Redress as American-style justice: Congressional narratives of Japanese American redress at the end of the Cold War

Introduction

In 2008, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 (CLA), the US Government legislation which provided a formal apology and payment of $20,000 to each surviving Japanese and Japanese American interned during the Second World War, celebrated its twentieth anniversary. Numerous commemorative events across the country marked the occasion. Since its passage, the CLA has been upheld as a precedent and even a model for subsequent redress and reparations movements, not only within the US but around the world (see, for example, Brooks, 1999; Barkan, 2000; Yamamoto, 1997). This national and global prototype of ‘justice’ which Japanese American redress and the CLA have come to signify, urgently calls attention to the need to critically analyze not only the case’s legal and legislative machinations (as many scholars have done), but also its ideological functions, its social meanings, and its political implications within both domestic and international contexts.

In this article I ask the following:

How and why, within the official congressional redress discourse, was the case of Japanese American internment rendered redressable by the state at this particular moment in 1988?

To explore these questions, I analyze the transcripts of the 1987 and 1988 US House and Senate congressional debates on the CLA which preceded its signing into law by President Ronald Reagan in August 1988. ¹ I focus my examination on these debates because I am most interested to analyze the production of the official state-sanctioned discourse on Japanese American redress as it takes shape in relation to the (re)formation of a US national ontology at a pivotal political moment, both domestically and worldwide. I pay close, critical attention to the politics of national redress – that is, to how official historical knowledge and collective national memory are constructed and mediated around the so-named originary episode of state violence, to the interpellation and production of redressable national subjects, and to the complex relationship between national redress and nation-building. Congressional hearings constitute critical, productive sites of national cultural production and meaning-making processes wherein national ideologies, myths, and dominant historical knowledge are continually rearticulated, reproduced, and naturalized for political purposes that go far beyond the legislation itself (see, for example, Chock, 1991). Moreover, as Yoneyama suggests, ‘The ongoing reformulation of knowledge about the nation’s recent past is a process of amnes(t)ic remembering whereby the past is tamed through the reinscription of memories’ (1999: 32). Thus, in my tracing of the production of Japanese American redress within these debates, I remain keenly attentive to that which is necessarily ‘forgotten’ in the discourse and has been subjugated, marginalized and/or hidden precisely to enable the prevailing narratives.

Through my reading, I identify two overarching narratives: one that centers on the incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans as ‘a shameful and tragic chapter in our nation’s history’ ² and ‘one of the most unconscionable violations of our Government of the civil rights of any people,’ ³ and another on the act of its redress as the ‘right thing’ ⁴ to do, one to show the world ‘our national – and natural – capacity for justice and wisdom.’ ⁵ Granted, in themselves, these narratives are not novel per se as in many ways they have become naturalized understandings of these two ‘episodes’ in American history. However, when read together and in relation to US nation-building and the politics of national war memories, these two accounts of the internment as a national tragedy and its redress as an act of greatness for a nation assume a much greater meaning and significance than merely a case of ‘justice’ served, as they are often understood. If the possibility of ‘critical re-membering’ – particularly of national events involving violence, mass destruction, sexual atrocities, and oppression – is inextricably tied to ‘the global and national conditions within which knowledge about the past is currently being reconstituted’ (Fujitani et al., 2001: 5), then the task to understand the political meanings and implications of governmental redress for historical injustices involves remaining especially attentive to the conditions for re-membering the historical injustice itself.

