The Returns of War and the Japanese American Incarceration in Tomie Arai’s Return (1997)
By Mellon Humanities Faculty Fellow, Kylie Ching
This talk will explore the entangled carceral experiences of Japanese Americans and Native Americans in Arizona during World War II through an examination of Japanese American artist Tomie Arai’s 1997 silkscreen photomontage diptych entitled Return. Arai looks back on this event fifty years later as she reimagines a cross-racial encounter between incarcerated Japanese Americans and tribal members of the Gila River Indian Community and the Colorado River Indian Community, whose land was transformed into two relocation centers – The Gila River War Relocation Center and the Poston Relocation Center. These centers were operated by a federal agency called the War Relocation Authority (WRA) and were the only camps situated on Native American reservations. Arai uses photomontage to recombine WRA-approved photographs of detained Japanese Americans alongside portraits of tribal members, maps of the camps and local highway infrastructure, and Japanese text. I argue that Return invokes multiple “returns.” For example, this work allows Japanese Americans to return to a site of memory in the face of archival and historical erasure, while also acknowledging the forestalled return of land back to Indigenous communities that have been reconstituted into what Jodi Kim calls a “settler garrison.”
