Different Archives, Different Values: Photographic Realism and Panoramic Perspectives on America ’s Concentration Camps

There are lieux de mémoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory. 

Nora, The Era of Commemoration

In his 1984 testimony about the World War II internment of Japanese Americans, John Tateishi, then national redress director of the Japanese American Citizens League, told the U.S. Senate:

That injustice was visited upon the lives of individuals who believed in this country and its ideals and who have faith that the United States will live up to its promises.  … We are talking about people like those you see in this room who went through the experience, and who suffered personal tragedies.  We are talking about people like a woman I know, named Mary Tsukamota who has an extreme case of arthritis and is in pain every time she puts her hand up to her chest, but that woman stands there, extremely proud to be able to recite the pledge of allegiance, or to hear the national anthem, and every time she does either, her eyes fill with tears.  We are talking about someone like a man named Tom Watanabe in Chicago who lost his twin daughters and wife at childbirth at Manzanar because of the lack of medical facilities, and, for forty years, all he wanted to do was find their graves because he was never told what happened to their bodies.  . . . We are talking about individuals here, and not some vague group that can easily be forgotten.[i]

One could not make a more apt summary of the politics of remembering internment. Tateishi’s brief statement, a single moment amidst what was eight years of debate and discussion in the U.S. Congress, signals the joining of historically produced politicized identities invested in what Wendy Brown calls its “wounded attachments” and the reliance on logics of difference, individuality, and temporality that Lawrence Grossberg sees as constitutive of contemporary identity politics.[ii]  Tateishi’s statement also marks the intersection of identity politics, national memory, and contemporary nationalism.  Here ethnic suffering buttresses the national imaginary by re-calling the citizenry to the obligations of the great promises of the American nation while at the same time displaying exceptional patriotism in the face of remembered exile and racism.

Notably, this statement displays an often-overlooked feature of contemporary identity politics: its reliance on a logic of realism.  The presence or absence, recognition or misrecognition of “real” identities ground the politics of remembering internment, as well as most contemporary race politics. Tateishi’s remarks illustrate rhetorical democracy’s reliance on a logic of identity that views individuals as unchanging and values a natural connotation between the character of injured groups and rhetoric about them.  Political power is accrued because of singularity, stability, continuity, homogeneity, and authenticity.  Along those lines, Jinqi Ling has noted that Asian American literature succeeds or fails according to its ability to pass through a series of “authentication strategies” that serve as technologies of realism, popularly accepted modes of corresponding to “reality.”[iii]  Tateishi’s statement would have little force were we not to imagine the very real presence of people like Mary Tsukamota and Tom Watanabe. 

It would be nice to imagine that the politics of remembering internment were limited to one debate in a government setting concerning only one group of citizens.  That, however, is not the case.  As this project has shown through several case studies, Tateishi’s statement is but one instance of individual political participation based on Japanese American identity.  Not only is the figure of the Japanese American as an injured identity everywhere in American culture-- circulating through autobiographies, teaching lessons, book reviews, local museums, the Smithsonian, a memorial on the National Mall, the New York Times Bestseller List, Congressional hearings, and recently formed departments of Asian and American Studies in universities across the country--but also it is marking complex changes in the functioning of American identification in the multicultural era.  Whereas once the presentations of the “model minority” were used to limit the possibilities of Asian American citizenship and discipline other minority workers,[iv] contemporary uses of Japanese American discourses utilize both ethnic and national identifications to produce the new technologies of “multicultural citizenship.”[v]  

While there has certainly been some degree of payoff (quite literally, for example, when speaking of reparations), the politics of (re)figuring internment memories and by extension Japanese Americans have also been assimilated into realist imaginaries.  Again, as Farewell to Manzanar’s integration into different curricula for political purposes demonstrates, the Japanese American internee as figure is put to many different uses for the nation.  Internment remembrance, as with identity politics, has “run out of steam,” “become a style” because rather than opening up political opportunities, people are “spoken by it,” determined by experience and predetermined to a politics based on background.[vi]  What, then, are the possibilities of avoiding national assimilation if we are no longer talking about rhetorical agency as a “robust force located in the subject?”[vii]   Is there any possibility for a politics of remembering internment that does not rely on these logics that are easily assimilated into American nationalism? What would the politics of remembering internment look like if, instead of conceiving of progressive politics as individual participation in political practices, scholars attended to the relationships between the cultural object and the historical codes of reading those objects as rhetorically activating certain imaginaries and behaviors?  On the way toward articulating the possibility of a politics of remembering internment that does not fall prey to the limited logic of identity I return to photographs of internment.  My purpose here is to make a case for the agency of the object, and, more specifically, to advance an alternative, indeed progressive, visual rhetoric that is not predicated on a realist aesthetic.  In order to understand the effectivity of the realist logic of Tateishi’s statement (and others like it), I examine the cultural technology of verisimilitude par excellance: photography.  Next, I turn to Masumi Hayashi’s panoramic photo collages “American Concentration Camps” to argue that they offer a visual perspective by incongruity that can provoke questions about realism and the process of recognizing the figure of the Japanese American.  On my reading, Hayashi’s photo collages serve as a concept-metaphor for rethinking national memory outside of realism.  I examine these two contrasting codes of interpretation in order to explore the possibilities for a multicultural memory that would eschew the uncertainties of nationalist identification, not in the hopes of rehabilitating a remembrance of internment but to better understand the spectral space of memory and the possibilities opened up by memory work that does not allow verisimilitude to easily connect the present to the past.