Many American studies scholars emphasize the cultural and political symbolic importance for US national ontology of the recuperation of the wartime incarceration by the US government of Japanese and Japanese Americans into postwar national narratives of the Second World War as the ‘good war’ and of the US as a ‘moral nation’ (see Sturken, 2001; Simpson, 2001). The internment, as a form of remembrance, has the potential to disrupt such narratives which purport that the US not only liberated people from oppressive government regimes (including Asians, and Japanese too, from Japan’s military fanaticism), but also ‘rehabilitated them into free and prosperous citizens of the democratic world’ (Yoneyama, 2003: 58). I add to this discussion by considering how redress for Japanese American internment, as itself a crucial form of re-membering, took place at a pivotal national and international moment when, on the eve of its Cold War victory, the US faced a crucial crossroads in its path toward leadership of the free world. This crossroads was marked by a certain degree of apprehension as the nation continued to struggle to rehabilitate itself, not only with regards to the persistent legacy of the Vietnam War as the lost war, but also in terms of severe economic uncertainty in the face of the stock market crash in October 1988, the federal budget deficit reaching an unprecedented $2.3 trillion (Maki et al., 1999: 161), and the looming threat of Japan as a rising economic model and superpower (Palumbo-Liu, 2001). ⁶ Within this context, the US also faced increasingly visible domestic racial strife, particularly between black and white Americans, which many perceived to be the result of the failure and/or neglect of effective government policies on civil rights. ⁷ In short, what was needed at this moment of national economic and social crisis as well as global uncertainty as to the US’s emergent role as the world’s leading military and moral authority, was the rehabilitation and reassertion of a particular brand of American exceptionalism – one that rested on the production of the US as a mighty, just and, specifically, racially inclusive nation.

Congressional narratives of redress for Japanese American internment strategically served this need. Not only did they function to ‘close the book on a sad chapter’ in American history – the ‘internment’ as the one ‘blemish’ in the nation’s vital ‘good war’ memories of rescue and liberation – even more, they reinvigorated those memories with a newfound sense of America as the world’s just, moral and multicultural leader. Members of Congress, in constructing ‘the internment’ as an isolated national tragedy, conveniently covered over the historical and contemporary structures of US racism and colonialism in which the internment was enmeshed in order to produce ‘redress’ as uniquely and exceptional ‘American-style justice’ – ‘a particular shining example to the world of America’s concrete commitment to justice and the redress of wrongs.’ ⁸ I contend that it is this same ongoing myth of the exceptional ‘universalizing force of American norms and institutions’ (Singh, 2004: 4), repeatedly called upon in the post-Cold War era, which continues to legitimate and embolden US imperial interventions across the globe.

Internment as a redressable national tragedy

‘The internment’ achieves its legibility within the congressional redress debates precisely as a redressable, historical event – one scheduled for eventual overcoming and emplotted in a linear narrative of national moral and racial progress. A crucial component of this construction was the representation of ‘the internment’ as a racist wrongdoing located in the nation’s past. Deploying such familiar tropes as ‘an old mistake,’ ⁹ ‘an act based on ill-founded fear and xenophobia,’ ¹⁰ ‘a grievous wrong,’ ¹¹ and ‘a terrible failure of judgment’ ¹² to describe the wartime incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans, Congress members on both sides of the aisle, both supporting and opposing the redress bill, seemed to agree upon this particular interpretation.

At this moment in the late 1980s, such a consensus on the two-fold historic ‘racism’ and ‘wrong’ of ‘the internment’ was not new. Rather, I read it as a consolidation of earlier trends in national sentiment, including those contained in the report by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), first published in 1983, which configured the internment as a ‘grave injustice’ caused by ‘race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership’ (United States Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, 1997). Still, within the redress discourse, this re-articulation of existing narratives of ‘the internment’ served a specific purpose: as a highly organized strategy of containment, it not only periodized and isolated ‘the internment’ as a historical, nameable episode of state violence but likewise presented a delimited view of US racism in general as a contemporaneous, circumstantial, and emotion-driven phenomenon. That is, by portraying ‘the internment’ as an unfortunate event driven by hysterics, ‘raw, racial prejudice,’ ¹³ and the ‘irrationality’ of a few bad apples at a time of war and ‘extreme national stress’ ¹⁴ when ‘national passions were running very, very high,’ ¹⁵ Congress members also contained the idea of ‘racism’ itself, tying it to individual perpetrators and specific extreme circumstances and detaching it from anything fundamental or sedimented within US systems and institutions. Such a framing of ‘the internment’ and its racism as an historic momentary glitch in an otherwise sound, non-racist system was key, not only to its construction as a redressable historical injustice, but also to the ultimate production of its redress as an act of atonement and racial reconciliation – one to resolve any lingering questions as to the moral position of the US in regards to civil and human rights.

