Shadow Traces examines little known visual archives attached to four historical groups of women including the indigenous Ainu who participated at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, early 20th century Japanese picture brides, Japanese American Nisei women in World War II internment camps, and World War II Japanese war brides. Less historiography than a critical reflection upon the meaning of visual representations within the intersectional context of empire, indigeneity, migration, war, and racism, the book guides us through various photograph archives, identifying their formations as well as our own investments in these public and private collections and what they can especially yield for feminist and Asian American Studies readers. With each of these groups, their photographic images not only function as key components of their unique archives, but invite us to consider their visual histories in new ways. Photographs play an important role in how we think about documenting the present and its relationship to the past—and vice versa. Creef carefully reveals the desires we have for archives, documentation, and photographs, especially when our desires themselves guide our memories and understandings of history. Shadow Traces builds upon and expands upon Creef’s earlier work by focusing on the representation of Japanese, Japanese American, and Ainu women as explicit subjects of photography.

"A tour de force. Creef provides nothing less than a visual pedagogy for Asian American feminism. She mines the dark gaze of imperial power and blank spots of gender history as well as its secrets. When she engages the family album (and story of a hapless Japanese pet dog, Butchi) as a site of memory and memorialization, you cannot put the book down."

—Leslie Bow, author of “Partly Colored”: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South

"In this carefully researched book, Elena Tajima Creef offers compelling feminist readings of archival photographs from the first half of the 20th century. . . . The important questions this book raises will no doubt stimulate further discussion and analysis of not only the historic representation of Japanese/American and Ainu women, but more broadly, some visual traces of power and resistance yet to be uncovered and witnessed."

—Visual Anthropology