“Don’t Fence Me In”: Interiorized Outsides and Japanese American Concentration Camps

Abstract

The family separation policy that peaked in the summer of 2018 has had an unintended consequence, that of recalling Japanese internment in the 1940s. The images of children warehoused in a converted Walmart, for example, prompted immediate reactions comparing the detention of children with one of the most shameful episodes of American recent history (Waxman 2018). The parallels between both acts of internment are hard to miss, for some “migrant detention facilities, including Fort Sill in Oklahoma, were the very same sites used to incarcerate Japanese Americans” (Sheffer 2020, 57). Furthermore, echoes of Japanese internment were present from the beginning of the Trump presidency. In the justification for the “Muslim ban” the former president cited Roosevelt’s executive order, seemingly unaware of the Civil Liberties Act signed by President Ronald Reagan that acknowledged that Japanese American incarceration was the result of “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership” (Sheffer 2020, 57). Thus, Japanese American internment periodically emerges as a locus of incarceration that punctuates American history from colonial times to the present, as Lipsitz claims in How Racism Takes Place:

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not exception but the rule.

—Walter Benjamin (1999), Illuminations