Realistic Depictions of Internment

The photographic collections utilized as evidence of suffering during internment are legion.  In addition to the preserved photographs from internees, a number of professional photographers were either commissioned by the War Relocation Authority or granted access to the camps by the Authority to photograph camp life.  Much like Foucault’s comments on the Victorian era’s “repressive hypothesis,” it seems that even though cameras were forbade in internment camps and the population was policed to the interior of the country to keep them out of the view of most Americans, those very censures have been productive of a plethora of images used in various memory sites now.[viii]  According to most sources, the intended purpose of inviting photographers to the camps was to produce a lasting documentary record of the internment project.[ix]  Accordingly, many professional photographers were not only allowed in the camps but were instructed to record visually the internment history.  It was out of this project that the internment photographs of Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams were produced.  Both positioned as outside observers, they took photographs of the evacuation to the camps, everyday life, special occasions, and resettlement.

The reception of Dorothea Lange’s images in the contemporary period is intimately connected to her status as a photographer for the people.  That notoriety had already been established before being employed by the War Relocation Authority (WRA).  Working for what was at the time known as the Resettlement Administration, and would later become known as the Farm Security Administration, her images of farm labor in 1936 Nipomo , California had been published in San Francisco newspapers as well as other sources.  By the time Pearl Harbor was attacked, her photograph of “the Migrant Mother” had already received widespread recognition as a force for social influence. Despite a small battle for control, “Migrant Mother” was published in Life magazine in 1939 and John Steinbeck had already acknowledged the image as the main inspiration for The Grapes of Wrath published in the same year.[x]  Thus Lange’s internment images are merely one collection like all others.  They are photographs taken by the photographer who captured the iconic image of the Great Depression.

Despite her popularity, it is unclear why the WRA selected Lange for this particular project.  Certainly there was an urge to document the camps. However, the WRA didn’t exactly get a photographer that recorded the internment exactly in the way that they wanted it done.  Her pictures received only condemnation from the WRA. Paul Taylor, Lange’s husband, later commented of her involvement.

They wanted it documented. . . . I suppose the reasons were not perfectly clearly worked out. But to have a photographer in a government agency was [by then] . . . acceptable. . . . Probably there were some who said 'We want to show that we are handling these people all right.' There were possibly some others who saw it another way; but anyway, WRA started to document it, and Dorothea went right to work.[xi] 

In the end, the dream of a public record was fulfilled in the US Army Western Defense Command and Fourth Army’s Final Report.[xii]  The Final Report includes its own “Pictorial Summary” of the internment.  The “Pictorial Summary” uses visual images to demonstrate fair treatment of Japanese Americans during internment.  With photographs showing how the Army “assists departing evacuees,” the “Summary,” presents a gentle version of internment in which, for example, a soldier hands an internee’s doll back to her as her smiling family watches.  The Japanese Americans also smile in schools, kitchens, talent shows, dances, and internment work centers, such as a seamstress center in Manzanar. 

Dorothea Lange’s photographs were very different.  Lange, who had become a public advocate for the poor, captured moments in which the internee’s dignity was highlighted.  In fact, Lange’s collection of images was considered too emotional by the WRA and not a single photograph by Lange was included in the Final Report.  Further, Lange was not able to publish the images independently, as she had done during her tenure for the Farm Security Administration; instead, as property of the WRA, their circulation was limited.[xiii]  To those who knew of it, the collection was available in the National Archives, as opposed to the Library of Congress in which her earlier work was housed. Judith Fryer Davidov has said that Lange’s record of the internment is so different from the “Pictorial Summary” of the Final Report that the two narratives seem to document different events.[xiv]  That is, their differences “call into question the very word document.”[xv]  While the “Pictorial Summary” is a happy narrative of the Army’s obligation and duty to internees, Lange’s taboo images depicted the humanity of internees caught in the inhumanity of Army camps. 

