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The life of paper: a poetics

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The life of paper: a poetics

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Content THE LIFE OF PAPER:

A POETICS

by

Sharon Luk

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

May 2012

Copyright 2012 Sharon Luk

ii
Epigraph

Thus, monks, this spiritual life is lived with mutual support for the purposes of
crossing the flood and making a complete end of suffering.

Itivuttaka 111

iii

Table of Contents

Epigraph ii

List of Figures v

Abstract vii

Chapter One: The Life of Paper 1
Literature Review 6
Methodology 20
Project Summary 26

Chapter Two: Detained: ±
3
√ Structure

(content-form)
3
30

1
√ 1: Civilization and Printed Papers 36
2
√ 1: Drawing the Lines 41
3
√ 1: Post(al) Wars 45
1
√ 2: Epistemology and Chinese “Self-Government” 53
2
√ 2: Race; Or, the American Dream 57
3
√ 2: Making (Family) Trees from Paper 63
3
(1)
: This Is a Manʼs World (?) 71
3
(2)
: The Sociality of the Her 78
3
(3)
(Conclusion): Paper Before Papers 84

Chapter Three: Interned: Censorship / and the Work of Art
(Where They / Barbed the Fourth Corner /
Open 89
What a Playwright and a Poet Learned on Their Road
Trip to Seattle 89
Of Letters: 92
The Widely Lesser Known Truth 94
What the U.S. Shares with the Boer War of South Africa
(And, What People Could Not Write About It) 102
“Just Like Being Pregnant” 114
Of Letters (Reprise): 126
Yes, It's Right to Recall 132
The Purloined Purloined Letter 135
Conclusion: The Work of Art in Ages of Social
Reproduction 141

iv
Chapter Four : Imprisoned: Pages of Stolen Life, Or,
Collectively Re-embodying the Human 145
1: Letters and Doing Time 147
2: Open Letters 152
3: Letters and Torture 159
4: Letters and Fathers 166
5: Letters and Mothers 173
6: Letters and Children 178
7: Parole Letters 179
8: Lost Letters 182
9: Love Letters 184
10: Postscript 189

Chapter Five: A Poetics 192
Aesthetics 192
People 197
Life 203

Endnotes
Chapter Two Endnotes 207
Chapter Three Endnotes 215
Chapter Four Endnotes 223

Bibliography 225

v
List of Figures

Figure 1.1: Huangshan Mountain 1

Figure 2.1: Hong Kong Postʼs “Four Great Inventions of
Ancient China” Special Stamp 30

Figure 2.2: Anonymous to J.B. Densmore, 30 October 1917 31

Figure 2.3: Newspaper advertisement for Kennah and Stidger,
Attorneys at Law 32

Figure 2.4: Envelope processed through min-chu 50

Figure 2.5: “Letter #18,” Lau Sai Jan to Lau Pock Toon,
c. 6 September 1917 50

Figure 2.6: Coaching letter #1, c. 1924 66

Figure 2.7: Coaching letter #2, c. 1924 68

Figure 2.8: Coaching letter #3, c. 1924 69

Figure 2.9: Yee Fon to sons Louie Kim Sin and Louie Kim Min,
c. 13 March 1918 74

Figure 2.10: Guey Hock to nephews Louie Suey Sang and
Louie Suey Wing, c. 4 March 1918 77

Figure 2.11: Wong Sor Gam to Father, c. 18 December 1916 80

Figure 2.12: “Letter by a Chinese Girl” 84

Figure 3.1: U.S. censor stamp (Fiset, 2001) and letter excerpt
from Dear Miss Breed (J. Oppenheim, Ed., 2006) 89

Figure 3.2: Amy, Bessie, Susie, Lucy, and Richard Masuda to
Edward J. Ennis, 14 September 1942 100

vi
Figure 3.3: Mrs. Chiyomi and Amy, Bessie, Susie, Lucy, and
Richard Masuda to Edward J. Ennis,
c. 2 December 1942 102

Figure 3.4: Chiyomi Masuda to Edward J. Ennis, c. July 1942 111

Figure 3.5: Charles Beckman, Sr, to the Director of
Alien Detention, 18 April 1942 114

Figure 3.6: Bessie Masuda to the U.S. Department of Justice,
15 February 1944 117

Figure 3.7: Mikio Masuda to Edward J. Ennis,
2 February 1944 137

Figure 3.8: Lucy Masuda to Edward J. Ennis,
15 February 1944 138

Figure 4.1: Cell check at Pelican Bay State Prison, CA 145

Figure 4.2: (Robert) Lester Jackson 169

Figure 5.1: Artwork by Horiyoshi III, from State of Grace, Inc.
(2009) 192

vii
Abstract
“The Life of Paper: A Poetics” explores the role of letter correspondence in
practices of social reproduction, specifically within histories of genocidal racism,
mass incarceration, and human resilience in California and the West. I trace this
life by fleshing out the labors that comprise letter correspondence in three case
studies: “Detained” focuses on migrants from Southern China during the early
period of U.S. Chinese exclusion (1880s-1920s); “Interned” focuses on people
identified with Japan during the World War II period (1930s-1940s); and
“Imprisoned” focuses on diasporas of Blackness in the post-Civil Rights period
(1960s-present).
Using a range of methods to analyze previously unstudied archives of
letters, this project explores how targeted diasporas—facing conditions of radical
alienation and confinement—engaged in practices of reading, writing, and
circulating letters to sustain communal life. I study a number of these inventive
practices by thematically framing each chapter. First, I historicize “detained”
letters in relation to emerging technological, epistemological, and social
infrastructures. Second, I analyze “interned” letters through dialectics of
censorship and aesthetic production. Third, I clarify how “imprisoned” letters have
transformed practices of collectively re-embodying the human.
Situating letters within the political violence that qualifies them, I define
letter correspondence in these contexts as a social response to coercion, ritually

viii
distinct from more commonly-studied epistolary social practices. I argue that such
conditions radically alter how and what letters mean, and how we might better
understand them. Thus, in this cultural studies project I interrogate the processes
that connect paper objects to historical human identity and being. I also examine
how these forms of connection—internalized in the letter—create alternative
conditions of existence that both ground and animate struggles against
premature death. As such, I methodologically elaborate the life of paper to re-
create an “abolitionist” epistemology of race, space, gender, and labor. Finally
then, I call the life of paper a “poetics”: a process of both literary and social
reproduction that revolves around maintaining the dynamics of creative essence.
This interdisciplinary project contributes to critical thought and
methodology in History, Media/Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, Geography, and
Political Theory by addressing gaps in each field. Typically, historiansʼ uses of
letters as evidence overlook the humanistic aspects of letters as literary works
and media forms. Inversely, literary and media analyses commonly neglect the
historically material contexts in which letters were written. Dominant geographic
research likewise remains under-attentive to disenfranchised epistemologies, as
manifest in and through “the life of paper,” and the ways they radically transform
knowledge about space and place. Lastly, both critical race scholars and political
theorists take for granted categories of analysis—such as race, ethnicity, space,
gender, and labor—which my sustained cultural study of letter correspondence

ix
ruptures and re-defines. By combining the strengths of each discipline, I present
letters in their deeper dimensions: simultaneously as forms of historical evidence,
as literary works of art, and as acts of communication that mediate power to be
and become in real space-time. Hence, my project bridges discourses often
viewed as separate to provide fresh insights about the human experience.

1

Chapter One

The Life of Paper

In 1927, Floyd Alonzo McClure was on his way to becoming one of the
Western worldʼs leading experts on bamboo. For his masterʼs thesis in Botany,
McClure sought to analyze the uses of bamboo for paper production in Southern
China, including documentation of the fibers, additives, places of origins, tools,
costs, and uses of Chinese paper-making. By way of introduction, he tells a story
of how the Chinese invented paper: How Cai Lun, the Chinese god of paper-
makers, had the novel idea of systematically using new fibers and processes of
making paper to substitute for the use of silk (too expensive) and bamboo (too
heavy) as writing materials in the Yuan-Hsing period of the Eastern Han dynasty,
or 105 A.D. (1986 [1928], pp. 7, 28). Historically, the invention of paper also
stands apart from the manufacture of papyrus, innovated in Egypt in the third
millennium B.C. Papyrus consists of strips of papyrus stalk that are layered,
pressed, and dried in the sun, the sheets held together by the natural gum of the
plant. Paper, in contrast, consists of plant and tree fibers that are pulped,
Figure 1.1: “Huangshan Mountain,” artwork by Martin Honto Luk, 2010 (personal archive).

2
processed, and transformed into a new material, held together by molecular
cohesion (Blum, 1934; the British Museum, 1935; McClure, 1986 [1928]).
As the rest of the story goes, war between two chiefs in what is now
Russian Turkestan put Arab mercenaries into contact with Chinese mercenaries.
Chinese prisoners of war who knew how to make paper comprised the labor
force for the first paper mill in Baghdad, c. 793-794 A.D., and soon Damascus
became the chief source of paper for Europe. Knowledge of paper-making also
spread to Egypt (c. 900 A.D.) and then to Morocco, whence the Saracens carried
it to Spain, c. 1150 (where people had used paper since c. 900, but did not then
know how to produce it). The first paper mills eventually opened in England in
1494 and North America in 1690. Yet, the people who were the slowest to make
became the quickest to mechanize. By the mid-1920ʼs, McClure was intent “to
prepare as graphic and complete a record of the prototype” as he could of the
Chinese craft of hand-making paper, witnessing as he was its displacement by
practices of mass production imported from Europe (1986 [1928], pp. 26-29).
During his fieldwork in China, however, McClure encountered
unanticipated problems. In his field notes, he remarks on the difficulty of getting
inside Chinese paper mills, small communes where men lived together during the
production season to devote themselves exclusively to making paper. McClure
describes the requisites of ideal mill location, as places where raw materials
(mostly bamboo and mulberry) were plenty, and which had a clean water source

3
proportionally abundant to the amount of pulp labor could produce: in other
words, the remotest rural areas with access to fresh mountain water streams. He
was permitted to stay in one mill for three days to gather fragmentary insights into
a process that could last as long as six to nine months. By the end of his study,
learning about paper left McClure with more questions than answers. About fifty
years later, when botanist Elaine Koretsky found McClureʼs archives at the
National Arboretum in Washington D.C., his sizeable collection of Chinese paper
varieties came attached with notes, explaining gaps in his research:
The matter of the identity of the pulp materials used in each variety is of
the most difficult…If one asks the man who makes the paper, he may be
deceived by deliberate intention, since the papermaker has nothing to
gain—and may have something to lose in revealing his trade secrets. The
paper dealer, particularly the retailer, usually has at best only a general
idea as to the materials and proportions used in the manufacture of the
various papers…(Note: There is no intention here to cast any unfavorable
reflection upon the integrity of Chinese in general or Chinese papermakers
in particular. Everyone knows that a tradesman in the possession of a
trade secret which is valuable to him has a perfect right to conceal it from
anyone) (1986 [1928], p. 76).

