothy Swaine Thomas, W. I Thomas and Jers	p. 108
The Tanforan and Gila Diaries: Becoming Nikkei	p. 136
From "Jap Crow" to "Jim and Jane Crow": Black and Blue (and Yellow) in Chicago and the Bay Area	p. 162
"It Could Just as Well Be Me": Japanese American and African American GIs in the Army Diary	p. 192
Conclusion Tatsuro, "Standing Man"	p. 218
Notes	p. 237
Index	p. 263
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