Lange’s series devoted to “members of the Mochida family awaiting evacuation bus” taken on May 8, 1942 in Hayward California is a good example (figures 1,2 and 3).  In that series, Lange photographs the nine members of the Mochida family huddled around their luggage.  Luggage tags that were used to identify what little they could take with them to the evacuation centers were also attached to the coats of the family’s three small children to identify them as Mochida.  The small Mochida children’s faces are placed within a few inches of large luggage tags used to mark what little belonged to the family.  The faces of her subjects address the viewer, but do not smile.  They are simply resigned to their fate.  The tags themselves, which are the subject of the images, reduce the agency of the people they are attached to: The tags identify the people as property, not actors.  They are no more in control of their travel and destination than their luggage is. Such images could not be included in the Army’s official report.

If Lange’s images were prohibited from circulation in 1945, they have come to fit quite well into twentieth century multicultural politics.  The earliest large scale exhibition of her images of internment came in 1972 when the Whitney Museum incorporated twenty-seven of her photographs into “Executive Order 9066,” an exhibit detailing the history of the evacuation.[xvi]  The emotional force of Lange’s photography, which made the Army distance itself from her during the war, has been well accepted by multicultural audiences.  The figure of the little girls in the Mochida family series, for example, resonates with the usage of such a figure in the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles .  Former Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark put it eloquently in the epilogue to the book published in conjunction with the Whitney exhibit by Richard Conrat:

That pictures can express truth more succinctly than words is proved here in the images that Dorothea Lange and the other photographers who documented the Japanese American relocation of World War II.  The wistful, forlorn look of the children . . . is a powerful reminder of a nightmare that was acted out here in our land of the free, all as the result of racism and wartime hysteria.”[xvii]

The images of the Mochida family have also been reproduced and displayed in many different venues. The photographs of the two Mochida daughters (figures 2 and 3) have been reproduced in histories of the internment such as Michi Weglyn’s Years of Infamy, Roger Daniels’ Japanese American from Relocation to Redress, and George Takaki’s Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans.[xviii]  It is in fact the only photograph used to represent the history of the internment in many popular secondary education history textbooks.[xix] Indeed, since the exhibit of her images at the Whitney, Lange’s photographs appear in books such as those listed above, on personal and official websites, and in attempts to publicize the complete WRA photo archive.[xx]

As the above mentioned reflections on the images clearly indicate, these photographs operate within the dominant epistemological code of documentary photography.  The images are thought to be unmediated copies of the real.  As Bryan Taylor suggests, realist discourses, “presume that communication is transparent and that objective information about phenomena can be unproblematically expressed.”[xxi]  Photography has been the technology of realist discourse par excellence as its images are seen as a means of documenting the real without mediation.  Scholars in a variety of disciplines have rejected this claim in favor of viewing the “real” as product, “not the referent.”[xxii]  While the photograph seeks to efface its own constructedness, it activates a number of culturally prescribed codes for interpretation.  Roland Barthes describes this realist message seemingly “without a code” as the photographic paradox.[xxiii]  He goes on to describe this as the result of at least two codes-—the denotated message or the pure analogon and the connotated message which is what society thinks of the analogon.   The combination of these two codes, which in practice can never actually be separated, naturalizes power relations produced by the photograph such that not only does the photograph itself seem to truly represent reality, but that apparent representation produces truth-effects which gain credibility because of the very technology employed.  Thus an ostensibly neutral technology is actually an interested one.  As John Tagg says, “Photographs are never ‘evidence’ of history; they are themselves the historical.”[xxiv] With Dorothea Lange’s photographs not only are the codes of verisimilitude active, but because many of her images articulate Japanese American bodies to the microphysics of the camera-- the Mochida family for instance—- realism is pressed into the service of a multicultural rhetoric of presence. 

Since the introduction of the daguerrotype in 1839 photography’s ability to capture the body and present it as it “really” is has formed an apparatus that indexes bodies in particular ways to create the truth of what people are/were like.[xxv]  Taylor notes that the body as an object of documentary photography has been a rich political and “social text” which serves as “a container of humanity that invites viewer identification, a surface on which traces of institutions . . . are made visible, and a condensation of highly charged abstractions like ‘the American people.’”[xxvi]  Thus in the deployment of Lange’s images in history books such as Roger Daniels’ Japanese Americans, from Relocation to Redress, images of the Mochida family are read by multicultural audiences as pointing unproblematically to the real oppression of real people.  Importantly, and as I have argued in chapter four concerning reparations, for example, the act of reading them in that way incites the condemnation of the internment policy and a simultaneous construction of an American national imaginary based on citizenship.