Following this logic, also crucial to internment’s redressability as forged by Congress members was its emergent hypervisibility as ‘the worst single wholesale violation of civil rights of American citizens in our history,’ ¹⁶ ‘one of the most flagrant violations of the principles laid down in this historic document [the US Constitution],’ ¹⁷ and ‘one of the most egregious violations of constitutional rights and safeguards.’ ¹⁸ This overt engagement and insertion of Japanese American internment into the national discourse as both ‘blatantly racist,’ ¹⁹ and ‘one of the most unconscionable violations of our Government of the civil rights of any people’ ²⁰ worked well to establish it as a redressable injustice – one that could be resolved by US norms and institutions. By making ‘the internment’ into an overdetermined aberration in America’s political history – ‘an appalling abuse of civil rights’ ²¹ and ‘inimical to the fundamental principles of law and justice embodied in our Constitution and characterizing almost all of our history’ ²² – this potentially disruptive past could be recognized and remembered in the national discourse in a way that not only left intact but reinvigorated the national symbolic central to US-nation-building throughout the second half of the twentieth century and since – that of the US as ‘the triumphant country of World War II,’ a ‘moral nation’ (Sturken, 2001: 47).

This rendition of ‘the internment’ as essentially the limit case of civil rights violations perpetrated by the US government – as ‘one of the most serious violations of constitutional rights in the history of this nation’ ²³ and ‘unprecedented in the history of American civil rights deprivation,’ ²⁴ functioned to strengthen the perception of what America is specifically by emphasizing what it is not. Particularly, by exceptionalizing and periodizing ‘the internment’ as ‘a most unfortunate and blatant display of racism’ ²⁵ located in its ‘violent’ past, the nation, with the act of redress, would be able to reaffirm, by linear juxtaposition, what it truly stood for in its ‘post-violent’ present and, more importantly, what it has stood for all along – a just and inclusive nation embodying the liberal promise of rights, freedom, and progress. It is important to consider here the constructedness of ‘the internment’ as a violation of civil rights as opposed to an international crime against humanity. This covering over of other human rights related aspects of ‘the internment,’ including the detention of first generation Japanese residents under the Enemy Alien Program or the rendition of over 2300 Japanese migrants from 13 Latin America countries, was again highly strategic and served to contain potentially disruptive memories that might not be resolvable by simply restoring America’s universalizing system of law and justice. ²⁶ Such a civil rights framework would be crucial to the making of ‘the internment’ as the limit case of US racial violence – neatly packaged for producing the act of its redress as the premiere symbol of national redemption and moral triumph on the world stage.

Before moving on to the act of redress, it is important to explore the internment’s ultimate construction as a profound and harrowing national tragedy – as a detached, politically insular, and temporally and spatially contained event located ‘at the outer edges of intelligibility, at the very boundaries of representation’ (Taylor, 2003: 263). Throughout the debates, Congress members routinely referred to it as ‘one of the ugliest episodes of our Nation’s past’: ²⁷ ‘a dark day for our country’ ²⁸ , ‘one of the saddest chapters in American history’, ²⁹ ‘a deep stain on the honor of our nation’, ³⁰ and ‘a terrible affront to the ideals for which our Nation stands.’ ³¹ Some explicitly expressed their profound distress that such an event could take place on ‘American soil.’ Representative Lawrence Smith (D-FL), for example, described it as ‘the most bitter example of how people can, under the threat of the possibility of war, be set upon and pitted against one another even in a democracy, even in this country.’ ³²

