AC 211 Lecture Outline for March 5

RACE, CULTURE, AND AMERICAN NATIONHOOD DURING WWII

Summary: Today we will explore the racial accents of American cultural life during World War II. We will focus on the different racial locations of African Americans and Japanese Americans during the war. We will continue to consider the mass-mediated dimensions of the war, focusing in particular on Frank Capra's remarkable documentary, Know Your Enemy -- Japan. Capra's film enriches our understanding of race and American cultural life during World War II.

RACE AND CULTURE IN WORLD WAR II

I.Last time:

A.Government appropriation of mass culture for propaganda purposes

B.Gender and wartime culture as reflected in Rosie the Riveter

1.wartime culture privileged the figure of the GI (see image)

2.also privileged "Rosie the Riveter," but in an auxiliary capacity

3.wartime representation of womanhood sometimes punitive (see image)

C. Westbrook's analysis of gender and the problem of political obligation in World War II

1. US lacks compelling definition of "the public"

2. in the absence of a compelling sense of public obligation, propagandists and government officials exhorted Americans to fight for private obligations to wives, sweethearts, and family members back home

3. Westbrook notes the potential for misogyny in a system that divides the political obligations of war unequally between women and men (see image)

II.Today: Race and wartime culture

A.World War II was the "good war"

B.Also a "race war"

1.African Americans and the "Double V" campaign

2.anti-Japanese imagery

a. Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar

b. "Goodbye Mama, I'm off to Yokohama"

c. anti-Japanese caricatures - contrast to representations of German and Italian enemies (see image)

3. gender, race, and the civic recuperation of the Japanese-American community

a. the Nisei soldier

b. Ansel Adams' photographic depiction of family-based Japanese-Americanism

III.Filmic illustrations of wartime racial themes: Frank Capra's wartime documentaries

A.Prelude to War (1942)

B.Know Your Enemy -- Japan (drafted 1942, released 1945)

C.The Negro Soldier (1944) (to be discussed in section, not in lecture)

IV. Like gender, race provided Americans on the home front with a metaphoric field for the articulation of broader cultural anxieties, having to do with the meanings of American national community and loyalty, and with the tension between public spiritedness and individualism in American political culture. For many African Americans and some Japanese Americans, the war also afforded an opportunity to prove their Americanism through military and civilian sacrifice.