First published 2017
Karen Tei Yamashita opens her family's archival boxes and finds letters, documents, and photographs from the Japanese American internment. She begins conversations with historians, anthropologists, and classicists, creating composite characters who represent different academic perspectives. Each scholar brings their own lens to examine the internment experience. The historians focus on civil rights violations. The anthropologists study community formation under duress. The classicists draw parallels to ancient concepts of exile and belonging. Yamashita weaves these academic voices together with her family's personal materials. The conversations move beyond her own family's story to address larger questions of debt between nations, the possibility of forgiveness, and the persistence of Orientalism in American society. The book becomes both a personal reckoning and a scholarly investigation, connecting the internment camps to broader patterns of exclusion and community resistance.
Genres: biography-memoir, asian-american, academic, american-history
Vibes: intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, scholarly-investigation
Setting: Internment Camps, United States
Period: 20th Century
184 pages · Paperback · Coffee House Press
Content warnings: racism