Diana Taylor has observed that the aesthetic connotation of tragedy functions as a strategic, temporal structure of containment whereby the ‘massive potential for destruction’ is ‘contained by the form itself’ – ‘deliver[ing] the devastation in a miniaturized and ‘complete’ package, neatly organized with a beginning, middle, and end.’ Such an aesthetically whole, teleological construction assures its audience that ‘the crisis will be resolved and balance restored’ ultimately in the final act and the ‘fear and pity we, as spectators, feel will be purified by the action’ (Taylor, 2003: 261). Indeed, I understand the staging of ‘the internment’ as a haunting tragedy from the nation’s past to be part and parcel of the performance of its redress as a monumental, even heroic, act of the post-violent present – one to bring proper and final resolution to the national crisis and recuperate the ‘proud history’ of ‘a good nation.’ ³³ Put differently, I read the narratives of ‘the internment’ and its redress as a two-part dialogical production by which the nation could not only contain memories of ‘the internment’ but ultimately imbue it with a heroic finale to serve as representative proof of the essential good of the nation. In the remainder of this essay, I examine this second act, paying close attention to its constructedness as an exemplar of ‘American-style’ justice, not just domestically but globally, on the world stage.

Redress as an act of national racial redemption

The act of redress for Japanese American internment was posited in the national discourse as an act with far-reaching repercussions that extended well beyond ‘making whole’ former internees’ personal losses. Produced as a national act, it was portrayed as a remedy of sorts – meant to repair a nation still haunted and ‘shaken’ by the ‘acknowledgement of this stain on our national record.’ ³⁴ In the House, for example, having scheduled the debate intentionally on the day of the two-hundredth anniversary of the signing of the US Constitution, supporters put forth the notion that the bill ‘not only attempts to compensate Americans of Japanese ancestry who were interned during World War II, but… also reaffirms, in a meaningful way, our faith in the fundamental constitutional principles of liberty and justice for all.’ ³⁵ Within this narrative of restored faith, the CLA was espoused as ‘the final act’ ³⁶ to ‘close the book on one of the most shameful events in our nation’s history’ ³⁷ and ‘to finally consider this issue and put it behind us.’ ³⁸ Congress members variously asserted that the bill would ‘remove this blight from our conscience,’ ³⁹ ‘dra[w] a conclusion to one of the most shameful episodes of American history,’ ⁴⁰ and ‘remove forever a longstanding blot on that great Constitution of the United States.’ ⁴¹ Redress and reparations, with the aim to repair, would be the way to bring closure and resolution to the national tragedy of ‘the internment,’ a ‘healthy’ way ‘for us as a nation’ ⁴² to heal from the trauma generated by a rupture to US national ontology premised upon the liberal promise of freedom, equality and liberty and justice for all.

Several members emphasized how their initial contentions with the bill over the issue of ‘unnecessary spending’ ⁴³ were overcome in the last instant as they became convinced that ‘this legislation is the only means available to put behind us this sad chapter of our history,’ ⁴⁴ ‘to bring this painful issue to a responsible conclusion.’ ⁴⁵ The ‘money,’ they stressed, was symbolic. Although ‘very, very modest,’ ⁴⁶ ‘just token,’ ⁴⁷ or ‘a very small amount,’ ⁴⁸ it was ‘the most appropriate gesture,’ and ‘the only equitable and reasonable step we can now take.’ ⁴⁹ In sum, this legislation, served up as ‘an important expression’ – ‘not simply for Japanese-Americans, but for all Americans’ ⁵⁰ – assumed a crucial symbolic role in US nation-building: a powerful way for the nation to resolve the nagging ontological contradiction wrought by traumatic memories of the internment and finally render that history totalized, settled, and closed.