What is wrong with the use of these images to criticize past governmental injustices?  In each case, Lange’s photographs are put to work in a narrative of internment that describes the government as oppressive and Japanese Americans as subjected, abused, and injured by the internment.  While it would be nice to imagine these photographs as purely resistant to dominant modes of oppression, they might more productively be seen as both resistant to the original internment but also productive of new relationships of power that, as I have argued, limit the possibilities for a progressive politics at the same time.  But how could that be possible?  Michael Shapiro argues that photographs themselves are neither liberatory nor oppressive, rather their force depends on how the photograph is situated within a general economy of statements.[xxvii]  He writes:

Photography thus speaks and thinks in a variety of ways, and there is no essential answer to how it tends to signify.  Its statements, like those of other modes of discourse, must be situated; its signifying force cannot be located wholly formalistically within the statement but rather emerges from the general economy of statements, photographic and otherwise, within which it functions . . . Therefore, when we interrogate photographs from the point of view of how they speak/think politically, it is necessary to think of them as discursive practices situated within the general economy of societal practices.  Given this contextual aspect of their meaning, it can be shown that photographs are not necessarily more politicized and less ideological when they are explicitly called upon in behalf of a political-reform issue.[xxviii]

In order to make his theoretical case, Shapiro offers two analyses of the photographs in Jacob Riis[xxix].  On the one hand, Riis’s images are attributed with having created the category of reform photography that greatly pushed along urban reform.  On the other hand, however, the same images also and at the same time depict slums as the antithesis of the home and, thus, “work” politically by appealing to the very middle class, bourgeois values they appear also to indict.  In addition to being reform oriented, the photographs confirmed the high value placed on a clean privately owned home.

Similarly, it may be noted that Lange’s photographs have been read both as critical of the policy of internment, and also as proof of one particular story of the Japanese American response to internment.  This multicultural narrative has been operating on different levels in each chapter of this project, whether it be the use of Japanese American memory in adult reading groups, local museums, or congressional hearings. In Lange’s photographs Japanese Americans appear docile and acquiescent to the government’s policy.  According to her visual history of internment, Japanese Americans wanted to be loyal American subjects and refused to resist the government orders.  Japanese Americans, as a people, were at the mercy of governmental oppression and had no ability to resist their fate.  Indeed, often Lange’s photographs of children being tagged and shipped are used to show the helplessness of internees.  This story and its strength based on the photographic evidence are part and parcel of the view of the Japanese American who, despite having endured oppression, is patriotic, family-oriented, and hard-working. In short, a model minority.  The use of Lange’s photographs displays a common normative feature of the believability of this discourse, its reliance on realistic depictions of the other. 

As a technology of memory, then, this collection constructs one particular version of internment based on what the photographs remember and what they forget.  Then those same images legitimize that same version of memory by their presence and attachment to codes of presence and codes of verisimilitude—-systems of interpretation producing what can be taken as real.  The deployments of the photographs are instances of places where a single perspective, or literally one point of view, receives validation because the institution of realistic photography is attached to it.  In the 1940s the photographs in the Final Report of the US Western Division and Fourth Army were used to present a vision of the internment camps that was calm, orderly, and comfortable for the internees.  In the 1990s the same images are used to criticize the governmental practice of internment.

 The Bancroft Library is one place where the entire WRA archive has been placed online in order to allow Americans to see what internment “really” was.  A statement on the content of the collection, however, at once signifies the Library’s own attachment to photographic realism, its realization of the idea of photographic bias, and its reliance on a logic of inclusion very familiar to multicultural identity politics.  Its statement on the scope and content of the WRA collection claims that:

It is important to note that the photograph collection, as the official documentation of the WRA, reflects the point of view that the WRA wanted to present to the citizens of the United States during World War II. … The photographs, presumably created for public exhibition, and the captions accompanying them written by WRA staff, present an idealistic view of the relocation centers which clashes greatly with the harsh realities detailed by many survivors and historians in the decades following the internment.[xxx]

Noting the previous uses of the photographs in order to “disclose” their intentional governmental bias adds to the strength of criticism. It seems that this collection questions the ability of this archive to index reality.  In effect, the linguistic framing even hints that there may be biases in the photographs and they may not be telling the whole truth.  While the collection comments on its own (in)capacity to present the photographic truth, it is also here that it reveals its own desire for completeness and inclusion.  The above statement seems to say, “If only we had more photographs to include in the collection, perhaps from different photographers taken at different times then the series would be able to tell the viewer the whole truth.”  In other words, the bias of the photographs does not convey the idea that photography is never neutral, but rather that we need other contributions, other photographers’ perspectives in order to get to the whole truth of the internment.  Thus, uses of the visual documentary have created the limits of acceptability for public memory which I might note resonate with the functioning of identity politics: if we simply had more testimony from those who actually experienced the injustice, we would get to the truth of it.