As it happens, the problem of identity does not end with the pulp materials.
While the first record of Cai Lunʼs innovation in paper-making came from
historian Fan Yie, sometime between 397-445 A.D. [McClure, 1986 [1928], p. 28;
cf. Robinson, 1996, pp. 104-106; Tsien, 1985), contemporary archaeologist Pan
Jixing (1988) points out that “plant fiber paper made of hemp datable before
Christ has been excavated five times in various places in China in 1933, 1957,
1973, 1978, and 1979” (p. 177). From his findings, Pan concludes,

4
Paper was invented in the Western Han dynasty, in the second to the first
century B.C. Its inventor, therefore, was not Cai Lun, but craftsmen whose
names are unknown…Papermaking, like other ancient techniques, could
not have been invented accidentally by a single person, but must have
gone through a historical evolution. Our experience of making paper has
taught us that an individual could not perfect processes of papermaking,
which is a collaborative labor…There is no basis for further perpetuating
the theory that Cai Lun invented paper (1988, pp. 178, 180).

This dissertation, “The Life of Paper: A Poetics,” tells the story of an
analogous human drama, in which the collaborative labor of unknown people
innovates the bonding of matter to create something distinct. Like other journeys
to understand the secrets in a work of art, this saga seeks to uncover the
processes through which an amalgam of material coheres into a form of beauty:
irrefutably real yet defying ascription. In doing so, this project also deepens our
insights into the mysterious “historical evolution” of paper, as this study
demystifies both the labor and its agents, misplaced in history, that give paper
social meaning through the material and spiritual cultures of everyday life (Cave,
1998; McClure, 1986 [1928]; Scott, 2007).
In this project, “the life of paper” refers to the role of letter correspondence
in practices of social reproduction, specifically within histories of genocidal
racism, mass incarceration, and human resilience in California and the West. I
trace this life by fleshing out the labors that comprise letter correspondence in
three case studies: “Detained” focuses on migrants from Southern China during
the early period of U.S. Chinese exclusion (1880ʼs-1920ʼs); “Interned” focuses on
people identified with Japan during the World War II period (1930ʼs-1940ʼs); and

5
“Imprisoned” focuses on diasporas of Blackness in the post-Civil Rights period
(1960ʼs-present). In my research, I ask, what is the life of paper? More
specifically:
• What technological, epistemological, and social practices are involved in
the labor of letter correspondence?
• What forms of social life does the labor of letter production, consumption,
and circulation bring into being?
• How do these processes of both aesthetic and social reproduction
constitute a "poetics" of diaspora through which radical imagination and
material reality converge?
Using both literary and historical methods to analyze previously unstudied
archives of letters, this project explores how targeted diasporas—facing
conditions of radical alienation and confinement—engaged in practices of
reading, writing, and circulating letters to form or preserve collective lives. I study
a number of these unique practices by thematically framing each chapter. First, I
historicize “detained” letters in relation to emerging technological,
epistemological, and social infrastructures. Second, I read “interned” letters
through dialectics of censorship and aesthetic production. Third, I clarify how
“imprisoned” letters have transformed practices of collectively re-embodying the
human.

6
Situating letters within the political violence that qualifies them, I define
letter correspondence in these contexts as a social response to coercion, ritually
distinct from epistolary practices common to civil society. I argue that such
conditions radically alter how and what letters mean, and how we must read and
understand them. Thus, this study of media and culture investigates the
processes that connect paper objects to historical human identity and being. It
also examines how these forms of connection—internalized in the letter—create
alternative conditions of existence that make it possible for people to live through
forces inducing their premature death.
Literature Review
From a survey of discourse in epistolary studies in both literature and
history, I found that much work comes out of either Anglo or French letter-writing
traditions. I briefly review here five general themes prominent in the literature,
most grounded in studies based in Europe: genre, authorship and subjectivity,
gender, desire, and socio-political context.
Genre
Across the gamut of contemporary epistolary studies, many scholars
agree that letter-writing crosses boundaries of genre, discipline, time, space,
place, subjectivity, and decidability. In literary studies, many critics are concerned
with the relationship between the epistolary form and the novel in particular, and
about the letter as the originary form of all literature in general (e.g. Bower, 1997;

7
Cook, 1996; Decker, 1998; Gilroy & Verhoeven, 2000; Kauffman, 1992; Simon,
2002). In her study of Epistolary Selves, Rebecca Earle (1999) points out that
epistolary scholars cannot agree on the definition of a letter, since it formally
structures or hybridizes with so many other forms of social life and
communication, e.g. news media, commerce, intimate relationships, politics,
travelogues, and poetry (p. 8; cf. Barton and Hall, 1999; Bazerman, 1999;
Donnelly, 1999). As Jacques Derridaʼs influentially asserts in The postcard
(1987): “Mixture is the letter, the epistle, which is not a genre but all genres,
literature itself” (p. 48; cf. Cook, 1996, p. 23; Decker, 1998, p. 16).
The question of aesthetic origins—as reflected in discussions about
relationships between the letter, the novel, the dominant Anglo literary canon,
and literature at large—poses an important problem. Exploring and historicizing
the relationships between genres helps explain the techniques through which
literature represents historical reality, and thus helps to create those realities as
such (Foucault, 1978; 1972; Lowe, 1996; Said, 1993; Williams, 1977). Hence,
scholars are fascinated with the indeterminate nature of the letter, and its
decisive yet ambivalent relationship to all forms and extensions of literary culture:
The inability either to define what constitutes a letter, or to understand with
certainty its syncretic relationships with other forms, destabilizes the onto-
epistemological assumptions foregrounding European generic convention and
hierarchies of aesthetic value. In addition to forming European literary genres and

8
canons, such epistemological and aesthetic conventions also appear in forms
such as their scientific schema, academic disciplines, and race-thinking. Thus,
generic questions and uncertainty about letters highlight a fundamental crisis in
dominant European or Eurocentric systems of knowledge.
Such crisis plagues historians who are centrally pre-occupied with the
epistolaryʼs status as evidence: its reliability, the problem of ephemerality for data
analysis, and ongoing debates among academic historians about the legitimacy
of popular text (Gerber, 2000, 1997). This poses a different version of the
problem of genre: a methodological problem of how to transform the
ephemerality of a letter, as a category of data, into a robust “knowing” of the past.
David A. Gerber (1997) argues that we see the difficulty of these practices, and
of generating disciplinary consensus concerning them, in the shifting place of the
letter in dominant notions about what “counts” as valid or legitimate sources of
information in the field.
For example, Gerber traces how immigration historians in the early and
mid-twentieth century, influenced by trends in Sociology, embraced letters as the
basis for constructing a “new American history.” In the post-WWII period, such
work went into decline as an ascendant conservative bloc de-legitimized the use
of letters to construct reliable narratives about the nation (1997, p. 6). Gerber
self-identifies as a historian working in the legacy of the “New Social History”
movement that re-sparked the fieldʼs contemporary interest in, and acceptance

9
of, quotidian and popular texts. Such work functions to re-enfranchise
marginalized groups such as immigrants and working-classes whose histories
reflect in popular rather than official documents (1997, p. 6; 2000, p. 4). Again, as
in literary debates, these shifts elaborate a significant problem because they
symptomatize internal battles over what constitutes History itself: as it is figured
through disciplinary norms, and as these norms shape the larger realities and
relationships they are designed to represent or manage.
Authorship and subjectivity
The dialogic nature of the letter throws into radical question the notion of
authentic and stable authorship/voice, leading many scholars to analyze the
contents of letters for what they can tell us about how the complex internal
psychological economies of letter-writers and readers, i.e. “consciousness,” work.
Much of this discourse draws from parts of European psychoanalysis that
theorize about the dialectically-structuring relationships between: 1) dominant
social institutions, language, and desire; 2) language, desire, and the
“unconscious”; and 3) the unconscious and conscious parts of the mind. Some
literary scholars study these relationships, as they reflect in letter content and
correspondence, to generalize about the processes through which the conscious
mind filters social reality (Bray, 2003; Simon, 2002). These scholars seem to
argue that we can observe this through the play of signs (words): how textuality

10
reveals the workings of the human mind, and what the mind thinks of (it)self in
relation to others, i.e. subjectivity.
These theorists argue that the inconsistency of self-representations, as
well as the undecidability of meanings in the content of letters they study, debunk
progressive European Enlightenment and Modernist ideologies that both
construct and assume a static, linear correspondence between rationality,
language, and personhood (the Cartesian subject). That is, the contents and
exchange of letters exemplify par excellence the way that meaning exceeds the
boundaries of what words intend, fundamentally destabilizing the assumption that
a definitive subjectivity manifests in a coherent voice-writing of an atomized
author-person. William Merill Decker (1998) defines such indeterminacy as the
core contribution of “poststructuralist” analysis to epistolary studies:
Indeed, it would be virtually impossible not to approach the epistolary text
as writing that exemplifies the unboundedness, undecidability, and
endless complication of the binary opposition of presence and absence
theorized by [Roland] Barthes and [Jacques] Derrida. In one way or
another, nearly all contemporary literary study reflects the challenges to
old assumptions of textual presence, unity, authorship, and consensually
stable meanings, mounted by Barthes, Derrida, [Michel] Foucault, [Mikhail]
Bakhtin, and a host of followers, and it has long been conventional to
regard texts as animated by the play of unanchorable and unbounded
signifiers, exceeding the borders that authors attempt to impose on them.
Likewise, it has become commonplace to speak of the readerʼs revision of
the text; to view the text as multiauthored, dialogic, pliable (p. 14).

Other literary scholars privilege and study the inverse operation, i.e. how
the condition of indeterminacy allows a person to imagine a self through writing
letters, and thus exercise agency to shape both subjective and objective realities.