Still, this narrative of Japanese American redress, structured strategically to culminate in the cathartic act of redemption by which the nation would honor its ‘deep moral and special obligation,’ ⁵¹ and ‘repay [its] moral debt,’ ⁵² in order ‘to atone for one of the most infamous incidents in our country’s history,’ ⁵³ was also about re-asserting a specific brand of US exceptionalism via a performance of racial reconciliation and inclusion. Central to this performance was the figuring of Japanese Americans as deserving model minority victims. Specifically, they were portrayed as ‘heroic soldiers’ and ‘loyal Americans’ who, unwavering in their level of commitment and personal self-sacrifice for the US nation, ‘gave us their sons as volunteers,’ ⁵⁴ despite the ‘racism’ and ‘hostility’ directed against them. As Iijima (1998) points out, this particular representation of Japanese and Japanese American former internees’ ‘accommodation’ and ‘superpatriotic response’ to the internment was not inevitable; at the time of the debates, there was much documentation of the resistance tactics employed by internees during their incarceration, including strikes, riots, petitions, and, of course, draft resistance. I read such a calculated effort by congressional supporters of the redress bill to cover over this history and instead put forth celebratory singular narratives of Japanese Americans’ sacrifice and subsequent ‘success’ as a move to not only uphold the ‘bootstraps’ model of the American Dream and thereby manage claims to the nation-state by other domestic racialized groups but also to reclaim the nation itself as the space of freedom in the world context. That is, narratives of Japanese Americans as proper redressable citizen subjects indeed provided the center stage upon which the US could perform its inspirational national linear narrative of moral, racial progress: the assumption of the burden of its racist history, the recognition of an exceptional patriotic minority, and its declaration, ‘never again.’

Japanese American redress was thus designed to be a universal symbol, emblematic of ‘American-style justice,’ but not a precedent for addressing other historical racial injustices perpetrated by the US government. In fact, the issue of redress and reparations for Japanese American internment posing ‘the spectacle of unwieldy precedent’ for ‘those with similar grievances’ ⁵⁵ was a central concern among members of Congress, particularly those opposed to the redress bill. Several members drew upon the historical experiences of African Americans and Native Americans in the US to illustrate what they described as ‘the potentially grave consequences… of [a]ttempting to put a price tag on misbegotten policies of the past.’ ⁵⁶ For example, on the first day of the Senate debate, Senator Ernest F. Hollings (D-SC) asked: ‘If we establish a precedent with S. 1009, where do we draw the line against reparations to the countless other groups of Americans who have suffered because of actions of the US Government? Or do we tell those other groups that their suffering was somehow less meaningful, less tragic, less deserving to recompense?’ ⁵⁷ The following day, in an extensive statement, Senator John H. Chafee (R-RI) similarly argued: ‘While the relocation and internment of Japanese-Americans was a terrible error by the US Government – no one disputes that now – it is not the only error the Government has made. Japanese-Americans are not the only group that has been unjustly wronged.’ He went on to state:

For example, what will passage of this measure say to the American Indians whose ancestors were brutally removed from their lands? Surely arguments can be made that the reservations on which so many Indians were placed, and continue to live today, and the Federal programs in place to assist American Indians, have not sufficiently redressed the wrongs committed against them. … What about black Americans? Think of those, how about those, their families, their predecessors who were in slavery in this Nation, not temporarily but permanently in slavery? How are we going to make a redress to them and their descendants? … They suffered the most outrageous discrimination in this Nation right up to the mid-sixties when some of the civil rights laws were passed. Are we going to make some kind of a redress to them? ⁵⁸

An amendment proposed by Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), which addressed this very issue eventually passed on the Senate floor by an unanimous voice vote; the amendment, characterized by Helms as ‘an insurance policy,’ ⁵⁹ stated that ‘nothing in this Act shall be construed as recognition of any claim of Mexico or any other country or any Indian tribe (except as expressly provided in this Act with respect to the Aleut tribe of Alaska) to any territory or other property of the United States, nor shall it be construed as providing any basis for compensation in connection with any such claim.’ ⁶⁰ With this ‘safeguard’ ⁶¹ in place to foreclose any redress possibilities connected to the US’ colonial past, ‘the internment’ came to signify, not just one of the worst aberrations on America’s moral record (an articulation necessary for its incorporation into the dominant historical narrative), but the universal limit case in the history of American racism. Such a production of an exceptional, yet paradigmatic racial injustice set the stage for the act of its redress then to become an exceptional, yet paradigmatically American act of national redemption – one which could symbolically stand in to atone for all other racial and colonial injustices of the nation’s past, for America to wipe the slate clean and re-emerge and redeem itself as an exemplary moral, multicultural nation at a pivotal international moment.

