Outsider Citizens: Film Narratives About the Internment of Japanese Americans

27 Pages Posted: 22 Jan 2020

See all articles by Taunya Lovell Banks

Taunya Lovell Banks

University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law

Date Written: 2009

Abstract

This article examines the conflicting film narratives about the internment from 1942 through 2007. It argues that while later film narratives, especially documentaries, counter early government film narratives justifying the internment, these counter-narratives have their own damaging hegemony. Whereas earlier commercial films tell the internment story through the eyes of sympathetic whites, using a conventional civil rights template, Japanese and other Asian American documentary filmmakers construct their Japanese characters as model minorities - hyper-citizens, super patriots. Further, the internment experience remains largely a male story. With the exception of Emiko Omori's documentary film memoir, Rabbit in the Moon (2004), the stories and voices of Japanese American women, who with their children comprised the bulk of internees, are marginalized. Thus I argue that the shadow of the internment experience affects Asian American documentarians' telling of the internment story. These filmmakers engage in a degree of self-censorship, crafting their stories to show Japanese Americans as a model minority to counter persistent perceptions of Asian Americans as foreigners - marginal citizens' whose loyalty is forever suspect.

Keywords: Japanese Americans, internment, civil rights, Asian Americans, minorities

Suggested Citation

Banks, Taunya Lovell, Outsider Citizens: Film Narratives About the Internment of Japanese Americans (2009). Suffolk University Law Review, v. 42, 2009, U of Maryland Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2009-5, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1336686

Taunya Lovell Banks (Contact Author)

University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law ( email )

500 West Baltimore Street
Baltimore, MD 21201-1786
United States

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