An oral-history-based biography of a seminal Asian-American activist. The book traces Embrey's life from her youth in the Little Tokyo section of Los Angeles, to her harrowing experiences in the Japanese internment camps, to her many decades of passionate advocacy on behalf of her fellow internees.

Demanding liberation, advocating for the oppressed, and organizing for justice, siblings Mitsuye Yamada (1923–) and Michael Yasutake (1920–2001) rebelled against respectability and assimilation, charting their own paths for what it means to be Nisei. Raised in Seattle and then forcibly removed and detained in the Minidoka concentration camp, their early lives mirrored those of many second-generation Japanese Americans. Yasutake’s pacifism endured even with immense pressure to enlist during his confinement and in the years following World War II. His faith-based activism guided him in condemning imperialism and inequality, and he worked tirelessly to free political prisoners and defend human rights. Yamada became an internationally acclaimed feminist poet, professor, and activist who continues to speak out against racism and patriarchy. Weaving together the stories of two distinct but intrinsically connected political lives, Nisei Radicals examines the siblings’ half century of dedication to global movements, including multicultural feminism, Puerto Rican independence, Japanese American redress, Indigenous sovereignty, and more. From displacement and invisibility to insurgent mobilization, Yamada and Yasutake rejected stereotypes and fought to dismantle systems of injustice.

Scholars across the humanities and social sciences who study public memory study the ways that groups of people collectively remember the past. One motivation for such study is to understand how collective identities at the local, regional, and national level emerge, and why those collective identities often lead to conflict. Public Memory, Race, and Ethnicity contributes to this rapidly evolving scholarly conversation by taking into consideration the influence of race and ethnicity on our collective practices of remembrance. How do the ways we remember the past influence racial and ethnic identities? How do racial and ethnic identities shape our practices of remembrance? Public Memory, Race, and Ethnicity brings together nine provocative critical investigations that address these questions and others regarding the role of public memory in the formation of racial and ethnic identities in the United States. The book is organized chronologically. Part I addresses the politics of public memory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on how immigrants who found themselves in a strange new world used memory to assimilate, on the interplay of ethnicity and patriarchy in early monumental representations of Sacagawea, and on the use of memory and forgetting to negotiate labor and racial tensions in an industrial steel town. Part II attends to the dynamics of memory and forgetting during and after World War II, examining the problems of remembrance as they are related to Japanese internment, the strategies of remembrance surrounding important events of the Civil Rights Movement, and the institutional use of memory and tradition to normalize whiteness and control human behavior. Part III focuses on race and remembrance in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, analyzing Walter Mosley’s use of memory in his literary work to challenge racial norms, President George W. Bush’s strategies of remembrance in his 2006 address to the NAACP, and the problems of memory and racial representation in the aftermath of the Katrina disaster. Taken together, the essays in this volume often speak to each other in remarkable ways, and one can begin to see in their progression the transformation of race relations in America since the nineteenth century.

This comprehensive compilation of entries documents the origins, transmissions, and transformations of Asian American folklore and folklife. Equally instructive and intriguing, the Encyclopedia of Asian American Folklore and Folklife provides an illuminating overview of Asian American folklore as a way of life. Surveying the histories, peoples, and cultures of numerous Asian American ethnic and cultural groups, the work covers everything from ancient Asian folklore, folktales, and folk practices that have been transmitted and transformed in America to new expressions of Asian American folklore and folktales unique to the Asian American historical and contemporary experiences. The encyclopedia's three comprehensive volumes cover an extraordinarily wide range of Asian American cultural and ethnic groups, as well as mixed-race and mixed-heritage Asian Americans. Each group section is introduced by a historical overview essay followed by short entries on topics such as ghosts and spirits, clothes and jewelry, arts and crafts, home decorations, family and community, religious practices, rituals, holidays, music, foodways, literature, traditional healing and medicine, and much, much more. Topics and theories are examined from crosscultural and interdisciplinary perspectives to add to the value of the work.

The Color of Success tells of the astonishing transformation of Asians in the United States from the "yellow peril" to "model minorities"--peoples distinct from the white majority but lauded as well-assimilated, upwardly mobile, and exemplars of traditional family values--in the middle decades of the twentieth century. As Ellen Wu shows, liberals argued for the acceptance of these immigrant communities into the national fold, charging that the failure of America to live in accordance with its democratic ideals endangered the country's aspirations to world leadership. Weaving together myriad perspectives, Wu provides an unprecedented view of racial reform and the contradictions of national belonging in the civil rights era. She highlights the contests for power and authority within Japanese and Chinese America alongside the designs of those external to these populations, including government officials, social scientists, journalists, and others. And she demonstrates that the invention of the model minority took place in multiple arenas, such as battles over zoot suiters leaving wartime internment camps, the juvenile delinquency panic of the 1950s, Hawaii statehood, and the African American freedom movement. Together, these illuminate the impact of foreign relations on the domestic racial order and how the nation accepted Asians as legitimate citizens while continuing to perceive them as indelible outsiders. By charting the emergence of the model minority stereotype, The Color of Success reveals that this far-reaching, politically charged process continues to have profound implications for how Americans understand race, opportunity, and nationhood.

"Even before wartime incarceration, Japanese Americans largely lived in separate cultural communities from their West Coast neighbors. The first-generation American children, the Nisei, were American citizens, spoke English, and were integrated in public schools, yet were also socially isolated in many ways from their peers and subject to racism. Their daughters especially found rapport in a flourishing network of ethnocultural youth organizations. Until now, these groups have remained hidden from the historical record, both because they were girls' groups and because evidence of them was considered largely ephemeral. In her second book, Valerie Matsumoto has recreated this hidden world of female friendship and comradery, tracing it from the Jazz age through internment to the postwar period. Matsumoto argues that these groups were more than just social outlets for Nisei teenage girls. Rather, she shows how they were critical networks during the wartime upheavals of Japanese Americans. Young Nisei women helped their families navigate internment and, more importantly, recreated communities when they returned to their homes in the immediate postwar period. This book will be a considerable contribution to our understanding of Japanese life in America, youth culture, ethnic history, urban history, and Western history. Matsumoto has interviewed and gained the trust of many (now old) women who were part of these girls' clubs"--

In this global and comparative study of Pacific War incarceration environments we explore the arc of the Pacific Basin as an archipelagic network of militarized penal sites. Grounded in spatial, physical and material analyses focused on experiences of civilian internees, minority citizens, and enemy prisoners of war, the book offers an architectural and urban understanding of the unfolding history and aftermath of World War II in the Pacific. Examples are drawn from Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Japan, and North America. The Architecture of Confinement highlights the contrasting physical facilities, urban formations and material character of various camps and the ways in which these uncover different interpretations of wartime sovereignty. The exclusion and material deprivation of selective populations within these camp environments extends the practices by which land, labor and capital are expropriated in settler-colonial societies; practices critical to identity formation and endemic to their legacies of liberal democracy.