11
Instead of turning inward towards individual consciousness, this perspective
focuses on the dialogical qualities of letter correspondence and how they reflect
or outwardly interact with institutional structures. Anne Bower (1997), for
instance, argues that people engaged in correspondence have seized upon tools
with which they “reclaim” themselves, “no matter how alienated or isolated”; she
contends that such agency has the potential to mitigate social conditions that
“frequently set up barriers to relationships” (p. 9). Similarly, Earle (1999) argues
that the “fictions of self,” produced through letter correspondence, serve a wide
array of social, commercial, and political purposes in the distinct environments in
which they are conceived (p. 2).
From a historiographical perspective, Gerber indicates that problems of
subjectivity and authorship arise in historiansʼ questions about “authenticity” of
identity and data. Generally, positivist norms seek to construct, verify, and
validate authenticity, thus assuming, rather than challenging, the idea of
authentic voice as such (Gerber, 1997). In this sense, the dominant use of letters
in the field for works of white male biography (Decker, 1998) relies primarily on
an attachment to notions of Enlightenment rationality and Cartesian subjectivity.
Yet, scholars of European immigrant (e.g. Gerber, 2000), African American (e.g.
Adero, 1993; Dauber; 2007), and working class (e.g. Armstrong, 2000) histories
have also used letters in more diverse ways, as research on popular cultures.

12
Gender
Literary debates abound about the feminization of the genre of epistolary
fiction. Contemporary critics seem to agree on a historical basis that nineteenth-
century epistolary fiction is bound to femininity, insofar as its grounding in the
“familiar letter” form relates to social responsibilities or archetypical qualities
typically assigned to women: domestic, reproductive, intimate, sentimental,
private, ephemeral, and innocent or pure. Some critics embrace notions of
intimacy, authenticity, and transparency of feminized voice; others refute those
assumptions and posit indeterminacy and the epistolary as forms of legitimate
social, public, and structural critique that must be taken out of re-inscribed tropes
of domesticity (MacLean, 2000; Cook, 1996; Decker, 1998; Earle, 1999; Favret,
1993; Hammerle, 1999; Kauffman, 1992; Steedman; 1999).
Several of these critics also assert that the feminization of the genre has at
least a two-fold effect. On the one hand, feminization devalues the epistolaryʼs
ranking in the formation of a hierarchical disciplinary canon: the novel privileged
as a masculine narrative form, the epistolary demoted as a feminine form. On the
other hand, epistolary fiction has observably served as an inroad through which
European and Euro-American women have entered into the professional ranks of
literary arts and sciences, as respectable epistolary novelists or scholars.
Scholars disagree about what this latter historical fact means. Some
embrace the notion of the epistolary as a reflection of womanhood or its voice,

13
and argue that this provides the basis for a (feminist) alternative to sexist
disciplinary norms and forms of knowledge production. Others more critical of this
idea examine the ways that 1) historically men wrote letters as often as women, a
fact obscured in epistolary fiction; 2) men were either the authors or the editors of
epistolary fiction, thus structurally fabricating rather than reflecting “authentic”
constructions of womanhood; and 3) the meaning scholars make out of social
fact (i.e. that at decisive times, women find opportunities to participate in literary
professions through writing epistolary fiction or criticism) drains the genreʼs ability
to function as public commentaries valued on the same basis as other forms.
This happens precisely through the ways that epistolary scholars romanticize (re-
valorize while preserve) domesticity and binary gender norms, ironically
dismissing the challenge issued by feminist epistolary writers to critique them
more deeply.
In dominant historiography, insofar as Enlightenment rationality produces
the normal methodological questions concerning letters as evidence, the
common sense of letters as feminine is not as pronounced—except, perhaps, as
implicit in arguments to exclude letters as a valid form of evidence. Rather,
historians embedded in this epistemological tradition accept and assume a letter-
writer in the likeness of the Cartesian subject, with traits gendered exclusively
masculine (cf. Lowe, 1996). This is true whether the particular writer is male or
female, for the criteria of a letterʼs legitimacy (e.g. questions about its writerʼs

14
coherence, capacity for logic, or ability to relay reliable information about an
event), are determined by a Eurocentric binary-gendered system of thought
removed from the specificities or uniqueness of referents (cf. Butler, 2004;
Harding, 1998). Thus, to the extent that historians consider letters relevant to the
field, letters and their writers must be recognized as masculine.
Desire
In literary studies, feminist scholars analyze how the feminization of the
form eroticize letters in dominant social imagination, tying letters to notions of
idealized female sexuality even as they are linked to practices of solitude (Brant,
2000; Donnelly, 1999; Steedman, 1999). Some argue that the condition of
solitude re-enforces social ideals of virginity or religious fancy, purity, or tragic
hyper-sentimentality: ideals that are eroticized precisely in relation to their binary
opposites, i.e. the threat of feminine sexual debasement, deception, and
deviance. Women engaged in letter-writing make this threat appear more real,
the act of writing suggesting feminine (sexualized) agency (Cook, 1996).
In another discursive thread, Marxian and/or post-structuralist critics
debunk certain psychoanalytic discourses of desire that limit the social factors
associated with its production. Linda S. Kauffman (1992), for instance, critiques
the overemphasis of the “Oedipal myth as universal trope” to explain desire,
which reduces all social processes involved in the production of desire to “the
triangle of nuclear family, repressive socialization, or an aggressive will to power”

15
(p. xviii). In a similar fashion, many challenge the common assumption that
letters connote privatized intimacies, and argue instead that even when letters
express personal erotic desires, “the meaning of desire is shaped by politics,
economics, and commodity culture” (Kaufman, 1992, p. 263; cf. Altman, 1995;
Cook, 1996; Favret, 1993; Gilroy & Verhoeven, 2000; MacArthur, 1990).
In historical discourse, Earle (1999) discusses the use of letters as the
historianʼs desire to talk with the dead (cf. Benjamin, 1968). Gerber (1997) also
reviews work in the field of Anglo immigrant history that charts how letters
communicate immigrant desires regarding both home and host lands. He also
researches the ways that immigrants used letters to re-establish or re-animate
familiar intimacies. Finally, connected to desire, Gerber argues that analyzing
letters can illuminate the role of imagination in constituting an “emigrant culture”
that mitigates distance and helps facilitate other material exchange.
Social, political, and material conditions
Contemporary work in both fields demonstrates an increasing concern
with how letters and letter-writing relate to the broader circumstances and
contexts of meaning from which they appear. Thus in both fields scholars are
working on situating letters in institutional contexts, political struggles, and
changes in economic modes of production and distribution of material goods.
Two historical periods particularly interest scholars in both fields. First, during the
17
th
-18
th
centuries, letters literally helped revolutionize Europe and Enlightenment

16
democracy. Letter-writing among radicals and intellectuals during the French
Revolution fundamentally shaped their earliest understandings and cries for
rights to communication and press (Briggs & Burke, 2005; Cook, 1996; Earle,
1999). In this political legacy and vision, Anglo colonial settlers valorized letters in
their American Revolution against the British. This appears, for instance, in their
radical opposition to British stamp acts and paper taxes. Colonial rebels viewed
such economic policies as politically repressive attacks, encumbering people
who, in this period of colonial expansion, relied more and more on trans-Atlantic
correspondence to help socially reproduce European and Euro-American
communities (Briggs & Burke, 2005; Schultz, 1999).
A second point of major interest, the early 19
th
century, marks the
revolutionary ascent of print capitalism and its interventions in Western
democratic culture (Anderson, 2006 [1983]). As the United States rose as a
hegemonic world power, the U.S. government invested in innovative technologies
to facilitate letter-exchange institutionally. Namely, this refers to national postal
services, as well as its necessary infrastructure such as roads, railroads,
steamships, and telegraph. On the one hand, diverse literate and literary publics
blossomed with these and other related technologies. On the other hand,
dominant blocs used these institutions to develop the politically reactionary rather
than popularly democratic potentials of European epistolary history. That is,
economic and political elites mobilized technologies to censor and control

17
communications, symptomatizing broader social struggles to shape American
democracy at this time (Anderson, 2006 [1983]; Decker, 1998; Earle, 1999;
Favret, 1993; Gilroy & Verhoeven, 2000; Schultz. 1999).
In conclusion, across these five themes, scholars are concerned with the
role of letter correspondence in expanding colonialism and dominant European
and U.S. democratic traditions. Yet, they all erase or defer constitutive histories
of race and racism. For instance, Amanda Gilroy and W.M. Verhoeven (2000)
represent the Eurocentric perspective when they disclaim,
Criticism on epistolary writing does not seem to have come to grips with
those issues of race and postcolonialism that have preoccupied and
continue to preoccupy, broad sections of the academic community;
regrettably, the power dynamics of colonization remains on the margins of
this present book, and though American epistolary writing is well-
represented, there is little discussion of the work of Hispanic or black [sic]
Americans (p. 13).

Citations of Alice Walkerʼs A Color Purple (1982) as “the only epistolary novel to
date in African-American literature” (Kauffman, 1992, p. 185; cf. Bower, 1997;
Gilroy & Verhoeven, 2000) largely misrepresent the historical and generic roots
of Black writing, and fail to pursue how even cursory investigations into the latter
prompt the need to radically re-consider the fundamental assumptions and scope
of hegemonic epistolary studies.
These intentional blind spots condition the context in which I work on my
project—as they conditioned the historical contexts I study—and they shape the
project itself on a variety of levels. These erasures pose methodological

18
problems that are themselves significant, yet again, only symptomatize broader
social struggles to shape democracy that appear simultaneously as material,
epistemological, ethical, and political problems. Thus, to work through the nexus
of these issues, I turn to other traditions obscured by dominant Eurocentric
knowledge production. Before doing so, two general points contextualize the
need for methodological intervention, and also summarize what distinguishes this
project from the range of existing work in epistolary studies.
First, for practical purposes I consider the letters in my project as versions
of what Achille Mbembe (2002) calls “archives of resemblance.” That is, they
manifest unique adaptations of an imposed literary culture, a historicity that
radically alters how and what letters mean, and thus how we must read and
understand them. This follows from a breadth of work (which I will soon discuss)
in Black/Ethnic literary, performance, and cultural studies, which asks: How can
scholars engage materials from the past and present, understanding that these
materials come out of particular social relationships to the dominant means of
communication—wherein the latter were not intended for use by disfranchised
groups, and/or were not used in ways, or for purposes, the latter were authorized
to use them? Furthermore, how do scholars embark on this research, to
encounter the radical questions it poses, rather than merely the answers we hope
to find? From this perspective, I read these letters as “a field of signs that [open]

19
the way to numerous unorthodox practices” (Mbembe, 2002, p. 638), a variety of
social activities that give paper its life.
Second, while this project revolves around the epistolary, the letters
comprising “the life of paper” all exist specifically within conditions of coercive
force and racialized confinement. This context raises at least another two
problems that infuse the life of paper at all times. On the one hand, the material
conditions of incarceration foreground a radically distinct relationship between
language, history, and personhood. As Allen Feldman (1991) poses the issue, in
an analogous point about what oral history means in the context of political terror
in Northern Ireland:
[T]he shrinkage of the space of political enactment corresponds with the
expansion of the acting subject—the increasing correlation of personhood
to historical transformation. This transformative application of the person
to the fabric of history through the texture of the body is witnessed
unobstrusively in oral history. There the body fragmented is reassembled,
and this act, the weaving of a new body through language, as much as
any act of violence, testifies to the emergence of political agency (p. 10).

