Julie Otsuka's novel When the Emperor Was Divine (2002) retells the trauma of the Japanese American imprisonment through the lens of fictional characters taken from their "white house on the wide street in Berkeley not far from the sea" to "the scorched white earth of the desert" (74, 23). The Topaz Internment Camp in Utah's Sevier Desert, where these characters were forcibly relocated, sits on the site of an ancient inland sea, Lake Bonneville, which submerged that barren desert ground some ten thousand years ago. The paleolake serves as a displaced but active character in Otsuka's novel that shapes the characters' understanding of their traumatic experience and their ability to work through it. Rather than serving as an actor in disorientation, the ancient sea actually enables reorientation, affording the characters a new understanding of self and place. In developing this sea-oriented analysis of the internment, I call upon theory from trauma scholars Judith Herman and Dominick LaCapra and archipelagic thinkers like Epeli Hau'ofa and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, who have reoriented our understandings of islands, continents, and the concept of home. With these thinkers as interlocutors, my archipelagic reading of When the Emperor Was Divine advances a model for understanding the ocean as a mediator and a symbol through which traumatic experiences are acted out, worked through, refracted, and reoriented. This essay relies on the interaction of"”or the potential for mutual illumination between"”two emergent arenas of study: critical desert studies and critical ocean and island studies. It thus becomes a frame through which archipelagic thought can become a collaborator for the contingent working through of trauma and, ultimately, a reimagination of notions of home and reorientation.

abstract: People come together and form communities in cities across the world but the processes behind community formation are not well understood. Some researchers theorize that having populations with similar characteristics is important; others argue that the existence of public spaces for interaction is key. I use archaeological data collected over six seasons of field work and archival data from The Granada Relocation Center (Amache) National Historic Landmark, a World War II (WWII) Japanese American incarceration center in Southeastern Colorado, to demonstrate the role that participation in previous social communities has on the formation of new social networks. The concept of social cohesion acts as a framework for understanding how access to public spaces and participation in different types of social activities creates a sense of neighborhood community among a dislocated population. During WWII Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes on the West Coast to ten incarceration centers, disrupting existing communities and forcing the formation of new ones. Amache is one of ten incarceration centers which housed families and individuals. The site resembled an urban center with public facilities and residential areas that functioned as neighborhoods. Archival and archaeological data indicate that residents developed socially defined neighborhoods. Internees modified each neighborhood through the creation of landscape features and development of social activity which provided a venue for residents to interact and form a sense of community identity. Neighborhood residents clustered based on their affiliation to previous communities both in California and in the temporary detention centers. Clustering in demographically similar neighborhoods facilitated the development of new social interactions and led to the proliferation of landscape features and social events seen in the archaeological and archival record. I identify patterns of neighborhood interaction through an examination of the archaeological record and social network analysis using archival newspapers. Applying archaeological data in partnership with social network data illustrates the range of strategies used by incarcerees to create new communities and problematizes working with a single data source when attempting to identify socially defined neighborhoods. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Anthropology 2020

This study utilized a qualitative/phenomenological research methodology to examine the generational and transgenerational issues of five identified Japanese American families. To be included in this study, families were identified to contain at least one member who was interned during World War II or who had parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents who were interned. Semistructured interviews, including Adlerian lifestyle assessments, were conducted with the 28 research informants who represented the second, third, and fourth generations of their families.