Panoramic Memories

Masumi Hayashi, professor of Art and Photography at Cleveland State University , has constructed an unusual photographic presentation of internment memories, one that eschews the logic of the visual archive but remains committed to remembering injustices.  Her collection “American Concentration Camps” is a series of photographic images of the landscapes, ruined buildings, and monuments left at the ten former internment camp-sites.[xxxi]   The images in “American Concentration Camps” are all panoramic photo-collages.  Over one hundred separate photographs taken by a 55-mm camera are imperfectly stitched together on a large piece of foamboard.  Steven Litt describes the process:

She picks a site, plants her tripod and Nikon FM camera, and then takes a series of shots scanning horizontally in every direction, moving her 55 millimeter lens roughly 22 degrees each time. The process takes about an hour.  After having color prints processed by a professional lab, Hayashi returns to the studio and has assistants assemble the snapshot-sized photographs in a grid matrix. The images are then drymounted on 4-by-8-foot sheets of foamcore.[xxxii]

The result is an image reminiscent of David Hockney’s photo-collages except that Hayashi’s images are panoramic and, unlike Hockney’s collages that fabricate a single perspective with pictures from different locations, Hayashi’s display distortion from a single point in space.[xxxiii]  

Hayashi’s panoramic photo-collages mark the intersection of three systems of sense-making in a single form: the images display a panoramic view, photographs construct that view, and the whole image is arranged as a collage.  While the panorama, the photograph, and the collage, as individual forms of visualization, all subscribe to specific, historical codes of connotation, Hayashi’s panoramic photo collages produce an intersection that place these very different economies of value into conversation with one another.  More than just a form of knowledge, aesthetics are modes of sense-making that define the historical specificity of these codes of connotation that are active here.[xxxiv]  The tension marked by the intersection of these three dominant codes is the rhetorical function of Hayashi’s collages. That intersection visually displays a tension between connoting reality and presenting a different version of the world.  

Taking the collection as a perspective on memory and internment opens up new possibilities for rhetorical identity politics.  More than simply questioning whether the collages themselves are truthful presentations of the internment camp sites, that is, whether or not they are accurate or complete representations, the juxtaposition of photography with cubist and panoramic practices offers an altogether different perspective on practices of remembrance. Questions about the world the images create thus become paramount.  Kenneth Burke calls the view generated by merging categories once felt to be mutually exclusive a perspective by incongruity.[xxxv]  Burke’s historical and linguistic examples demonstrate the combination: T.S. Elliot’s “decadent athleticism” and Veblen’s “trained incapacity.”[xxxvi]  It is “violating the proprieties of the word in its previous linkages” that creates the incongruous perspective.[xxxvii]   In each case, the juxtaposition of two seemingly incompatible terms creates new meanings that break the previous frame or reference.  The perspective itself allows new practices that problematize the trained incapacities of convention.

As a concept-metaphor for rethinking national memory, Hayashi’s images trouble the narrative that requires assimilating Japanese American internment remembrances on two levels.  First, Hayashi’s panoramic photo collages offer a visual perspective by incongruity that unsettles the realist logic of identity politics.  Second, the collages disrupt the logic of recognition based on the internee as a stable, homogenous identity. For, as I noted concerning Tateishi’s statement, the representationalist logics of identity politics are underwritten by a realist logic which establishes that minoritarian identities really exist.

As I have already begun to suggest, Hayashi’s images provoke questions over the connection or relation between photography and reality.  These collages are assemblage panoramas: assembling a series of frames into a “whole” constructs the image. However, unlike other assemblages, Hayashi’s images do not attempt to create a seamless depiction of the real world.  To the contrary: The lines and edges where snapshots meet are accentuated, not smoothed over or erased.  In Manzanar Monument (figure 4), for example, the circular foundation of the monument is rendered as a series of jagged triangles, calling attention to the place where one photo ends and another begins.  In Heart Mountain Hospital (figure 5) a furnace tower ascends toward the sky with a single base, yet its top is split into two as slightly different perspectives of the tower record the light at different angles.

This presentation of the seams of the image calls attention to the ability of the collage to depict reality and, in fact, presents an argument that each seam represents a different view on the scene.  Scene is dramatically in play in the collage as it presents not just one scene, but in fact hundreds of scenes positioned all as the same scene.  The multitude of perspectives on a single scene as requested by the Bancroft Library above, for instance, are mimed in the hundreds of individual images which all seem to produce a comment on the undecidability of the “real” scene.

Another feature of Hayashi’s collages that depart from a conventional photographic aesthetic is the presentation of different temporalities in the same image.  The collages are composed of at least three horizontal rows of frames.  These horizontal rows are often the combination of several separate “passes” of the camera.  Thus, the photographs beside one another have obviously been taken at different times of the day (and perhaps different times of the year).  This temporal quality is not only preserved but also inflected in the collage as photographs displaying different color shades, different shadows, or, in some cases, different clouds or suns, are joined together in one collage. Manzanar Guard Gate (figure 6) contains two suns, one on each side of the image, and the center of the image displays a different set of shadows from the top and bottom portion. 