Akin to Feldmanʼs argument, this project examines how, in the context of
the shrinkage of space, “the weaving of a new body through language” in letters
enacts both political agency and historical transformation. On the other hand, this
study of the life of paper must also tend to the ways that coerced isolation inflects
the relationship between thought and political struggle. Potentially fatal
constraints on the space of political enactment dialectically structure the urgency
to create shared utopian spaces at the level of thought and ideology (Scott, 1990,

20
p. 91); furthermore, such constraints also fundamentally shape thought and
ideology as primary sites of embodied political struggle (Scott, 1990, p. 203;
Rodríguez & Ngo, 2002).
Methodology
Literary and cultural studies methods
I use the life of paper to re-pose and pursue an originary problem from
which Ethnic Studies arose to clarify in the academy: How does focusing rather
than ignoring questions about racial and ethnic formation in the U.S. change the
fundamental assumptions grounding traditional Eurocentric disciplines, and what
opportunities arise from this shift? Specifically, this study integrates insights from
four (overlapping) theoretical schools that gained visibility with Third World
liberation movements in the second half of the twentieth century.
First, I borrow from interventions made in Asian American literary criticism
that elucidate rather than obscure bonds between language, racialization, and
historical condition. Edward Said (1994), Lisa Lowe (1996), and Colleen Lye
(2005) each offer methodologies and analyses to highlight how literary culture
shapes and disciplines national identities, and how those identities are socialized
and racially embodied (Kang, 2002). Focusing on distinct eras and geographies,
they each argue that language and literacy operate within political-economies of
racial capitalism, and play active roles in struggles to determine how societies
understand and distribute rights and resources. David L. Eng (2001) argues for

21
an approach to literary criticism that both challenges our thinking about
subjectivity, agency, and identity with the best tools of post-structuralism, and
understands that such activity is useful insofar as it stays related to building
social justice movements and political possibilities with the best tools of Ethnic
Studies (p. 27).
Second, to address intentional blind spots in Western historiography, I
apply approaches to ephemeral archives and alternative socialities from Queer
Studies, to problems inherent in figuring “ethnic” histories. Queer theorists such
as Judith Halberstam (2005), Jose Muñoz (1996), and Anne Cvetkovich (2003)
have identified diverse forms of “ephemeral” archives and suggested
methodologies for their analysis as evidence (alternately, as ephemeral traces of
evidence inside evidence, cf. Derrida, 1995; Freccero, 2006; Gordon, 1997;
Keeling, 2007). Such interventions offer a response to the problem Postcolonial,
New Social History, and Subaltern Studies scholars have also worked on,
regarding how to “know” or produce histories about communities whose material
traces have either been destroyed by historical forces, or are illegible, to or
disavowed by, dominant knowledge industries. Queer theorists, as well as
literary critics in African, Latin@/Chican@, and Asian American Studies, have
also called attention to the ways that capitalist processes of labor differentiation
have produced conditions of possibility for unanticipated social collectivities
(Halberstam, 2005; Hong, 2006; Ferguson, 2000; Lowe & Lloyd, 1997). Such

22
work poses a challenge that I take up in my project, to question the limits of what
we recognize as both “ethnic” and “history.”
Third, I work from the Black radical traditionʼs emphasis on peopleʼs
everyday life practices that function to “preserve the ontological totality”
(Robinson, 1983). Intellectuals in this epistemological tradition such as C.L.R.
James (2008 [1982]), W.E.B. DuBois (1970 [1935]), and Ida B. Wells (1997
[1892-1900]) propose and model how historical and literary analyses derive
meaning from their active service to social justice movements. A countless
number of contemporary scholars extend this tradition of work, grounded in an
epistemological inheritance that grew in the Americas and offer a vision and
praxis of democracy distinct from the dominant European models that shaped the
Western world (e.g. Gilmore, 2008, 2007; James, 1997; Kelley, 2003, 1990;
Moten, 2003; Woods, 1998).
Such perspectives on diasporic community formation illuminate
multiplicitous experiences of both space and time. For instance, Black feminist
scholars have discussed the ways that daily practices of place-based community-
building materialize the “sacred” within the quotidian (Alexander, 2005; Evans,
1984; Gilmore, 1999; James, 1996; McKittrick, 2006). Likewise, Black
intellectuals and artists operate within (“queer”) temporalities that disrupt not only
Enlightenment teleology but its residuals in academic typologies of “modern” and

23
“postmodern” that punctuate European epistolary studies (Brooks, 2006; Everett,
2002; Nelson, 2002; Weheliye, 2005).
Fourth, I draw from Black and women of color/“borderlands”
epistemologies that challenge and provide alternatives to dominant industries of
ideological production (e.g. Anzaldúa, 1987; Christian, 1988; Hull, Scott, & Smith,
1982; Kay-Traske, 1996; Lorde, 1984; Moraga and Anzaldúa, 1981; Pulido,
2006; Smith, 2005; Spillers, 2003). These traditions offer methodological
approaches, insights about “alternative” archives, and epistemological resources
whose strengths come precisely from their historical marginalization from
dominant sites and processes of making knowledge. Out of the latter conditions,
marginalized groups have produced and shared knowledge through myriad and
dynamic forms, contingent upon situatedness of circumstance (Lowe, 1996;
Nelson, Tu, & Hines, 2000). Thus, women of color intellectuals emphasize the
multiple axes along which knowledge, communicated through various forms of
discourse, is constantly socially negotiated and shifting (Kim, 1999)—a
framework from which white feminists have also expressed solidarity (e.g.
Harding, 1998; Rich, 1979; Sacks, 1989; Wilson, 2004).
For example, Hortense Spillers (1993) offers a critical methodology for
research, or an “intramural protocol of reading,” through which we might recover
pluralities of meaning by exploring “the interior dynamics of Otheredness” (p.
279) in text. To do so, we must situate these dynamics in the political economy

24
and social relations surrounding the text itself, as well as its author(s) (p. 287).
This approach illuminates how the act of speaking within these constraints
creates new ways of theorizing the relationship between subjectivity and
objectivity, figured in the relationship between text and personhood.
Historical methods
Materials in the archive of letters I created for this project include national
and community-based archival research for the “Detained”; literary, film, and
testimonial sources for the “Interned”; and political anthologies, communiqués,
and “neo-slave” narratives for the “Imprisoned.” These materials reflect historical
research I conducted at USC, UCLA, and Los Angeles public libraries, in addition
to the following archives: National Archives and Records Administration, Pacific
Region; Chinese Historical Society of Southern California; Japanese American
National Museum; Southern California Library; and Freedom Archives.
Two main reasons explain why this project about letters also incorporates
other genres, such as poetry, memoir, documentary film, and political
communiqués. First, the conditions of knowledge production I have discussed,
coupled with the radical uncertainty of what defines a letter, shape the ways that
letters and insights about them come in a variety of forms. Second, historically
continuous efforts to de-legitimate or destroy particular struggles or their legacies
also influence the very process of archival research, and thus led me look
beyond traditional archives. During the course of my research, on several

25
occasions I also had the privilege of directly speaking and/or corresponding with
people I have met, who generously shared their personal archives with me.
When applicable, their comments appear in chapters three and four.
Lastly, several precedents in the field of history have guided my attempts
to produce something resembling a “peopleʼs history.” First, interventions to re-
write working-class histories have opened opportunities to diversify forms of
recognizable evidence and speak more openly from marginalized standpoints
(e.g. Linebaugh & Rediker, 2000; Thompson, 1966; Zinn, 1980). Second, I glean
methodological approaches from work that privileges sources from popular
culture to write ethnic histories (e.g. Avila, 2004; Kelley, 1997; Sánchez, 1993;
Sandage, 2005; Zaretsky, 2007). Third, scholars of oral history offer unique
insights about dialogic methodology that enrich my research, as they approach
narrative art as a practice of recognizing beauty, using imagination, and heeding
the “imperatives of the real, the actual” (White, 1987, p. 4; cf. Cronon, 1992; Hise,
2006; Portelli, 1997).
Finally, at the intersection of history and politics, the theory of “infrapolitics”
(Kelley, 1993; Scott, 1990) informs my approaches to, and visions for, this study.
James C. Scott defines “infrapolitics” as “a wide variety of low-profile
performances of resistance that dare not speak in their own name” (p. 19). This
perspective provides a variety of tools to examine the differences between what
things look like and what they mean, which Scott partly articulates through the

26
dialectic between the “official” and “hidden” transcripts of interactions between
dominant and subordinate groups. Robin D.G. Kelley extends this analytic to
highlight and politicize the central role of family life in Black working-class
resistance: an approach I reproduce in this project. In sum, this emphasis on
hypo-visible and quotidian forms of struggle re-orients what we can see of power
and political action. “The Life of Paper” thus privileges relatively anonymous
actors as well as activities to tell an epic story of revolutionary change, from the
perspective that infrapolitics—while neither directly causing nor leading to more
institutionalized forms of social justice—operates in dialectic with collective, open
engagement to change the world (Scott, 1990, p. 203; Kelley, 1993, p. 111).
Project Summary
Dialectical movements of content and form shape each chapterʼs internal
architecture, as well as the progressive articulation of the dissertation as a
coherent whole. That is, the narrative plot structure of each individual chapter is
essentially the same: Each begins with a composite of the social and material
conditions that define the case study, and unfolds as antagonistic social crises
intensify racist movements for mass incarceration. Each reaches its climax as its
characters intensify their struggle against alienation and confinement by
engaging in practices of letter correspondence. Finally, each comes to
denouement through the identification of what those formal practices revealed
and/or reproduced in historical human being.

