The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration

Introduction by Frank Abe and Floyd Cheung. Edited by Frank Abe and Floyd Cheung. This anthology presents a new vision that recovers and reframes the literature produced by the people targeted by the actions of President  Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress to deny Americans of Japanese  ancestry any individual hearings or other due process after the Japanese  attack at Pearl Harbor. From nearly seventy selections of fiction,  poetry, essays, memoirs, and letters emerges a shared story of the  struggle to retain personal integrity in the face of increasing  dehumanization – all anchored by the key government documents that incite the action. The selections favor the pointed over the  poignant, and the unknown over the familiar, with several new  translations among previously unseen works that have been long  overlooked on the shelf, buried in the archives, or languished unread in  the Japanese language. The writings are presented chronologically so  that readers can trace the continuum