Lost And Found

by Ishizuka, Karen L.

• ISBN13: 9780252073724
• ISBN10: 025207372X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-09-15
• Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr

Summary

Combining heartfelt stories with first-rate scholarship, Lost and Found reveals the complexities of a people reclaiming their own history. For decades, victims of the United States' mass incarceration of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II were kept from understanding their experience by governmental coverups, euphemisms, and societal silence. Indeed the world as a whole knew little or nothing about this shamefully un-American event. The Japanese American National Museum mounted a critically acclaimed exhibition, "America's Concentration Camp: Remembering the Japanese American Experience," with the twin goals of educating the general public and engaging former inmates in coming to grips with and telling their own history.Author/curator Karen L. Ishizuka, a third generation Japanese American, deftly blends official history with community memory to frame the historical moment of recovery within its cultural legacy. Detailing the interactive strategy that invited visitors to become part of this groundbreaking exhibition, Ishizuka narrates the processes of revelation and reclamation that unfolded as former internees and visitors alike confronted the experience of the camps. She also ponders how the dual act of recovering--and recovering from--history necessitates private and public mediation between remembering and forgetting, speaking out and remaining silent.By embedding personal words and images within a framework of public narrative, Lost and Found works toward reclaiming a painful past and provides new insights with richness and depth.

Author Biography

Karen L. Ishizuka is a an independent writer and documentary producer who has produced numerous award-winning films including Something Strong Within, and Toyo Miyatake: Infinite Shades of Gray, an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival. She served the Japanese American National Museum for its first fifteen years as Senior Curator, Senior Producer and Director of its Media Arts Center.

Table of Contents

Foreword	ix
John Kuo Wei Tchen
Foreword	xiii
Roger Daniels
Preface	xvii
Acknowledgments	xxi
The Legacy of Camp	1	(16)
A Strategy of Process and Participation	17	(22)
Grandma as History	39	(18)
The Exhibition	57	(61)
America's Concentration Camps: Remembering The Japanese American Experience
Something Strong Within	118	(21)
Los Japoneses Que Hablan Espanol and Other Stories That Walked in the Door	139	(15)
Coming to Terms	154	(19)
Recovering History and Recovering from History	173	(20)
Notes	193	(12)
Selected Readings	205	(4)
Index	209