27
Yet, within this shared structural framework and essential problematic, the
historical uniqueness of each case study makes every chapter substantively
distinct and internally differentiated from one another. The story of the “Detained”
begins in the mid-nineteenth century, at the aggressive advance of global
capitalist movements to “modernize” in the forms of international imperialisms
and discrete nation-states. This chapter explores the development of
technological, epistemological, and social infrastructures that ground letter
correspondence for Chinese migrants and the rest of the world at this time. I
analyze how these developments facilitate Chinese correspondence to produce
and reproduce racial and gender formation at the scales of body, community, and
nation-state.
The next chapter, “Interned,” builds on dynamics from the previous case
while thematically emphasizing dialectics of censorship and aesthetic production.
Against the backdrop of global racism, I interrogate the discursive, physical, and
subjective constraints faced by families of Japanese ancestry corresponding
within and across WWII U.S. internment camps. I identify the categories of
difference, namely immigration status, gender, and age, that the U.S.
government exploited in order to destroy social bonds, as well as the communal
and literary practices that people invented to thwart the dismantling of their
communities. I also consider how camp letters have syncretized with other

28
aesthetic genres, mirroring processes ethnic hybridity between generations in the
poetics of diasporic reproduction.
This analytical groundwork culminates in the last chapter, “Imprisoned,”
where I theorize transformations in twenty-first century racial formation through
an investigation of an emerging “convict race.” Through an examination of letter
correspondence that confronts socialized practices of torture, I elucidate the
interconnected relationships among and between imprisoned people of all races,
their home communities, the state, and civil society. I do so to help ferment and
renew bonds of social kinship and solidarity: transforming racialized knowledge
production by re-articulating the axes of human recognition through which we
both define and reproduce our selves and each other. In this way, I formally
designed the dissertation as a whole to unfold through magnifications of its
internal consistency. I did this in order to illustrate formally this project's
conclusion, regarding a poetics of social reproduction through persistent re-
doublings, revealing the mystery of essential oneness through multiplicity and
differentiation.
This interdisciplinary dissertation thus contributes to critical thought and
methodology in Literature, History, Ethnic/Cultural Studies, and Political Theory.
By combining the strengths of each discipline, I present letters in their deeper
dimensions: simultaneously as forms of historical evidence, as literary works of
art, and as acts of communication that mediate power to become. Ultimately, I

29
seek to demonstrate methodologically how the life of paper re-creates an
“abolitionist” epistemology of race, space, gender, and labor, through “a poetics”
of both literary and social reproduction that revolves around maintaining the
dynamics of creative essence.

30

Chapter Two

Detained:
±
3
√ Structure

(Content-Form)
3

By 1915, the scandal had just become too much. After more than thirty
years of government involvement in illegal “Chinese smuggling plots,” someone
had to clean out the system once and for all—and the U.S. Secretary of Labor
put his best investigator, John B. Densmore, on the job. Initiated at the federal
level in 1915, the Densmore Investigation was going to be different from all the
other investigations since 1882: all the ones that reformed immigration law
enforcement with administrations that “soon became worse than those removed,”
as a Treasury Department official in 1899 once put it (Lee, 2003, p. 200). The
Densmore Investigation was committed to serving both the American and
Chinese people by weeding out government “fraud” at the Angel Island port of
immigrant entry, and thus fix enforcement of the class-based 1882 U.S. Chinese
Exclusion Act

(cf. Hsu, 2000; Lau, 2006; Lee, 2003; Liu, 2005; Luibhéid, 2002;
Ngai, 2004).
1
This internal shakedown attempted to control (not necessarily to
resolve, cf. McKeown, 2003) rampant corruption that supported the growth of
Figure 2.1: Hong Kong Postʼs "Four Great Inventions of Ancient China" Special Stamp, issued on 18
August 2005 (Clockwise: compass, printing, paper, gunpowder).

31
illegal working-class Chinese communities in the U.S. Specifically, the
underground networks facilitating the proliferation of Chinese “paper families” had
to be discovered and destroyed.
These were no simple cases of mistaken identity, nor of cat and mouse.
The production of social relationships at this time involved processes counter-
intuitive to how these processes appeared. That is, things were not what they
looked like—and all parties faced the problem of accounting for the difference.
No easy task, especially when the evidence resided in “difficult personalities”:

Figure 2.2: Anonymous to J.B. Densmore, 30 October 1917. From the National Archives and
Records Administration-Pacific Region (San Francisco) (NARA), RG 85 (Entry 232), Folder
3 of Box 4 (12016-1076-3).

32
Figure 2.3: Newspaper advertisement for Kennah
and Stidger, Attorneys at Law. From NARA. RG
85 (Entry 232), Folder 5 of Box 3.

The contradictions that punctuate this letter raise both questions and clues
about why its writer would be “afraid to show his right name” (and also point to
the anxiety embedded in what his “right name” would be). First, the letter
indicates most basically the problem that Densmore sought to contain: i.e. how
Chinese migrants were mobilizing paper, information, and transportation
technologies to produce legal status under Chinese Exclusion laws. Namely,
Chinese migrant communities articulated “paper families” through the paper-
generated invention of new identities and kinship ties to facilitate legal migration.
Such labor involved activities such as stealing and doctoring official immigration
documents, as well as the exchange of “coaching letters” that instructed migrants
on how to pass rigorous physical and oral examinations at California ports of
entry. Successful legal entry,
based on fabricating family ties of
the Chinese merchant class,
depended upon the production of
qualitatively distinct social and
economic networks during this
period.
This anonymous letter to
Densmore, however, illustrates how these social and economic networks
revolving around paper were anything but clear-cut. For example, reference to

33
the leadership of immigration attorneys O.P. Stidger and Henry C. Kennah allude
to the multiplicity of actors involved in the production of the Chinese diaspora in
California;
2
moreover, the reference suggests that bonds of cooperation, consent,
exchange, and reform—not just bonds of coercion and antagonism—animated
relationships between Chinese communities and American law officials
throughout the Exclusion period (Lau, 2006; Ngai, 2004). Other details contained
in the letter also illustrate the breakdown of binary assumptions about both racial
and state formation. For instance, the “crooks and grafters” under investigation
reference not Chinese detainees but the government officials in charge of them.
Likewise, the writerʼs support of the Densmore Investigation exemplifies how
immigration officials actively encouraged and recruited Chinese migrant
participation in efforts to enforce Chinese Exclusion. Yet, the specificity of the
authorʼs purpose of writing, as when his closing objective clearly singles out his
targets (“Why these two mens not to be punish?”), suggests pre-existing ulterior
motives and histories: indicating that the informantʼs investments in the
Investigation have more to do with how Densmoreʼs project coalesces with,
rather than defines, a prior web of social relations already in motion.
Lastly, this letter points to the expansive implications of “paper families,”
coming into being deep inside the heat of global imperialist warfare and capitalist
movements to “modernize” the world market in the mid-nineteenth century.
Within this historical context, the emergence of these structures of “paper”

34
kinship shaped both the content and form of the trans-Pacific Chinese diaspora in
powerful and lasting ways. We glimpse evidence here, for instance, that paper
families materialized through dense structures of gendered labor differentiation,
economic and geographic organization, and knowledge production. Specifically,
“afraid to show his right name” points towards the re-configuration of sexual
divisions of labor that reproduced paper families, articulated through commodity
relations and exchange; as well as the rise of qualitatively new educational
institutions and networks, and finally, multiple geographic paradigms that ordered
the realm of diasporic social life (in three short paragraphs that link carceral
space to discursive, administrative, maritime, and urban development).
This chapter explores such intrigues in deeper detail, as I interrogate the
structural foundations both necessary for, and created by, the social reproduction
of paper families. Through this case study, I argue that letter correspondence in
and among the diaspora was a highly coordinated (though not predictable)
activity that necessitated an infrastructure underlying the production of paper
families, so that disparate people stretched across space could do the work more
effectively, and, in a sense, efficiently. In particular, I focus on struggles to
develop or transform three inter-related kinds of infrastructure, from c. 1854
(when Allied Forces officially declared the sovereign International Settlement of
Shanghai) to c. 1924 (when the United States passed the Johnson-Reed
Immigration Act securing the global dominance of U.S. racism): global

35
infrastructures of modern technology, epistemology, and human kinship.
Furthermore, I examine each level by looking at structural transformations
occurring within three distinct, yet densely articulated, or stretched, places:
Guangdong, China, where migrants originally started; California, U.S., where
they either visit or end; and the place made through and as the life of paper, a
unique region comprised of a mix of places—renovating the “familiar” (or “inside”)
and the “foreign” (“outside”) into new combinations or mixes of relationships,
aspiration, knowledge, and being (Gilmore, 2008).
In this chapter then, I read letters of the Detained to illuminate these
structural transformations across space. I examine technological changes across
these three geographies (Guangdong, California, and the life of paper), with an
emphasis on two aspects: the innovation of tools, as well as what Michel
Foucault (1986, 1981) calls “technologies of the self”—which I appropriate to
describe how communities of people interacted with these tools to define the
substance of their own lives (cf. Marx, 1990 [1867]).
3
Then, I discuss
epistemological changes across these three geographies, exploring how the act
of ordering and representing knowledge on paper literally transformed what, and
how, people thought of themselves and the world. Lastly, I investigate social
transformations that occurred in each of these geographies, as communities re-
articulated both individual subjectivities and collective socialities.

36
1
√ 1: Civilization and Printed Papers
This journey begins in Guangdong, a southern province in China, in the
1870ʼs, during a period of transformation in the modes of production of paper and
print. Struggles over technological change at this time reflected the terms of
imperialist and civil war happening in China—to control land and resources and
to define national identities, in an era of intensified global colonial and anti-
colonial ambitions in East Asia (Baark, 1997; Dong, Lu, & Wang, 1991; Reed,
2004; Rhoads, 1975).
To contextualize these movements, first recall that in folk traditions and
practices indigenous to villages in Guangdong at this time, paper already
possessed long-standing social meaning and sacred value. For instance, Janet
Lee Scott argues that, distinct from Holy Scripture such as the Bible or the
Quʼran, in Chinese folk tradition paper itself acted as “the material aspect, the
physical representation of worship and belief” (2007, p.12). That is, Scott
investigates practices related to paper and its making, offering, and burning as a
means to communicate and maintain relationships with gods, ghosts, ancestors,
and the natural world. In these social traditions, respect for paper itself,
hierarchized by perceived quality and inclusive of specific categories for paper
bearing characters or print, mediates and coheres particularized worldviews of an
ontological totality (2007, pp. 4-12). As Roderick Cave (1998) asserts,
The value of paper bearing written or printed characters is recognized in
the pious Confucian motto, ʻRespect scrap paper bearing charactersʼ

37
(jingxi zizhi), the Buddhist tradition that special rewards will be earned by
those who respect and preserve paper bearing sacred messages, and the
Daoistsʼ plentiful use of paper charms (Cave, 1998, p. 1; cf. Scott, 2007, p.
21 [citing Dard Hunterʼs (1937) translation of jingxi zizhi as “Respect all
written paper and treat it with care”]).

