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
[New York: NYU Press, 2004]
As we have been reminded by the renewed acceptance of racial profiling, and the detention and deportation of hundreds of immigrants of Arab and Muslim descent on unknown charges following September 11, in times of national crisis we take refuge in the visual construction of citizenship in order to imagine ourselves as part of a larger, cohesive national American community.
Beginning with another moment of national historical trauma—December 7, 1941 and the subsequent internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans—Imaging Japanese America unearths stunning and seldom seen photographs of Japanese Americans by the likes of Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Toyo Mitatake. In turn, Elena Tajima Creef examines the perspective from inside, as visualized by Mine Okubo's Maus-like dramatic cartoon and by films made by Asian Americans about the internment experience. She then traces the ways in which contemporary representations of Japanese Americans in popular culture are inflected by the politics of historical memory from World War II. Creef closes with a look at the representation of the multiracial Japanese American body at the turn of the millennium.
Reviews:
"[Creef] examines myriad genres of visual and linguistic representation in order to understand the historical and contemporary 'imaging' of Japanese Americans."
—Kent A. Ono, University of Illinois
"Imaging Japanese America examines myriad genres of visual and linguistic representation in order to understand the historical and contemporary 'imaging' of Japanese Americans. It is both an artful writing project and an exemplary scholarly work within the field of visual culture studies. Readers will appreciate the interdisciplinary methodology, the rich detailed analysis, and Creef's powerful voice. A joy to read—one learns something new at every turn."
—Kent A. Ono, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"An astute and lucid study of visual representations of Japanese Americans and an important original work for understanding American history in the second half of the twentieth century. Creef elegantly reads the myriad interdisciplinary contexts in which dynamics of race, gender, class, and nation frame Japanese Americans as foreign or the same, alien or national, while revealing the hidden costs such representations extract from individuals and communities."
—Shirley Geok-lin Lim, University of California, Santa Barbara
”In engaging and lucid prose, each chapter moves through sensitive and nuanced analyses of a carefully chosen juxtaposition of biographies of individual artists and writers, cultural productions, academic texts, institutional practices and discourses, and material artifacts.”
—Feminist Studies
[Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008]
"To me life and art are one and the same, for the key lies in one's knowledge of people and life. In art one is trying to express it in the simplest imaginative way, as in the art of past civilizations, for beauty and truth are the only two things which live timeless and ageless." - Miné Okubo
This is the first book-length critical examination of the life and work of Miné Okubo (1912-2001), a pioneering Nisei artist, writer, and social activist who repeatedly defied conventional role expectations for women and for Japanese Americans over her seventy-year career. Okubo's landmark Citizen 13660 (first published in 1946) is the first and arguably best-known autobiographical narrative of the wartime Japanese American relocation and confinement experience.
[San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press, 1990]
Gloria Anzaldua's celebrated 1990 collection of writings by women of color featuring over 70 works by poets, writers, artists, and activists. Anthology includes the autobiographical essay, "Notes of a Fragmented Daughter" by Elena Tajima Creef.