The jagged edges and the different temporalities in the images accentuate the seams or fissures that lie between the individual snapshots.  In this sense, the images retain a collage effect.  Collages, Shapiro argues, denaturalize the photograph because they present seams in what is supposedly a seamless medium.  Photography normally functions by supposing the seamlessness of reality.[xxxviii]  The photo collage is “disruptive, intervening in the process through which the viewer’s interpretive codes accord a representational quality to photographs.”[xxxix]  Rather than efface the techniques of their production, Hayashi’s collages call attention to their own constructedness; rather than present the idea of a single, homogenous perspective on the history of internment, the presence of the seams calls into question the temporal and spatial distances offered in individual perspectives.  

Hayashi’s images also make use of the panoramic form. They attempt to allow the viewer to “see all” by providing a view that is wider than the eye can regularly observe.  Each image “unwraps” the natural world in order to render features in front of, to each side, and even behind the point of perspective onto a flat two-dimensional surface that can be observed at once.  Hayashi’s panoramas, however, overwhelm the viewer due to the extensive visual distortion.  These collages are not just panoramic.  They are hyper-panoramic.  In many images towers, doorways, even trees are placed within the frame twice making the perspective more than 360-degrees.  Manzanar Guard Gate presents two gates framing an entrance.  That framed entryway, however, is a construct of the image.  Repeating pictures of a single guardhouse creates the collage’s gateway.[xl]  There is no such entryway at Manzanar.  In Tule Lake Stockade (figure 7) the collage is centered at an intersection of three hallways.  Yet, the reproduction of the hallways on each side produces five hallways intersecting in the point of view of the image.  This distortion removes the possibility of a single viewpoint within the image.  The viewer gets lost because there is no way to make the image conform to what is accepted as the real world. 

The variations in Hayashi’s camera angle from a position parallel to the object’s plane, tilted down, tilted up, or placed very close to the landscape produce distortions altering the size of parts of the same object or altering relationships between objects.[xli]   The “cigar-effect” distortion, the “end-of-the-earth” distortion, and the “bowl-effect” distortion, are all present in Hayashi’s work.[xlii]  In collages such as Heart Mountain Blue Room (figure 8) the room itself appears warped due to the merging of multiple frames from different angles.  Some art critics have noted that this hyper-panoramic view even distorts personal memory of first-hand observation making “familiar places seem very strange.”[xliii]

The panoramic photo collages also disrupt the logic of recognition.  The many distortions of the collages disrupt identification itself by taking away the idea of a single viewpoint or gaze.  Without a stable position to view the collage from, the landscape itself becomes unrecognizable.  Gila River Monument (figure 9), for example, prevents the viewer from finding any reference points within the frame whatsoever.  Shadows crisscross.  Straight lines bend.  Circles flatten.  The multiple temporalities even prevent the viewer from establishing the “time” that they are to view the scene.  In short, the location itself, as a space of American history, becomes foreign to the eye. 

Further, in contrast to traditional photographic remembrances of internment, such as Lange’s, that feature internees in camp settings, there is no Japanese American subject within Hayashi’s frame.  Instead, the internee frames the landscape (both literally as Hayashi is the photographer and metaphorically as the remains are visible because they have been inhabited by internees).  Whereas identity is so crucial to the circulation of the Japanese American autobiography, exhibition, and redress, identity is specifically refused in Hayashi’s images.  As Homi Bhabha says, “There is no native informant here.”[xliv]  Rather, than give in to dominant constructions of internees as either resistant or oppressed, the emphasis on the “disjunctive present of the utterance” allows a view of subaltern agency based on “relocation and reinscription.”[xlv] Instead of photographs of bodies, the ruins of internment are presented.  In the same way that the images call attention to their own constructedness, as practices of remembrance, they call attention to the reconstructedness of all memory.  Hayashi offers a personal, experiential perspective of the way she sees the camps.  Rather than focus on the moments in time caught by documentary photography, she presents the leftover spaces from internment, the remainder.  Ironically, it is the system for disposing of human waste that remains in the internment sites.  The content of many of the collages concerns the camp sewer systems.  “The sewers are always on the outskirts and they’re still there,” Hayashi says, “they’re too big to destroy.”[xlvi]  Structures for dealing with waste form the subject of the collage, instead of Japanese American bodies. 

Despite their absence from the frame, internees are somehow present in this once inhabited landscape, haunting the ruins to remind the viewer of their history.  In two different collages, Hayashi’s presence is felt in the shadows of the collage.  In both Manzanar Guard Gate and Gila River Relocation Camp, Foundations the shadow of Hayashi’s tripod and camera are present within the collage (figures 10 and 11).  Although the body of the photographer is not in either the frame or the shadow, there is a lingering presence that makes itself felt.  To return to the metaphor that opened this project, the shadow is much closer to “an absent presence” referenced in the works of Carole Chung Simpson and Marita Sturken: Hayashi is only there by noting that she is looking on with the viewer.[xlvii]  However, this absence is not simply a now absent presence, but a continually absent presence, a ghostly presence.  It is most appropriate to say that her presence, denied corporeal form, haunts the collage as a spectre of memory.  It is Jacques Derrida who poses the connection between ghosts and memory most succinctly.  He begins a recent work on Marx with the idea that, “Someone, you or me, comes forward and says: I would like to learn to live finally.”[xlviii]  Learning to live finally means learning to accept that life and death are not opposed.  Thus learning to live means living with ghosts: “So it would be necessary to learn spirits.”[xlix]  For Derrida the spectres of history press on the present and we must learn how to live with them in order to conceive of ourselves. Learning to live with spirits implies first figuring history not in terms of laws, drives, structures, or the like, but in terms of spectres whose remainder haunts the present without making their corporeal form, that is, their materiality ever fully recognizable. 