These values assigned to paper by Guangdong communities
corresponded with the venerated art of papermaking: the latter involving intricate
systems of organizing collective labor, living cooperatively during the
papermaking season, and revolving the craft around natureʼs cycles for optimal
climactic conditions and access to water and fibers (McClure, 1986 [1928]; Pan,
1988). Yet, by the 1870ʼs, the import of the mechanical printing press to the
colonized territories of Shanghai began to transform practices surrounding both
paper and print. Prior to the 1870ʼs, Imperialist Chinese leaders of the dying Qing
Dynasty (also referred to as the Manchus) resisted the import of Western printing
technology for cultural, financial, and aesthetic reasons.
4
Market-oriented
industrialization did not begin in Shanghai until 1876-1877, after Chinese
entrepreneurs took to Western-style lithography first introduced by a Catholic
orphanage for printing religious imagery (Reed, 2004, p. 264). This
mechanization of print media, alongside the prototype for the organization of
production that commercial industrialization introduced,
5
also hastened the mass
production of paper, thus displacing the traditional methods of papermaking
(McClure, 1986 [1928], p. 26).

38
These technological shifts occurred amidst extreme political-economic
instability, as changes in the mode of production of print and paper also reflected
the mass dislocation of people from common land. This dislocation occurred as a
result of wars between and among Chinese, Japanese, American, and European
imperialists, in addition to competing Chinese nationalist parties and an array of
warlord factions during this time (Dong, Lu, & Wang, 1991; Elleman, 2001; Hou,
1963; Vohra, 1987; Worthing, 2007). Indeed, the modern Chinese print industry
developed in the late-nineteenth century through processes of land enclosure,
privatization of the means of production, and competitive capitalist domination. In
these regards, perhaps geographic detail best and most succinctly illustrates the
tense, unequal interdependence of U.S., European, and late-Qing Chinese
imperialisms at this time, in this industry, and through this medium: Shanghaiʼs
Wenhuajie district (“culture and education streets”), housing Chinaʼs major trade
and journalistic publishers and associated retailers, was located just behind the
“financial arsenals” of the Bund, in the heart of International Settlement of
Shanghai (Reed, 2004, p. 17).
6
The International Settlement, officially dated
1854-1943, formed a unique sovereign territory, negotiated mainly among British,
French, and American forces. They intentionally designed it to prevent the
colonization of Shanghai by a single foreign country, and also created their own
multi-national settler government, the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC)
(Dougan, 1981; Haan, 1982; Hou, 1963; Rhoads, 1975).
7

39
Moreover, perhaps the bankrolls best and most succinctly illustrate the
material conditions of dependency of Qing rule on Western imperialists:
“Between 1862 and 1905, seven foreign firms invested 3.9 million yuan in
Shanghaiʼs nascent machinery industry [inclusive of but not exclusively print
machinery]; in the same period, ninety-one Chinese firms invested no more than
87,000 yuan” (Reed, 2004, p. 137). The existing figures on printing machinery in
Shanghai before 1930 average seventy-six percent imported (ibid).
By the 1920ʼs, alongside these tendencies of enclosure and economic
dependency, mythic narratives about the Chinese “invention” of both paper and
print, constructed by white scholars with interests in the “Orient,” also emerged.
This cultural work helped to facilitate and rationalize U.S. and European colonial
projects in East Asia. For instance, Thomas Francis Carter (1925), an Ivy League
professor who served as a school superintendent in China from 1910-1925,
helped popularize the discourse of “the four great inventions”:
Four great inventions that spread through Europe at the beginning of the
Renaissance had a large share in creating the modern world. Paper and
printing paved the way for the religious reformation and made possible
popular education. Gunpowder leveled the feudal system and created
citizen armies. The compass discovered America and made the world
instead of Europe the theater for history. In these inventions and others as
well, China claims to have had a conspicuous part…

The restlessness of the tribes of Central Asia during the early centuries of
our era brought several hundred years of anarchy in China, corresponding
to the Dark Ages in Europe; but as these barbarian migrations did not
cause quite such a complete rooting up of classic civilization in Eastern
Asia as they did in the West, China quickly recovered and was earlier
ready for those inventions which came into Christendom with the

40
beginning of the Renaissance. Marco Poloʼs record shows us a China
whose civilization already in the thirteenth century had come to full bloom
and had advanced very much further than that of contemporary Europe
(1925, p. ix).

This origin story about paper and print (articulated with technologies of
navigation and warfare) exemplifies European and U.S. Orientalist discourse of
East Asia developing at this time (cf. Said, 1978). This story and discourse first
dispossesses “classic civilization in Eastern Asia” of history in order to fetishize it,
and then assimilates a Chinese past with Western imperialism, vis-à-vis a
narrative of shared technology. The discourse mediated, as it sanitized, the
brutality characterizing contact between East and West in the Asian Pacific: as it
was within the context of violent coercion, warfare, and occupation that Carter
concluded his study of The Invention of Printing in China and Its Spread
Westward, “Tsʼai Lun
8
[Chinese diety/mythic inventor of paper] and Gutenberg,
spiritual father and spiritual son” (1925, p. 238). Such positivity operated in
dialectic with its negative expression, as the discourse simultaneously justified
the same brutality exercised against what Carter called the inassimilable
“barbarian migrations” plaguing Europeans since the Dark Ages (cf. Prashad,
2000; Robinson, 1983). Ironically then, we shall soon see that the spiritual
brethren that whites wanted to make in China are one and the very same as the
barbarian migrations that whites wanted to destroy in California!

41
2
√ 1: Drawing the Lines
Indeed, concurrent developments in technological infrastructures, to
integrate California into the U.S. nation-state following the 1848 Treaty of
Guadalupe-Hidalgo (cf. Acuña, 1988; Almaguer, 1994; Menchaca, 2001),
illustrate the dialectic occurring between the techniques that the U.S. used for
wars waged domestically (“inside”), and those they used for wars waged abroad
(“outside”) in the second half of the nineteenth century. That is, the white
supremacist Republican Free Soil Movement seized control of the U.S.
government in 1854 (Woods, 1998, p. 60), the same year that the U.S. also co-
pioneered the International Settlement of Shanghai. To settle territories on both
sides of the Pacific then, U.S. colonial forces, seeking to reproduce capitalism,
took control of developing transportation, communication, and governmental
systems to construct, literally, their imperialist designs across spaces (cf.
Gilmore, 2008; Headrick, 1981).
Specifically, this case study of the Detained unfolded during the capitalist
development of the transcontinental railroad, telegraph, and postal systems: to
constitute and re-constitute the Union of the United States of America, following
both the occupation of the American West and the U.S. Civil War (c. 1861-1865)
(Brown, 1989; Carey, 1989; John, 1995; Stillson, 2006). While the historical
details of these activities lie beyond the scope of this chapter, it suffices to say
that the capitalist political economy needed connective tissue both to build and

42
bond the different movements of capital accumulation in the U.S. North, South,
and emergent West (Baark, 1997, p. 49). From this need appeared new grid lines
and the crowning achievement—the first transcontinental railroad, established in
1869 by joining the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroad lines, the latter half
built by Chinese labor (Takaki, 1989, pp. 86-87).
This contradictory need for Chinese labor to reproduce racial capitalism,
alongside the movement for Chinese Exclusion to reproduce racial citizenship
(Chiu, 1967; Jung, 2006; Lowe, 1996; Lye, 2005; Ngai, 2004), established the
conditions of possibility for the formation of “paper families.” The Chinese
Exclusion Act, in place from 1882-1943, barred all working-class people from
China from legal U.S. immigration. It also established exceptions and specific
regulations for the legal entry of Chinese merchant and educated classes, and
allowed those legal migrants to petition for the entry of certain members of their
families. Thus, the phenomenon of “paper sons” or “paper families” began:
referring to the elaborate systems that Chinese diasporic communities designed,
to facilitate legal migration by inventing what they called kinship “slots” in the
families of legal categories of migrants. Essentially, making “paper families”
entailed selling or fabricating identification and bureaucratic paperwork to pass
an illegal migrant off as the kin, usually a son, of a legal migrant, and then to
secure his legal entry (Hsu, 2000; Lai, Lim, & Yung, 1980; Lau, 2006; Lee, 2003;
Ngai, 2004).
9

43
Seeking to contain the problem, Immigration officials persistently
intensified the rigors with which they tried to verify peopleʼs identities, such as the
use of new fingerprinting and photographic technologies, as well as extensive
medical exams and subjective interrogations (Luibhéid, 2002; McKeown, 2003;
Molina, 2006; Pegler-Gordon, 2006; Shah, 2001). Increased verification led to
long-term immigrant detention, signaled by the opening of Angel Island in 1910.
Chinese migrants stayed at Angel Island while awaiting the long process of entry
or denial, precisely because of its isolated Island location—escape-proofed like
Alcatraz prison—that made outside communication as difficult as possible (Lai,
Lim, & Yung, 1980. p. 13).
10

By the turn of the century then, the contradictions shaping the relationship
of Chinese people to both U.S. railroad and governmental infrastructures also
punctuated their relationship with U.S. postal technologies. That is, in addition to
transporting the letters of the diaspora, the primary role of U.S. postal cargo ships
was also to carry Chinese migrants themselves to the U.S. (cf. Barde, 2004).
Travel arrangements were made by what were called “steering companies” or
jinshanzhuang (Gold Mountain firms), operated on both formal and informal
bases by Chinese merchants (Chu & Chu, 1967; Hsu, 2000; Lai, 2004). The use
of American and British cargo ships reflected the dominance of Western capital
over fledging Chinese capitalists, who did not possess enough wealth to finance
their own national steamship companies (Rhoads, 1975, p. 149; cf. Baark,

44
1997).
11
Additionally, for the majority who disembarked at the San Francisco port
of U.S. entry before 1910, the converted two-story shed at the Pacific Mail
Steamship Company wharf served as their detention cells until the opening of
Angel Island (Barde, 2004; Lai, Lim, & Yung, 1980; Lee, 2003).
Lastly, the infrastructural importance of epistolary form itself, as a
technology during the Chinese Exclusion era, contextualizes the role of both
personal and “coaching” letters, to create paper families in California. Recall that
letters, as formalized by the European Enlightenment, acted as the standard
medium of both government and business administration throughout the
modernizing world (Barton & Hall, 1999; Cook, 1996; Earle, 1999). Additionally,
beginning in eighteenth century England, letters also played a central role in
cultivating white civic culture, as institutionalized literacy training socialized
citizens across space to identify themselves through dominant ideologies of
modern subjectivity and proper citizenship (Anderson, 2006 [1983]; Lowe, 1996;
Said, 1993). English letter-writing instruction, popularly instituted among those
considered eligible citizens in England, its colonies, and later in the U.S., served
as a primary means through which students learned the values of social order,
Christian morality, and character (Kell, 1999; Schultz, 1999; cf. Hoggart, 2009
[1957]). Alongside ideological content, learning the formal aesthetics of a proper
letter also structured studentsʼ concepts of rationalism, social refinement, and
upward mobility, as letters mediated—and generic convention represented—

45
bourgeois and governmental order during this time (Decker, 1998; Dierks, 1999;
Gilroy & Verhoeven, 2000).
In this context, precisely because of the contradictions facing Chinese
migrants—in which they struggled for formal U.S. citizenship through the terms of
Chinese Exclusion from political and civic life—their full engagement with the
epistolary thus mediated unique kinds of administration and culture. Navigating
through shifting terms of Immigration truth and “fraud,” migrantsʼ epistolary
productivity, inside the excesses of exclusion (cf. Ferguson, 2004; Moten, 2003),
thus responded to yet differed from dominant forms, and also facilitated
conditions of possibility for other forms of life.
3
√ 1: Post(al) Wars
Indeed, a closer look at the postal infrastructures that developed in the
diaspora, stretched across spaces, helps reveal the distinct technological
aspects of this life of paper. To explore the latter, I follow Chi-Ming Houʼs (1963)
argument that
It would be interesting and useful to study, perhaps through the channels
of transportation and communication, the steps in which modern economic
activity impinged upon the life of various zones of the country [China] from
the middle of the nineteenth century. The indigenous response to modern
development might be better understood by examining the changes, if
any, in attitudes and institutions in areas where foreign and Chinese
merchants tried to secure their desired raw materials, such as cotton (p.
598).

