Memorializing Pearl Harbor examines the challenge of representing history at the site of the attack that brought America into World War II. Analyzing moments in which history is re-presented—in commemorative events, documentary films, museum design, and educational programming—Geoffrey M. White shows that the memorial to the Pearl Harbor bombing is not a fixed or singular institution. Rather, it has become a site in which many histories are performed, validated, and challenged. In addition to valorizing military service and sacrifice, the memorial has become a place where Japanese veterans have come to seek recognition and reconciliation, where Japanese Americans have sought to correct narratives of racial mistrust, and where Native Hawaiians have challenged their ongoing erasure from their own land. Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork, White maps these struggles onto larger controversies about public history, museum practices, and national memory.

This special edition commemorating the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which occurred December 7, 1941, presents a compilation of eyewitness accounts by those who survived, including soldiers, sailors, airmen, chaplains, and wives.

Foregrounding indigenous and feminist scholarship, this collection analyzes militarization as an extension of colonialism from the late twentieth to the twenty-first century in Asia and the Pacific. The contributors theorize the effects of militarization across former and current territories of Japan and the United States, such as Guam, Okinawa, the Marshall Islands, the Philippines, and Korea, demonstrating that the relationship between militarization and colonial subordination—and their gendered and racialized processes—shapes and produces bodies of memory, knowledge, and resistance. Contributors: Walden Bello, U of the Philippines; Michael Lujan Bevacqua, U of Guam; Patti Duncan, Oregon State U; Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, U of Hawai‘i, M noa; Insook Kwon, Myongji U; Laurel A. Monnig, U of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign; Katharine H. S. Moon, Wellesley College; Jon Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio, U of Hawai‘i, M noa; Naoki Sakai, Cornell U; Fumika Sato, Hitotsubashi U; Theresa Cenidoza Suarez, California State U, San Marcos; Teresia K. Teaiwa, Victoria U, Wellington; Wesley Iwao Ueunten, San Francisco State U.

How Pearl Harbor has been written about, thought of, and manipulated in American culture.

Summoning Pearl Harbor is a mesmerizing display of linguistic force that redefines remembering. How do words make the past appear? In what way does the historian summon bygone events? What is this kind of remembering, and for whom do we recall the dead, or the past? In this highly original meditation on the past, renowned art historian Alexander Nemerov delves into what it means to recall a significant event—Pearl Harbor—and how descriptions of images can summon it back to life. Beginning with the photo album of a former Japanese kamikaze pilot, which is reproduced in this volume, Nemerov transports the reader into a different world through his engagement with the photographs and the construction of a narrative around them. Through its lyrical prose, Summoning Pearl Harbor expands what we traditionally associate with ekphrastic writing. The kind of writing that can enliven a work of art is also the kind of writing that makes the past appear in vivid color and deep feeling. In the end, this timely piece of writing opens onto fundamental questions about how we communicate with each other, and how the past continues to live in our collective consciousness, not merely as facts but as stories that shape us. Here, Nemerov’s constant awareness of the power of language to make an experience—seen or remembered—become real reminds us that great ekphrastic writing is at the heart of every effective description.

Gives accounts by American and Japanese survivors of The Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941.