To return again to Masumi Hayashi’s Collage as a concept metaphor for a post-identity politics, to learn to live with the internment, past the internment, means that the effects of the internment haunt the present in a myriad of ways.  Hayashi’s shadow, the continual absence that suggests its presence, is felt but unseen.  This is perhaps the most disturbing feature of spectrality, “our incapacity to see what looks at us.”[l]  Derrida calls this feature of spectral asymmetry the “visor effect”—“a look which will always be impossible to cross.”[li]  In contrast to the differing modes of identification I have traced through internee autobiography, docent and exhibitionary rhetorics, citizenship testimony, and finally documentary photography, the “visor effect” short-circuits this process because we cannot identify the spectre.[lii]  This is how spectrality disrupts specularity—- by preventing the truth effects of recognition.  Wendy Brown comments that this “visor effect,”

wreaks havoc with the epistemology of empiricism, particularly with empirical accounts of power. . . This challenge to specularity, to both the tangibility of power and the reciprocity of visibility between actor and acted upon, disrupts empirical and systematic efforts to apprehend both power and history, and especially the power of the historical in the present.[liii]

Thus in Hayashi’s collages we have not the internee being observed, nor the nation observing the historical internee (such as Lange’s images), but the nation remembering the internment without recourse to a stable, identifiable internee figure to observe:  An unstable, ghostly recollection of internees observing the nation remembering internment.  In this sense, a spectral politics of remembering internment would entail not recognizing what the nation observes, but recognizing that the nation is observed by that which we cannot identify absolutely.  A spectral politics, then, is first and foremost a challenge to identity politics and logics of recognition, even though there is great difficulty identifying its own orientation, precisely because ghosts cannot be seen.  As Brown notes, “to be haunted by something is to feel ourselves disquieted or disoriented by it, even if we cannot name or conquer its challenge.”[liv]

Second, learning to live with spirits implies its own sense of responsibility to these others of the past.  Derrida notes,

The time of the “learning to live,” a time without a tutelary present, would amount to this . . . to learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts.  To live otherwise and better. No, not better, but more justly.  But with them.  No being-with the other, no socius without this with that makes being-with in general more enigmatic than ever for us.  And this being-with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance and of generations.  No justice . .  seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations.[lv]

This comment entails its own set of ethico-political relations.  Ethics with regard to the spectre, Derrida suggests, is not centered around including it in present acknowledgment nor in redistributing material resources to it: the twin goals of multicultural social movements, recognition and redistribution.  Instead, as Brown makes clear, this Derridean justice is “less institutional or spatial than temporal.”[lvi]  For Brown, “it pertains almost entirely to a practice of responsible relations between generations.  Justice concerns not only our debt to the past but also the past’s legacy in the present; it informs not only our obligation to the future but also our responsibility for our (ghostly) presence in that future.”[lvii]  To return again to the lessons for multicultural politics offered from Hayashi’s ghostly presence in the collage, learning to live without the presence of an injured identity easily recognizable to our view means practicing ethical conduct and pursuing political justice “within a world that is contingent, unpredictable, [and] not fully knowable.”[lviii]  To take a perspective that accepts justice as temporal is to accept the haunting of the past while governing our own actions in the present.  Thus my commentary on the possibilities of retaining the “psychic residues” of remembering internment as the future of our political institutions in textual operations, the exhibitionary complex, and the political rationality of reparations is not posterior to remembering internment but absolutely essential to the memory work done there because those new relations of power are constitutive of our national ghostly presence in the future. 

To Return Again to Identity and the Nation

The different discourses investigated in this project intersect in numerous and complicated ways.  Hayashi’s Panoramas intersect all of the lines of investigation.  Her project began as an attempt to document her own birthplace and may be read as a photo-collage autobiography. During the spring of 2004 the entire collection of collages was put on display at the Japanese American National Museum .  During that time, Hayashi spoke at the Museum on the indefiniteness of memory at a member’s-only reception. Finally, Hayashi’s collection, American Concentration Camps, was funded through the Civil Liberties Public Education, which is part of the ongoing process of reparation and education that was guaranteed by the enacting of HR442, the congressional redress bill.  While nearly all of the discourses investigated in these case studies traffic in a realist identity logic, it is also true that Hayashi’s collages mark a particular intersection of all of the political and rhetorical uses of the figure of Japanese American internees.  Thus her collages, as resistant to the realist logic of identity and recognition, offer a unique perspective on the politics of multicultural remembrance.