Particular to this case study, in which foreign and Chinese merchants dealt in the
business of human immigration, associated “attitudes” and “desired raw

46
materials” take on particularly significant meanings. I argue that the postal
institutions, developed by Chinese merchants across the Pacific, marked a
distinct response to the burdens of modern technology: as Chinese diasporic
communities were differently marginalized from dominant movements and
institutions in both China and the U.S., and thus—inside and out of the mix—
struggled with existing resources to articulate their own places to exist (Gilmore,
2008).
To preface this discussion, exploring why communities who migrated to
the Americas during this period came specifically from Guangdong, illuminates
some of the unpredicted uses and consequences of globalized technological
infrastructures. In addition to the role of personal letters and word of mouth in
Guangdong to create informal yet organized networks of information (Takaki,
1989, p. 34; cf. Zo, 1971), other key factors also influenced the migration pattern.
Namely, after the U.S. seized control of the American West in 1848 (the same
year as the discovery of gold in California, followed by its statehood in 1850),
controversy and news regarding “free soil” spread relatively quickly throughout
the world (Almaguer, 1994). By 1865, representatives of western American
railroad companies and western state immigration commissions primarily
comprised what Oscar O. Winther (1956) called the “agents of the West.”
Specific to the Anglo diaspora, these agents traveled from the U.S. to
England to recruit Anglos to occupy new U.S. territories, also devoting generous

47
funds to develop literature promoting the American West (Winther, 1956, pp. 508-
513). They produced this literature in a variety of genres, including
“correspondence, special crop exhibits, newspaper advertisements, small
circulars, large posters, two-color handbills, photographs, maps, brochures, and
various combinations of the same” (Winther, 1956, pp. 507-508). The circulation
of these materials among the colonial Anglo diaspora in Hong Kong and
Southern China port cities, on the one hand; and the labor recruitment circulars
distributed by the same “agents of the West” to Chinese working-classes, on the
other (Takaki, 1989; Lau, 2006, pp. 61-63), put Guangdong in the center of
dynamic flows of people and information, mostly facilitated by a globalized postal
system.
12
Lastly, Guangdongʼs significance as a colonial hub of specifically
maritime commercial activity helps explain its convenience as the marketplace for
Anglo-American labor brokers, evolved from the mid-nineteenth century British
“coolie trade” (Lau, 2006, pp. 61-62; Takaki, 1989, pp. 22-24).
Within this milieu, diasporic postal networks, centered in Hong Kong,
proliferated by uniquely mobilizing the technological resources from multiple
places, making the surrounding context crucial to understanding how these
businesses grew. In fact, alongside the struggles already covered in previous
sections, the postal system in China was another arena through which imperialist
and anti-imperialist struggles were unfolding. A brief history of the Chinese postal
system in China begins with the establishment of government courier services

48
dated to the Chow Dynasty, or c. 1122-255 B.C. (Dougan, 1981). Originally
called Yu (or youyi), this imperial postal system was re-organized during the Han
Dynasty, or 206 B.C.-23 A.D., and renamed I Chan. I Chan integrated money
courier services during the Tʼang Dynasty, or A.D. 618-905, and served as the
government postal service in China until c. 1914, delivering primarily government
documents, letters, and military information. During a period of the Ming Dynasty,
sometime between 1402-1424, commercial need also led to the emergence of
private or unofficial postal institutions, called min-chu. For the next five hundred
years, the min-chu served merchants, businessmen, and segments of the
general population requiring postal services (Cheng, 1970; Dougan, 1981; Fan,
1983).
Thus, when British official Robert Hart—working for the Qing government
as Inspector General of Imperial Maritime Customs
13
—prioritized the
modernization of the Chinese national post in 1861, he faced quite a task. That
is, this project would entail transformations at massive physical and
epistemological scales: as it necessitated dismantling the pre-existing system
and replacing it with a new one that would comprehensively re-organize and fix
both space (through the creation of addresses) and time (through reliable,
scheduled delivery)
14
(Carey, 1989; Menke, 2009). Yet, frustrated by inefficiency
of the semi-autonomous British Hong Kong Post Office (opened in 1841), as well
as the “guest posts” opened by Japan, the U.S., France, Germany, Italy, and

49
Russia, Hart struggled to create the Chinese Maritime Customs Post, opened on
20 March 1896 (Cheng, 1970). Evolving into the Chinese National Post based in
Shanghai, the latter did not achieve full command until 1926, making the post
office the last institution to become modernized (Cheng, 1970; Dougan, 1981).
According to C.W. Dougan (1981), three dominant sources of opposition
to the Imperial Customs Post were high officials opposed to the suppression of
the I Chan; commercial and letter-writing Chinese nationalists loyal to the min-
chu; and foreign post offices, which paid for overseas transport of mails and did
not trust Chinese governmental postal services for local turnover (p. 6). Yet,
Fairbank (in Cheng, 1970) also notes that starting in the late nineteenth century,
at the height of postal modernization efforts, there was a seemingly counter-
intuitive proliferation of the traditional min-chu. While he and Dougan both argue
that such proliferation constitutes an oppositional movement against the foreign
element infiltrating Chinese government, I route this back also to the emergent
relationship between Chinese merchants and Chinese working-class families in
the diaspora: the former finding lucrative business opportunities in facilitating the
migration and structuring the communication of the latter.
15
In this sense, migrant
mail businesses, evolving out of the min-chu and serving the Chinese diaspora
during the Exclusion period, served as a response and alternative to dominant
postal wars—as people of the diaspora belonged to both and neither, and were
literally caught between, struggles in the dominant landscapes.

50
Figure 2.4: Envelope processed through min-chu. From
NARA, RG 85 (Entry 232), Folder 4 of Box 1.
Discernable details about this diasporic postal system suggest an
organizational and economic structure, drawing yet distinct from forms emerging
in either the U.S. or China (cf. Baark, 1997; Reed, 2004, pp. 10, 22, 265). The
envelope inserted here (Figure 2.4), for example, with merchantʼs stamp in the
upper-left hand side, illustrates the min-chuʼs unique capacity at this time to
mitigate the radical difference between Chinese and U.S. postal/address systems
in order to facilitate delivery.

Furthermore, the following “Letter
#18” (Figure 2.5) alludes to at least
three key points about postal
operations:

Figure 2.5: “Letter #18,” Lau Sai Jan to Lau Pock
Toon, c. 6 September 1917 (Original letter).

51

First, methods of payment, for both migration services in general and
postal services specifically, were flexible and varied. Consistent with this
merchantʼs attention to the specific financial situation of his customer, Ying-Wan
Figure 2.5 (Continued): Lau Sai Jan to Lau Pock Toon, c. 6 September 1917. Translation by
Immigration Interpreter H.K. Tang, from NARA. RG 85 (Entry 232), Folder 7 of Box 1.

52
Cheng (1970) found several methods of payment for min-chu services, including
split payments by multiple parties, payments upon delivery, advanced payments
with fee waivers, account passbooks, and fixed sum per annum; additionally,
Cheng notes that “It was not unusual that the relationship between the [min-chu]
and their clients rested more or less on a personal basis…[A]gencies tried their
best to meet the requirements of their clients and, in face of keen competition,
offered all kinds of inducements to retain their patronage” (pp. 45-46).
Second, the multiple channels of information—both personal and
business—indicated in “Letter #18” also allude to the social “mix” that the min-
chu helped network. In fact, the min-chu coordinated a variety of institutions and
parties across land and sea. One pattern of organization that Cheng found, for
instance, started with a clan leader or “headman” who collected and bundled all
the letters of a migrant group, and sent them through the post office of the “host”
country to a letter merchant or min-chu in the Southern China region, usually
eventually transferred either to Amoy (Fujian province) or Swatow (Guangdong
province). Individuals or min-chu agents then hand-delivered the letters, many
including money remittances, to recipients in the surrounding villages (Cheng,
1970, pp. 47-48). Lastly then, despite general reliability of the min-chu to secure
delivery (Cheng, 1970, p. 46), such routines could create consequential temporal
lags in letter sending and receiving. For example, details in “Letter #18” point out
the challenges of planning around unpredictable letter-delivery times, as the latter

53
also needed to be coordinated with steamship schedules in order to secure
migration.
1
√ 2: Epistemology and Chinese “Self-Government”
Ancient Chinese had an advanced understanding of the sciences of physics,
engineering, chemistry and astronomy. Their numerous discoveries and
inventions have shaped the development of science and impacted on human
civilisations around the world. In this new series of stamps, "Four Great
Inventions of Ancient China", Hongkong Post showcases four revolutionary
Chinese technologies - the compass, printing, gunpowder and
papermaking…These ancient inventions have profoundly changed the world
since they emerged many centuries ago. The compass ushered in a brave new
world of exploration and trade; the invention of gunpowder changed warfare
tactics through the development of weaponry; and printing and papermaking
facilitated the spreading of knowledge to lay the cornerstone for universal
education.
(Hong Kong Post, 2005)

Structural transformations in the realm of technology occurred alongside
dramatic epistemological shifts, i.e. changes in what global communities thought
about themselves and the world, as well as how they organized and manifested
their thinking. I will begin this discussion by briefly highlighting the political
conditions that grounded changes in knowledge production in China. Throughout
the country, struggles for political dominance characterizing and following the
Revolution of 1911 forced the Imperialist Chinese bloc to re-structure (Dong, Lu,
& Wang, 1991; Reed, 1994). In order to win state power and legitimacy under the
new republican government, its intelligentsia began to re-draft a collective self in
nationalist terms, re-creating a popular supremacist identity using technological
innovations.
16
The latter refers both to the ideological content of the discourse, as

54
well as to the physical means of production the bloc controlled, relative to other
Chinese nationalist blocs:
Gutenberg was absent from Chinaʼs first modern dictionary, Xin zidian
(New Dictionary), issued by the Commercial Press in 1912…When
Gutenbergʼs name finally did appear in Chinese discussions of printing
history, it was initially in the context of defensively asserting claims about
Chinaʼs contribution to world printing history. Such discussions reflect the
immediate impact that Thomas Francis Carterʼs now-classic study in
comparative history, The Invention of Printing in China and Its Spread
Westward (1925), had in China, even in the original English-language
edition. Convinced, even inspired, by Carterʼs argument that the source of
one of the distinguishing technologies of Europeʼs modern period lay in
China, the Chinese now began to lay emphasis on their countryʼs central
place in the world technological history in general and, more specifically, in
printing history (Reed, 2004, pp. 12-13).

