Civil Rights and Identity in Japanese American Incarceration Literature

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During World War II, U.S. authorities forcibly incarcerated 126,000 people of Japanese ancestry, removing their rights and triggering identity reconfigurations before, during, and after the camps were closed. Entire families were uprooted without due process in one of America’s most profound betrayals of its constitutional ideals.
This book explores how Japanese American writers transformed this traumatic event into a powerful literary legacy. From the immediate aftermath of the camps to the present day, authors bear witness, reclaim their voices, and interrogate notions of civil rights and identity, revealing fractured selves and communities, as characters navigate divided loyalties, express resistance, and search for belonging in a nation that branded them as extensions of battlefield wartime enemies.
For Nikkei Amerikajin characters, civil rights and identity intertwine and are co-dependent, while Japanese and American identities are challenged during times of crisis: can they coexist, or does one always deny the other? The answers resonate far beyond the 1940s, speaking to everyone interested in civil rights, belonging, and literature’s capacity to challenge injustice, in its various forms and temporal manifestations. This book ensures these stories and the hard-won lessons they contain continue to be heard.

Raluca-Andreea Petruș