A symphony of voices: digital and visual narratives of Japanese American incarceration

This project both analyzes and enacts the complex role of genre in the production of historical and aesthetic experience. The dissertation itself is a mixed-genre, multimodal work, comprising analysis that focuses on the official narrative and counter-narratives from Japanese Americans incarcerated during WWII, along with creative sections that focus on my experiences as a person of Japanese descent, both growing up in the Deep South and visiting the individual camps during a cross country research trip. The dissertation utilizes a feminist methodology in which a multivocal account of the event is analyzed. The analysis considers how multivocal visual and digital narratives, distinguished from traditional scholarly or historical writing, alter the ways histories of marginalized communities may be accessed and understood. The creative sections foreground the importance of the subject position as well as aesthetic experience in approaching such complex historical phenomena. To help scholars speak with rather than for marginalized communities, I use the metaphor of the symphony, seeing scholar as a conductor who organizes a multitude of primary voices.