The George and Sakaye Aratani Nikkei in the Americas Series
"A significant, often beautifully written book . . . Relocating Authority will make an important contribution to the field.”
—John Duffy, University of Notre Dame
—LuMing Mao, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio
—Franke Abe, International Examiner
—Densho
—Nichi Bei
“[C]hallenges us to resee a moment and to look more deeply at what we find in relation to all the other artifacts we have. . . [Shimabukuro’s] book is both a text about writing to redress and writing to redress in action.”
—College Composition and Communication
Relocating Authority examines the ways Japanese Americans have continually used writing to respond to the circumstances of their community’s mass imprisonment during World War II. Using both Nikkei cultural frameworks and community-specific history for methodological inspiration and guidance, Mira Shimabukuro shows how writing was used privately and publicly to individually survive and collectively resist the conditions of incarceration.
Examining a wide range of diverse texts and literacy practices such as diary entries, note-taking, manifestos, and multiple drafts of single documents, Relocating Authority draws upon community archives, visual histories, and Asian American history and theory to reveal the ways writing has served as a critical tool for incarcerees and their descendants. Incarcerees not only used writing to redress the “internment” in the moment but also created pieces of text that enabled and inspired further redress long after the camps had closed.
Relocating Authority highlights literacy’s enduring potential to participate in social change and assist an imprisoned people in relocating authority away from their captors and back to their community and themselves. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of ethnic and Asian American rhetorics, American studies, and anyone interested in the relationship between literacy and social justice.
Talk at the Japanese American National Museum