In 1942, Bill Manbo (1908-1992) and his family were forced from
their Hollywood home into the Japanese American internment camp at
Heart Mountain in Wyoming. While there, Manbo documented both the
bleakness and beauty of his surroundings, using Kodachrome film, a
technology then just seven years old, to capture community
celebrations and to record his family's struggle to maintain a
normal life under the harsh conditions of racial imprisonment.
Colors of Confinement showcases sixty-five stunning images from
this extremely rare collection of color photographs, presented
along with three interpretive essays by leading scholars and a
reflective, personal essay by a former Heart Mountain internee. The
subjects of these haunting photos are the routine fare of an
amateur photographer: parades, cultural events, people at play,
Manbo's son. But the images are set against the backdrop of the
barbed-wire enclosure surrounding the Heart Mountain Relocation
Center and the dramatic expanse of Wyoming sky and landscape. The
accompanying essays illuminate these scenes as they trace a
tumultuous history unfolding just beyond the camera's lens, giving
readers insight into Japanese American cultural life and the stark
realities of life in the camps. Also contributing to the book are:
Jasmine Alinder is associate professor of history at the University
of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she coordinates the program in public
history. In 2009 she published Moving Images: Photography and the
Japanese American Incarceration (University of Illinois Press). She
has also published articles and essays on photography and
incarceration, including one on the work of contemporary
photographer Patrick Nagatani in the newly released catalog Desire
for Magic: Patrick Nagatani--Works, 1976-2006 (University of New
Mexico Art Museum, 2009). She is currently working on a book on
photography and the law. Lon Kurashige is associate professor of
history and American studies and ethnicity at the University of
Southern California. His scholarship focuses on racial ideologies,
politics of identity, emigration and immigration, historiography,
cultural enactments, and social reproduction, particularly as they
pertain to Asians in the United States. His exploration of Japanese
American assimilation and cultural retention, Japanese American
Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and
Festival, 1934-1990 (University of California Press, 2002), won the
History Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies
in 2004. He has published essays and reviews on the incarceration
of Japanese Americans and has coedited with Alice Yang Murray an
anthology of documents and essays, Major Problems in Asian American
History (Cengage, 2003). Bacon Sakatani was born to immigrant
Japanese parents in El Monte, California, twenty miles east of Los
Angeles, in 1929. From the first through the fifth grade, he
attended a segregated school for Hispanics and Japanese. Shortly
after Pearl Harbor, his family was confined at Pomona Assembly
Center and then later transferred to the Heart Mountain Relocation
Center in Wyoming. When the war ended in 1945, his family relocated
to Idaho and then returned to California. He graduated from Mount
San Antonio Community College. Soon after the Korean War began, he
served with the U.S. Army Engineers in Korea. He held a variety of
jobs but learned computer programming and retired from that career
in 1992. He has been active in Heart Mountain camp activities and
with the Japanese American Korean War Veterans.
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