| Description |
While official government photographs from the Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II has received scholarly attention, private photographs from the Incarceration are also valuable to the reconstruction of personal Camp memories. Using my family's photographs, I conducted oral history interviews with 5 family members who were incarcerated at Topaz or Amache Camps. My thesis employs a performance studies lens in order to better understand the relationship between memory, identity, agency, and photographs. My approach recognizes that memory, identity, and agency are complex ongoing processes, which are informed by, and inform, one another. In all, through purposeful acts of forgetting in the oral history interviews, my relatives were able to (re)conceive their Camp experiences in ways that fit their present needs. For example, in remembering to forget, the Nisei are able to construct a memory of the Camp experience that supports their identities as Japanese Americans by reinforcing their identity as an American through the depoliticization of Camp memories. Additionally, in order to better make sense of the relationship between photographs and the memory construction process, I provided a binder of family photographs from the Camps for the interviewees to view. My analysis suggests that photographs in the oral history performance are used as a prop that allows for acts of both remembering and forgetting while embracing the fragmented nature of memories. Overall, this study reveals the relationship between identity and memory with implications on how this interaction allows us to remember, forget, or remain silent. In my attempt to understand how my relatives' constructed memories of their Incarceration, I was able to reflect on my own experiences as a Japanese Chinese American. To this end, memories are not only about what is remembered, they are also about how what is forgotten and what is remembered reinforce and are reinforced by identity. |
