Thirteenth International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

Once a strategically “forgotten” episode in U.S. history, the forced internment of Japanese Americans during World War II is now the subject of numerous books, films, and monuments. Historian Caroline Chung Simpson has referred to the internment as an “absent presence”; it is the most-discussed episode of Asian American history, yet it is frequently footnoted in broader scholarship and representations of World War II. Museum exhibits have a role to play in making that absence visible. This paper focuses on the museum located at the site of one former internment camp: the Manzanar Relocation Center in California’s Owens Valley. I examine the delivery media through which visitors are guided through the museum as elements of visual rhetoric that work against the popular American understanding of the World War II era as a time of national unity, voluntary sacrifice, and victory. Overall, I argue that, while humanizing the interned individuals, the museum also makes the “absent presence” visible and tangible to visitors.