However, rather than present a perspective based on the reality of a stable identity, the “perspective” Hayashi’s images enact and oblige us to perform is the impossibility of any stable perspective.  Viewers are decentered insofar as they must step to the side of or beyond, so to speak, their own perspective in order to find a location and a time from which to make sense of the images.  That location and temporality, however, is denied and the result is the presentation of the danger of multiculturalism: the loss of stable identity. The collages perform the limit of the dominant mode of sense-making in identity politics.

When commenting on the “New Times’ politics,” Stuart Hall commented that if ethnicity is to have any political force, it must be conceived of as a place, not as a delimitable identity.  He notes:

By ‘ethnicity’ we mean the astonishing return to the political agenda of all those points of attachment which give the individual some sense of ‘place’ and position in the world, whether these be in relation to particular communities, localities, territories, languages, religions, or cultures. . . . The question of ethnicity reminds us that everybody comes from some place –– even if it is only an ‘imagined community’ –– and needs some sense of identification and belonging.[lix]

Hayashi’s panoramic photo collages construct Japanese American, not as a stable subjectivity, but as the name for a place and, given the politics of the spectre, a time.  Within the frame of Hayashi’s collages, Japanese American becomes a position founded on the multi-perspectival nature of memory.  In contrast to individual practices of political engagement based on identity such as John Tateishi’s, “American Concentration Camps” visualizes a politics in which the cultural object is acting upon individuals.  Hayashi’s images provoke questions about realism, remembrance, and visualization by disrupting the processes of connotation and recognition on which American multiculturalism relies. Viewing Hayashi’s photo collages as generating a perspective by incongruity poses the possibility of new practices of remembrance not limited to identity politics and the logic of recognition.  In other words, to deal with a question raised by Jinqi Ling, Hayashi’s images take advantage of the contradictions and contingencies of remembering to insist on their own politics, while avoiding nationalized identities.[lx] Given the spectral figure of Hayashi’s collages, politics must conceive of not only acknowledging the internment’s haunting of the present, but also our responsibility to future generations that will only be understood as our own ghostly future specularity. 

            This brief tracking of the deployment and circulation of the figure of the Japanese American internee is necessarily partial and incomplete.  No doubt the reader will know of many more sites of cultural memory where the internment is active and activated.  This project has explored the effectivity of the practice of remembering internment which, as I have argued, is everywhere in popular culture today and has a significant effect on the American nation.  I have endeavored to explore the rhetorical effects of claims to vernacularity by examining discourses that are both local and national as they are taken up by larger institutions in order to examine the cultural and political formation of multiculturalism.  There are many trajectories in this formation that have not been considered in this study; certainly I have been all too quick to note the intersection between the internment, feminism and class in the operations that define internee autobiography, for instance.  No doubt the formation is much richer than what my brief investigations can allow. 

            Each chapter has sought not to provide an exhaustive mapping of multiculturalism, but rather addressed multiculturalism by attention to identification.  Multicultural identification, as I expressed earlier, is a negotiation between technologies of sign systems, technologies of power, and technologies of the self.  The multicultural self in need of understanding its relation to racial and ethnic others, its split relationship to ethnicity and nationality, and its obligations to past injustices is made to do work on itself through the deployment of Japanese American internee discourses as they claim vernacularity and locality.

            Some would argue, and rightly so, that this positioning of remembering internment is only a function of larger societal, cultural, and political forces that make up race in America and that I have unnecessarily focused on one Asian American group at the expense of looking at larger historical structures, for example, impinging on many racial groups.  Certainly this project makes no attempt to comment on the entire spectrum of American racial formation.  Indeed, my area of inquiry has been not only limited to one subject of memory work -–the internment—- from only one population, but it has also been limited in the audience addressed by this rhetoric.  I have not attempted to comment on the force or value of remembering internment for the Japanese American community itself, although certainly it would be a mistake to read any of this project as a condemnation of Japanese American rhetorical acts.  This project has limited itself to the force of remembering internment on the national imagined community in order to better understand one facet of race and nation and how attempts to negotiate those two terms are productive of other logics that often go unnoticed.  There is no attempt here to name or examine all the different functions of Japanese American identity and the rhetorical uses it is put to.  Instead, I have commented on the evolving nature of a model minority discourse that rides the seam, to recall Masumi Hayashi’s collages, of memory, multiculturalism, and nationalism in order to better understand how these regimes of power and knowledge are dynamic, fluid, and always-already productive of American selves.