Relocating authority: Japanese Americans writing to redress mass incarceration

Drawing upon work in Composition and Rhetoric, New Literacy Studies, Multicultural Rhetorics, and Asian American studies, Relocating Authority examines the ways Japanese Americans used writing during World War II to respond to the circumstances of their mass incarceration. Following previous interdisciplinary scholarship on Japanese American "internment," this study offers the concept of Writing-to-Redress as an analytical framework through which many self- and community-sponsored literacy activities and texts first created in the incarceration camps can be read. While the word "redress" in the Nikkei (those of Japanese heritage) community refers to the reparations movement that began in the 1970s and culminated in the 1988 passage of the Civil Liberties Act, among the word's many broader definitions are "to set right" or "to remedy or relieve." As such, Relocating Authority highlights how much writing composed in "camp" can be seen as a codification of a desire to set right what is wrong or to relieve one's suffering from the psychological and physical imposition of forced "relocation" and incarceration.;Beginning with a discussion of "rhetorical attendance," a culturally relevant methodology for scholars who not only identify with, but have also been nurtured by, those communities that make up the focus of their scholarship, this study then examines the politics of archival recovery as a method of rhetorical remembering for the post-WWII, Nikkei community. Following these discussions, I apply the concept of Writing-to-Redress to texts and accounts of both private and public forms of writing primarily available in two community-sponsored archives, that of both the Japanese American National Museum and the on-line Densho project. Combining these findings with the theoretical work of such scholars as King-Kok Cheung, Malea Powell, Abdul JanMohamed, and David Lloyd, and Deborah Brandt, I argue that Nikkei incarcerees used writing in both public and private ways to both individually survive and collectively resist their mass imprisonment, as they "relocated authority" away from the U.S. government and back into the community and themselves. Ultimately, I argue that the rhetorical significance of Writing-to-Redress must also be understood across time in order to grasp its still-evolving rhetorical power.