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Contests over the Carceral Landscape: Space, Place, and Artifacts at the Manzanar National Historic Site

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Dark Tourism in the American West

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Abstract

This chapter deals with the public memory of Manzanar internment camp as expressed in the internment narrative of the present-day exhibition in Manzanar National Historic Site’s visitor center and the rebuilt elements of the camp structures. Managed by the National Park Service and neglected until relatively recently, Manzanar raises important questions about its mission as a public immersive space, and the means of telling its wartime history to the general population. The chapter explores how the landscaping and reconstruction decisions on Manzanar National Historic Site influenced the public image of Japanese American internment and played into the “progressive” narrative of American history, ultimately minimizing the prominence of physical confinement, violence, and surveillance in the Japanese American internment experience.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “‘The Banality of Evil,’ and the Nazis’ Early Victims,” The New York Times, September 8, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/09/opinion/the-banality-of-evil-and-the-nazis-early-victims.html.

  2. 2.

    For the initial proposition of this framework by Miles and the designation of specific supplier site categories by Stone, see William F. S. Miles, “Auschwitz: Museum Interpretation and Darker Tourism,” Annals of Tourism Research 29, no. 4 (2002), 1175–1178; and Philip R. Stone, “A Dark Tourism Spectrum: towards a typology of death and macabre related tourist sites, attractions and exhibitions,” TOURISM: An Interdisciplinary International Journal 54 no. 2 (2006): 145–160.

  3. 3.

    Kenneth E. Foote, Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

  4. 4.

    “Auditorium Restoration,” Manzanar National Historic Site, National Park Service, accessed December 28, 2018, https://www.nps.gov/manz/learn/management/auditorium-restoration.htm.

  5. 5.

    Alice Yang Murray, What Did the Internment of Japanese Americans Mean? (Bedford Books, 2000), 21.

  6. 6.

    Ibid.

  7. 7.

    Roger Daniels, Concentration Camps USA: Japanese Americans and World War II (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1971), 72.

  8. 8.

    Ibid. 75.

  9. 9.

    Arthur A. Hansen and David A. Hacker, “The Manzanar riot: An ethnic perspective,” Amerasia Journal 2, no. 2 (1974): 112–157.

  10. 10.

    Robert T. Hayashi, “Transfigured patterns: Contesting memories at the Manzanar National Historic Site,” The Public Historian 25, no. 4 (2003): 51–71.

  11. 11.

    “Map of America’s Concentration Camps,” Japanese American National Museum, http://www.janm.org/projects/clasc/map.htm.

  12. 12.

    Megan Venno, “Interpreting Human Rights Tragedies: A Comparison of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Manzanar National Historic Site,” Master of Science thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 2005.

  13. 13.

    Ibid. 13.

  14. 14.

    Donald Branson, transcript of an oral history conducted 1973, in Camp and community: Manzanar and the Owens Valley, California State University, Fullerton Oral History Program, 1977.

  15. 15.

    National Park Service, “Manzanar National Historic Site Facts,” site brochure, 2015.

  16. 16.

    John E. Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press, 1992), 170.

  17. 17.

    Donald Branson, Transcript of an oral history conducted 1973, in Camp and community: Manzanar and the Owens Valley, California State University, Fullerton, Oral History Program, 1977.

  18. 18.

    Rollin Bell, Transcript of an oral history conducted 1973, ibid.

  19. 19.

    Anna T. Kelley, Transcript of an oral history conducted 1973, ibid.

  20. 20.

    Pauline Miller, Transcript of an oral history conducted 1973, ibid.

  21. 21.

    The Internment Archives, http://www.internmentarchives.com/.

  22. 22.

    Bessie K. Pedneau, Transcript of an oral history conducted 1973, in Camp and community: Manzanar and the Owens Valley, California State University, Fullerton, Oral History Program, 1977.

  23. 23.

    Frank Hays, “Groveling Sycophant or Social Conscience: Telling the Story of Mountains, Valley, and Barbed Wire at Manzanar National Historic Site,” The Public Historian 25, no. 4 (2003): 73–80.

  24. 24.

    Ibid.

  25. 25.

    Ibid.

  26. 26.

    Manzanar National Historic Site Museum Management Plan, 2012.

  27. 27.

    Cultural Landscape Report, Manzanar NHS, 2006, 210.

  28. 28.

    “Manzanar National Historic Site Facts,” site brochure, 2015.

  29. 29.

    Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

  30. 30.

    Hayashi, “Transfigured Patterns,” 69.

  31. 31.

    Serdiukov, Stepan. Field research on-site at Manzanar Memorial Park, April 19, 2015. Manzanar Memorial Park Visitor’s Guestbook: reviewed for comments (no date).

  32. 32.

    Frank L. Pedneau, Transcript of an oral history conducted 1973, in Camp and community: Manzanar and the Owens Valley, California State University, Fullerton Oral History Program, 1977.

  33. 33.

    “Bernadette Lovato Named as New Superintendent of Manzanar National Historic Site,” Manzanar Committee Blog, April 22, 2014, http://blog.manzanarcommittee.org/2014/04/22/bernadette-lovato-named-as-new-superintendent-of-manzanar-national-historic-site/.

  34. 34.

    In April 2015, the National Park Service commissioned a study of potential historical preservation sites for the Reconstruction Era. On January 12, 2017, President Barack Obama dedicated the Reconstruction Era National Monument in Beaufort County, South Carolina. It became the very first NPS site to commemorate the period.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Stepan Serdiukov

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  1. Stepan Serdiukov
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Correspondence to Stepan Serdiukov .

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  1. Department of English, Humanities, and Philosophy, Midwestern State University, Wichita Falls, TX, USA

    Jennifer Dawes

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Serdiukov, S. (2020). Contests over the Carceral Landscape: Space, Place, and Artifacts at the Manzanar National Historic Site. In: Dawes, J. (eds) Dark Tourism in the American West. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21190-5_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21190-5_5

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