Subtitle: Crafting Survival in Japanese American Concentration Camps
Author: Jane E Dusselier
Subject: Asian American Studies , American Studies
Paper ISBN 978-0-8135-4408-3
Cloth ISBN 978-0-8135-4407-6
Pages: 184 pages
Publication Date: December 2008

Events:

March 14, 2009 at 1:00
Beaverdale Books
2629 Beaverdale Avenue
Des Moines, Iowa
515279.5400
Contact: Alice Meyer

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"Dusselier has given us an excellent thick description of the ways that Japanese American prisoners of both generations used arts and crafts as tools of survival. Future camp studies will have to take her work into account."
- Roger Daniels, University of Cincinnati

During World War II, over 120,000 people of Japanese descent were forcibly interned in concentration camps across America.

In Artifacts of Loss, Jane E. Dusselier focuses the lens on the lives of these internees and the art they created. Their camp-made artistry included flowers formed from tissue paper and shells, wood carvings honoring pets they left behind, furniture crafted from discarded apple crates, gardens nurtured next to their housing—anything to help alleviate their visual deprivation and isolation. Internees’ crafts were central to sustaining, re-forming, and inspiring new relationships. Creating, exhibiting, consuming, and living with art became the essence of everyday camp life and helped provide for mental, emotional, and psychic survival.

Dusselier considers these often overlooked folk crafts as meaningful political statements, significant as material forms of protest and as representations of loss.  She also sheds light on displaced people around the globe today and the ways in which personal and group identity is reflected in similar creative offerings.


Brief list of camps mentioned:

Tanforan, Tule Lake, Topaz, Heart Mountain, Manzanar, Jerome, Amache, Rohwer, Poston

Jane E. Dusselier is an assistant professor of anthropology and Asian American studies at Iowa State University. Her previously published works include Does Food Make Place? Food Protests in Japanese American Concentration Camps.