Natural life, manufactured feelings: National identity, bio-political power and the Japanese American internment

Abstract

This study examines the bio-political character of the internment of Japanese Americans on the West Coast of the United States during World War II. The thesis argues that the internment can be understood as an instance of sovereign decision on a state of exception by which the affected population—the American Issei and Nisei—were placed outside the pale of the law and exposed to arbitrary treatment. Because of the bio-political character of modern state power, and because of the organization of the global political space as a world system of nation-states, the legal and factual loss of citizen status means the loss of access to fundamental human rights, and at the same time, exclusion from processes of national identification. Chapter one examines the effects of the modernization of Japan on the formation of a modern Japanese nationalism and national identity and shows the global reach of this system by analyzing two autobiographies of Ayako Ishigaki and Kazuko Kuramoto. Chapter two focuses on the impact of the state of exception on the executive, military, administrative, legal, and academic state apparatuses involved in the evacuation. The emphasis falls on arbitrary decision-making, lack of accountability, uncertainty on procedure and powers, and the incapacity to comprehend and/or acknowledge the arbitrary nature of sovereign power. Chapter three examines memoirs, autobiographies, and autobiographical fiction by former internees for traces of the bio-political relation. The emphasis is on the political character of national identification in tension with the supposed automatisms that claim to bind the individual to the nation and the state from the moment of birth. The concluding chapter argues that the Japanese American experience in the internment shows that national identity, citizenship, and fundamental individual rights, are all subject to exception by the constitutive power of the sovereign to create law, not just preserve it. The possibility of an ethical relation with state and sovereign power is suggested to lie beyond the nationality principle, in the willingness to let go of collective identity for the sake of justice and fairness.