An absent presence : Japanese Americans in postwar American culture, 1945-1960
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
An absent presence : Japanese Americans in postwar American culture, 1945-1960
(New Americanists)
Duke University Press, 2001
- : pbk
- : hard
Available at 31 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [216]-225) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
There have been many studies on the forced relocation and internment of nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. But An Absent Presence is the first to focus on how popular representations of this unparalleled episode in U.S. history affected the formation of Cold War culture. Caroline Chung Simpson shows how the portrayal of this economic and social disenfranchisement haunted-and even shaped-the expression of American race relations and national identity throughout the middle of the twentieth century.
Simpson argues that when popular journals or social theorists engaged the topic of Japanese American history or identity in the Cold War era they did so in a manner that tended to efface or diminish the complexity of their political and historical experience. As a result, the shadowy figuration of Japanese American identity often took on the semblance of an "absent presence." Individual chapters feature such topics as the case of the alleged Tokyo Rose, the Hiroshima Maidens Project, and Japanese war brides. Drawing on issues of race, gender, and nation, Simpson connects the internment episode to broader themes of postwar American culture, including the atomic bomb, McCarthyism, the crises of racial integration, and the anxiety over middle-class gender roles.
By recapturing and reexamining these vital flashpoints in the projection of Japanese American identity, Simpson fills a critical and historical void in a number of fields including Asian American studies, American studies, and Cold War history.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. "That Faint and Elusive Insinuation": Remembering Internment and the Dawn of the Postwar
2. The Internment of Anthropology: Wartime Studies of Japanese Culture
3. How Rose Becomes Red: The Case of Tokyo Rose and the Postwar Beginnings of Cold War Culture
4. "A Mutual Brokenness": The Hiroshima Maidens Project, Japanese Americans, and American Motherhood
5. "Out of an Obscure Place": Japanese War Brides and Cultural Pluralism in the 1950s
Epilogue
Bibliography
Notes
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