“BARBED VOICES” TALK AT MANZANAR
Dr. Arthur A. Hansen will read from his new book, Barbed Voices at the Manzanar National Historic Site on Saturday December 15th at 1 p.m. The book is an anthology of Dr. Hansen’s “most significant” previously published articles that have been “updated and annotated for contemporary context,” he said. The articles navigate the stories of “inmates and selected camp groups who spearheaded resistance movements in the ten War Relocation Authority administered compounds in the United States during World War II.”
As a whole, the collection analyzes the evolution of the historical memory of Japanese incarceration.
“Barbed Voices presents a new framework of enduring value for anyone interested in the World War II experience and civil and human rights,” Dr. Hansen said.
The book provides “a basis for understanding why, when, where, and how some of the 120,000 incarcerated Japanese Americans opposed the threats to themselves, their families, their reference groups, and their racial-ethnic community,” Hansen said.
He says what was pitched by the U.S. government as a ‘Japanese-American Evacuation’ was in fact “a social disaster, which, unlike a natural disaster, is man-made.”
At the same time, he would like to “demonstrate that his focus on first-person Japanese-American testimonies gathered through powerful oral history interviews gives expression to the resistance to this social disaster.”
In addition to Barbed Voices, which was published by the University Press of Colorado, Dr. Hansen edited Nisei Naysayer: The Memoir of Militant Japanese American Journalist Jimmie Omura (Stanford University Press), and wrote the foreword for Naomi Hirahara and Heather C. Lindquist’s, Life After Manzanar (Heyday Books).
He has a Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of California, Santa Barbara and is a Professor Emeritus of History and Asian American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, where he taught for 42 years.
According to Manzanar National Historic Site Park Ranger Rose Masters, Barbed Voices will available at the Manzanar store on December 12th.
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