This paper seeks to situate Miné Okubo’s graphic novel Citizen 13660, which depicts the internment of Japanese during World War II, in a particular history of American documentarian photography. From the government-sponsored photography programs of the New Deal (FSA, WPA, and later the WRA) up to the “democracy of photographs” produced around the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, I trace a mode of documentarian photography that responds to sites of national vulnerability, threat, or trauma by participating in a logic of security that seeks to contain the threat. Denied photographic equipment inside the internment camp, Okubo turns to sketches as an alternative medium that mimics this photographic documentary mode, and the FSA project specifically. However, if the New Deal government utilized “official” activist-documentarians and 9/11 made witnesses of every New Yorker, Okubo’s text offers a unique documentarian perspective by projecting the author as both participant and observer—that is, both the subject (the interned) and the documentarian. Okubo thus challenges the “democratic” documentary practices of the U.S., and in the broader context of wartime internment, critiques the culture of national security and the problems of citizenship this raises. Through the documentation of the internment, Okubo constructs an alternative national archive and offers an alternative representation of “national security,” ultimately questioning what it means to be a subject of the state and what it means to participate in the life of the nation, particularly during times of war.
About the presenterJennie N. Snow
Jennie is a PhD candidate in English Literature at Brown University. She focuses on 20th century American literature drawing on postcolonial theory and media studies, with a particular interest in war and the nation.