Manzanar Mosaic

Description

Providing a new mosaic-style view of Manzanar’s complex history through unedited interviews and published scholarship, Arthur A. Hansen presents a deep, longitudinal portrait of the politics and social formation of the Japanese American community before, during, and after World War II.
 
To begin, Hansen presents two essays, the first centering on his work with Ronald Larson in the mid-1970s on the history of Doho, a Japanese and English dual-language newspaper, and the second an article with David Hacker on revisionist ethnic perspectives of the Manzanar “riot.” A second section is composed of five oral history interviews of selected camp personalities—a female Nisei journalist, a male Nisei historical documentarian,  a male Kibei Communist block manager, the Caucasian wife and comrade of the block manager, and the male Kibei who was the central figure in the Manzanar Riot/Revolt—that offer powerful insight into the controversial content of the two essays that precede them.
 
Manzanar can be understood only by being considered within the much wider context of Japanese American community formation and contestation before, during, and after World War II. A varied collection of scholarly articles and interviews, Manzanar Mosaic engages diverse voices and considers multiple perspectives to illuminate aspects of the Japanese American community, the ethnic press, the Manzanar concentration camp, and the movement for redress and reparations.
  “Rich, detailed, and nuanced—the work of a lifetime by one of the preeminent historians of Japanese American incarceration. This book only makes more visible the deep importance of Hansen’s work.”—Daryl Maeda, University of Colorado Boulder   Arthur A. Hansen is emeritus professor of history, founding director of the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program and the Center for Oral and Public History, and founding faculty member of the Asian American Studies Program at California State University, Fullerton. He has been honored as both the Outstanding Teacher and the Outstanding Faculty Member in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at CSUF. He was senior historian at the Japanese American National Museum and received the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Asian American Studies in 2007 and the Sue Kunitomi Embrey Legacy Award from the Manzanar Committee in 2014. He is also the author of Barbed Voices: Oral History, Resistance, and the World War II Japanese American Social Disaster and editor of Nisei Naysayer: The Memoir of Militant Japanese American Journalist Jimmie Omura and Beyond the Betrayal: The Memoir of a World War II Japanese American Draft Resister of Conscience.
 

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