#creef

[violetcatt]

[randomizt]

cafeteria crew in a project

[dumpsterrrat]

hiii :3

[researchpaper2014-blog]

Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation (Elena Tajima Creef)

"What remains of Manzanar War Relocation Center itself is not hard to find, provided that you know what you are looking for -- even though writer James Houston once added, "If you didn't know what to look for, you'd never know who had been there." After the war, with lumber at an all-time premium, the buildings were for the most part disassembled plank by plank, and the rest of the camp was bulldozed or removed until the place was, as one newspaper put it 'flatter than Hiroshima.' 

And yet, a handful of the original camp structures remain. Two samll pagodalike stone buildings, formerly used by the camp police as sentry posts, still stand at what was the official entryway. And nearby, the barnlike camp auditorium now functions as a storage room for the county. If you walk the perimiter of the camp, littered with gnarled barbed wire, you can find what is left of hte toppled concrete foundations that once held up the eight guard towers, as well as the stones marking the old camp flagpole, the camp dump, and hte decorative rock gardens that once adorned the housing area for Caucasion personnel...National Park Service archaeologists, who have now spent three seasons surveying the site, have discovered hundreds of names and dates written by internees in the concrete foundations of the camp hospital, laundries, and reservoir." 

A map provided by the National Park Service makes it easy to walk about the one square mile of hte camp's perimeter and fee teh presence of the thousands of Japanese Americans who lived here from 1942 to 1945...Abandoned by the War Relocation Authority over fifty yeras ago and reclaimed by the National Park Service and the sage brush flats fo the Owens Valley desert, Manzanar now holds historical fascination as the culture of ruins, as a kind of Japanese American ghost towns and archaeological dig. One thing remains certain: even though thousands of visitors trek annually into this desert site, Manzanar continues to be a place on teh American map that many would still like to forget."(135) 

[researchpaper2014-blog]

maging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation (Elena Tajima Creef)

"Sharon Yamato's self-published essay, Moving Walls: Preserving the Barracks of America's Concentration Camps (1998), documents the systematic recovering, dismantling, and rebuilding of these barracks for the museum exhibit. It chronicles -- with the help of photographer Stan Honda -- how they operate as one of hte most powerful artifactual signifiers of the trauma of the internment experience. Moving walls is particularly striking for Yamato's understanding that the barracks operate as a metaphor for collective historical memory and the public and private process of tearing down the walls of silence that have impacted the Japanese American community and families for over fifty years." (130)  

"What is most compelling in Moving Walls is Yamato's story of how the volunteers themselves 'reclaim their past' by returning to Heart Mountain, where the physical work of tearing down walls literally unleashes years of repressed memory of familial hardship and shame. For many of hte volunteers, the barracks project becomes an intensely personal one."(130) 

"As I leave the exhibit, I note that the simple act of relocating the Heart Mountain barracks from Wyoming to downtown Los Angeles is to insist on a politics of visibility for a late twentieth century memorializing of wartime Japanese American history."(122)