‘A shining example to the world’

‘So the burden has fallen upon us to right the wrongs of 45 years ago. Great nations demonstrate their greatness by admitting and redressing the wrongs that they commit, and it has been left to this Congress to act accordingly.’ ⁶² These words, spoken by Representative Norman Mineta (D-CA), demonstrate how the act of redress, via a periodized narrative of redemption, functioned at once to define what constitutes a great nation (the recognition of ‘past mistakes’) while simultaneously designating the US nation as such. In another illustrative testimony, Representative Bruce A. Morrison (D-CT) stated: ‘This is a challenge on a great day to a great nation to have the strength that only a great nation can have to recognize when it is wrong and to try to correct its wrong no matter how late in the day that realization comes.’ ⁶³

Thus, the act of redress would come to represent not merely ‘the right thing to do’ but an act of moral greatness for the US nation. As Congress members variously asserted, the redress bill – as a bill ‘for all Americans, including those yet to be born,’ ⁶⁴ ‘a test of historic magnitude,’ ⁶⁵ and thus vital to ‘our future strength as a nation’ ⁶⁶ – would ‘prove that our beloved country is great enough to acknowledge and correct its past mistakes’, ⁶⁷ ‘demonstrate our national – and natural – capacity for justice and wisdom’, ⁶⁸ ‘show the strength of our nation and our system of laws,’ ⁶⁹ and ‘send a message down the corridors of the future that America is big enough to admit a mistake and honest enough within itself to try to make atonement for the error.’ ⁷⁰ Redress, as an act of greatness, had become a key moment of US national formation and a pivotal opportunity to rearticulate and reassert America’s moral exceptionalism.

Such a performance should be read not within an isolated domestic space – that is, as solely performed for an ‘American audience’ – but as inherently and fundamentally produced by and for particular global historical forces and international audiences. Throughout the debates, Congress members themselves alluded to the performance of the US on the world stage and the making of a great nation within the context of a newly emerging global world order. Here, one can again detect the slippage between the framing of Japanese American redress as a case of civil rights for the US nation versus one of universal human rights in the world context. Specifically, redress was positioned as an important test for the US nation, in the assumption and fulfillment of its emergent position as ‘leader of the free world and a strong and persuasive voice for human rights and freedom.’ ⁷¹ Congress members expressed the need for the US government to ‘tell the world that this body is genuine in its commitment to the Constitution’ ⁷² and to send this message ‘to those around the world, who want to know whether America does in fact stand for the principles that it so eloquently talks about on this floor and around the world.’ ⁷³

Ultimately, redress then became a testament of the nation’s exceptional moral authority in the world context: ‘a great example for the rest of the world that a strong and powerful and free Nation is not embarrassed about saying that we are not perfect and we are getting better, and we acknowledge that we made a mistake.’ ⁷⁴ The notion of the act of redress as an ‘exemplar’ and ‘an unprecedented action’ that ‘no other nation on Earth’ ⁷⁵ would undertake, was prevalent throughout the debates. For example, Representative Dan Glickman (D-KS) proclaimed: ‘Mr. Speaker, this is a great day for America, because it bears witness to the unique and special greatness of America that we are today repaying American citizens for injustices suffered during World War II as a result of denial of due process. Very few other societies or countries would do what we Americans are doing today. Mr. Speaker, this bill proves our respect for human rights and liberties is paramount.’ ⁷⁶ Likewise, Representative Barbara Boxer (D-CA), drawing parallels between Japanese American internment and other human rights violations around the world, testified:

Because of my own ancestry, I had aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents pulled from their homes in Western Europe because of one reason – their ethnicity. This kind of ripping apart of humanity must have no place in the world – no place! Our action here today is very significant not just in this country but all over the world. We are saying no, never again! Whether it's the Japanese American relocation, or the Armenian genocide, or the Holocaust or apartheid, or the refuseniks in Russia, or solidarity in Poland, we say ‘No.’ ⁷⁷

Hence, redress for Japanese American internment was not only about fashioning national imaginings of a utopian multicultural domestic future, but also global imaginings of an international humanitarian regime of which the US would reign as its just and moral leader. Put differently, at a key moment in the reorganization of the world order, the act of re-dressing Japanese American internment worked to establish not only a national past but also a global present and future in which the US would reclaim and remake itself as the space of freedom and as the adjudicator of world justice – the nation ‘to lead all nations to a new future devoid of interethnic strife’ (Sanchez, 2000: 41). Not coincidentally, this same narrative, repeatedly called upon, would serve to justify and embolden the proliferation of US military interventions in the name of democracy, justice and human rights in the years to follow.

Conclusion

This article is motivated by a concern for justice: for those Japanese Latin Americans who are still seeking redress and reparations from the US government for their forced removal and incarceration and, in some cases, repatriation and utilization in a prisoner-of-war exchange program with the Japanese government during the war; for the Italian and German American former internees who also have yet to achieve public visibility and official recognition from the US government for their incarceration under the Enemy Alien Program; for Arab, Muslim and South Asian residents and citizens who were, and continue to be, violated by the state in the name of America’s ‘war on terror’; for Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans who continue to fight for governmental apology and appropriations for past injustices, including genocide, dispossession, and displacement; and for the millions of lives lost throughout the world in the name of so-called American-style justice, freedom and democracy premised upon national myths of rescue, liberation and rehabilitation.

In this article, I have sought to interrogate what has become an important exemplar of ‘American-style justice.’ I find that instead of using the debates on the redress bill as an opportunity to open up and take a critical look at America’s colonial and racist history, Congress members opted to do just the opposite and constructed the CLA as a symbol of justice done in order to cover over the intricate, relational state-sanctioned structures of US racism that are not only contained in the past but continue to infuse the present. At a crucial moment of national crisis and on the brink of the reorganization of the world order, this dominant narrative of Japanese American redress conveniently served to not only recuperate national memories of the Second World War as the ‘good war’ but even more reinvigorate and imbue such memories with a newfound sense of American exceptionalism centered upon visions of a global humanitarian justice regime of which the US would reign as its just and moral leader.

Such a narrative, couched within the privileged liberal humanist temporal frame of violence and redemption, signals both the political limits of redress as a radical politics towards global justice and the need for an alternative paradigm – one that self-critically acknowledges the very violence of History, recognition, and re-membering. At this current historical moment when redress and reparations have become our privileged paradigm of historical justice, it is important to consider anew other imaginings and possibilities that may go beyond the jurisdiction of the legislation itself.

My goal here was not simply to rewrite the story of Japanese American redress as a moment of reinvigorated US exceptionalism but rather contribute to the growing conversation initiated by activists and scholars alike post-redress to make that redress live up to its potential, out of a broader concern for justice. I hope that I have accomplished this goal; the rest of this larger task is to be collectively determined and fulfilled by the ongoing efforts to critically re-member the narrative of ‘internment’ and ‘redress,’ seizing it from its confines within dominant nationalist discourses and connecting it with current and future struggles against racial and social injustice at home and abroad. Such is the stuff that may open a new door toward an alternative emancipatory politics that rests not in the act of redress itself, emplotted in a linear narrative of justice done and progress made, but rather in the ongoing questioning of that progress, in the messy intersections between violence, history, and redemption.