Thus, with the formal Chinese appropriation of Carterʼs work, “the four
great inventions of ancient China” (Zhong guo si da fa ming) became such “truth”
that it eventually formed part of compulsory Chinese elementary school
curriculum (Reed, 2004, p. 300).
17
So completes the genealogy of quasi-
antagonistic yet deeply co-operative multicultural histories of science and
technology, wrapping around paper and print and ultimately interweaving to
bolster both distinctly Western and distinctly Eastern imperialisms: radical shifts
in dominant scientific discourse in the making during the period framing this
chapter.
Other historical blocs, namely the Nationalist Party bloc
18
and the
emergent Communist bloc, also struggled through print culture to organize
political identities. First, between 1900 and the late 1920ʼs, the Nationalist Party

55
under Sun Yat Sen, as well as other student movements (including but not
necessarily Nationalist Party-aligned), actively sought to unify the peoples of
China by adapting forms of modern nationalism and nation-statism that they had
become exposed to through university learning and student exchange (Dong, Lu,
& Wang, 1991; Reed, 2004). The print industry played a central role in these
efforts to produce a competing Chinese nationalism, and to transform it into a
Chinese nationality.
19
Likewise, an emergent Communist bloc also began to
organize at the level of the “print proletarians,” launching revolutionary print
worker strikes starting in the 1910ʼs (Reed, 2004, pp. 222-223).
20

Migrant communities from the southern province of Guangdong found
themselves at the intersections, margins, and in the heart of this varied
Imperialist, Nationalist Party, and Communist organizing. On the one hand,
primary factors leading to their migration in this period and from this region
include rural poverty, hyper-vulnerability to factional civil strife, European and
Japanese colonial violence, and the various daily burdens of social life and
survival under these conditions (Liu, 2005; Rhoads, 1975; Takaki, 1989). Yet,
these communities also possessed unique opportunities and means to realize
them. Removed from the concentration of political activities happening farther
north, in the biggest cities, dominant industries, and major universities; they were
also in the home base of both colonial and Nationalist Party blocs, situated not
only amidst four coveted colonial port cities and adjacent to Hong Kong and

56
Macao, but as the main hub of Sun Yatsenʼs Nationalist Party activities before
enemiesforced their dispersal. Guangdongʼs city of Canton was also the site of
Chinaʼs first labor union, the Society for the Study of Machines, organized by
engineering mechanics in 1909 (Rhoads, 1975, p. 127).
Thus, the particular articulation of political power and identity in this region
wove together aspects of disparate elements, in order to inform how local
organizations understood themselves, as well as their methods and goals for
self-government. Edward J.M. Rhoads (1975) argues that the Canton Merchantsʼ
Self-Government Society represented the most active local movement at the turn
of the century, competing with the Qing-sanctioned Association for the Study of
Self-Government (Rhoads, 1975, pp. 148, 154). Responding to demands for
more regional and local political autonomy, Qing reforms at this time included the
creation of provincial assemblies that were ultimately accountable to the Manchu
government, yet had some independent ability to decide how to adapt general
mandates to local conditions. Under these terms, the traditional scholar-
bureaucrat gentry (local representatives of the Chinese Imperialist bloc) and the
emergent merchant class (new national capitalist petty-bourgeoisie) each
organized to win positions on the Provincial Assembly in Guangdong, formalized
in 1909. Self-Government Society activists were removed from Cantonʼs official
Chamber of Commerce, instead aligning with merchants organized as the
independent Canton Seventy-two Guilds. The Self-Government Society was thus

57
uniquely positioned to incorporate aspects of foreign capitalism into their national
capitalist practices, aspects of Nationalist Party nationalism into their ideological
practices, and aspects of Qing order into their political practices, in their
movement to win dominance in the area.
Unlike the gentry or the merchants, the peasant majority did not benefit
from, nor identify with, the self-government program (Rhoads, 1975, p. 175).
Hence, the peasantry engaged in their own activities during this time, primarily
targeting the gentry in their protests against higher land rents, census-taking, and
taxes imposed on farming, gambling, and wine. Uprisings were sporadic and
isolated while also selective and widespread; protesters burned mostly schools,
gentry meeting halls, and churches. Less commonly, they also targeted old
clothes shops, pawn shops, salt depots, rice shops, and private homes of well-
known merchants and gentry members (Rhoads, 1975, pp. 175-179). Yet, if
antagonism ultimately characterized the basic relationship between the rural
working-class and the traditional scholar-bureaucrat gentry, something different
at this time and place characterized the relationship between the working and
merchant classes: tensely bound to each other, as we have seen, through the
business of U.S. immigration.
2
√ 2: Race; Or, the American Dream
Amidst the diversity of information, mentioned earlier, circulating in the
Guangdong region about the American West, the mass migrations starting from

58
the second half of the nineteenth century indicated that people were willing to test
the myths and risk their realities. By the 1910ʼs, if the writing on the walls of
Angel Island Immigration Station meant anything, it would appear that once
arriving in California, migrants from Guangdong seemed to prefer the wars they
had just left to the ones they found. Stripped of their belongings at the Angel
Island, migrants wrote poetry on the walls of their detention cells, expressing the
things they were not able or willing to write to folks back home (in Lai, Lim, &
Yung, 1980):
21

I am distressed that we Chinese are detained in this wooden building.
It is actually racial barriers which cause difficulties on Yingtai Island.
22

Even when they are tyrannical, they still claim to be humanitarian.
I should regret my taking the risks of coming in the first place (p. 100).

I abandoned my native village to earn a living.
I endured all the wind and frost to seek fame.
I passed this land to get to Cuba.
Who was to know they would dispatch me to a prison on a mountain? (p.
132).

My parents are old; my family is poor.
Cold weather comes; hot weather goes.
Heartless white devils,
Sadness and anger fill my heart (p. 150).

Indeed, “racial barriers”—both physical and epistemological, “tyrannical”
and “humanitarian”—significantly structured migrants’ life possibilities in
California at this time. Notably, such barriers not only formally regulated U.S.
citizenship and borders, they also structured U.S. attempts to control social
movements globally. For example, as one of the poems illustrates, migrants not

59
seeking U.S. citizenship, but only “pass[ing] this land to get to Cuba,” were
nonetheless still detained at Angel Island for inspection and interrogation. In this
section then, I give a brief overview of epistemological developments in white
supremacy in California at this time, as these changes manifested broadly
through cultural and political practices of racism and specifically through Chinese
Exclusion.
As noted earlier, logics of white supremacy rationalized U.S. wars of
occupation in California and the American West. The conquest of the latter,
formalized in 1848, occurred as dominant historical blocs in the U.S. also
struggled politically to resolve internal ideological and logistical crises within and
among each other, regarding land, labor, capital, and state capacity (Gilmore,
2007). In these years preceding the Civil War, antagonistic Democrat and
Republican blocs nevertheless shared one commonality across their otherwise
growing irreconcilable differences: the will to occupy California and the West
based on an epistemology of the divine right of whiteness that underlay Manifest
Destiny (Horsman 1981; Saxton 1995 [1971]; Almaguer, 1994, pp. 13-14, 32-41;
DuBois, 1970 [1935], p. 28).
According to Alexander Saxton, the Democratic Party expounded the idea
of Manifest Destiny to justify the contradiction between the U.S. Constitution and
slavery, while the Republicans were split between three camps. The Whigs
emphasized nativism that accommodated white immigrants; a Republican
minority advocated religiously-inspired abolition; and the Union-Republican party

60
pushed the Free Soil Movement, which argued for the abolition of slavery to
secure the full emancipation of purely white labor (Saxton, 1995 [1971], pp. 21-
37). The ideology of Free Soil triumphed in the 1850ʼs, as European Americans
imagined California as a white-only Eden for an ascendant middle class (cf.
Deverell, 2004; Hise, 2005; Wild, 2005).
White supremacy thus governed social movements to develop California
in the mid-nineteenth century, with varied effects on racially differentiated groups.
Dominant U.S. blocs struggled to maintain the radical political-economic
disfranchisement of Black people, as well as the latterʼs exclusion from the West
(Almaguer, 1994, pp. 38-41; cf. DuBois, 1970 [1935]; Woods, 1998). On the other
hand, the transition in racial-class structures, as the territory shifted from Mexican
to U.S. control following the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, produced new
“racial triangulations” (Kim, 1999; cf. Menchaca, 2001; Sánchez, 2010).
Dominant blocs continued to neutralize American Indian populations through
death, dispossession, and/or forced assimilation, while Mexicans, afforded U.S.
citizenship through the terms of the Treaty, faced more ambiguous terms.
Landholding elites who claimed European blood-ancestry and human reason
(“gente de razón”) were recognized as “white,” although privileges of this
tentative racial status occurred alongside massive land dispossession and
ownership transfers (Almaguer, 1994, pp. 46-68; cf. Jacobson, 1998; Pulido,
2006). Working-class Mexican populations, despite formal enfranchisement,

61
remained racially and economically alienated; yet, due to dominant U.S.
movements to keep this population small in number and isolated in the most
subordinate economic sectors, working-class formerly-Mexican nationals
presented less of a perceived threat to white civic life, in relation to Blacks,
Indians, and Asians, until the 1910ʼs and 1920ʼs (Almaguer, 1994, pp. 46, 72-74).
Under these conditions, the capitalist recruitment of politically-
disfranchised Chinese labor in the new West only deepened rather than resolved
the contradictions of the Constitution, genocide, and slavery in the mid- and late-
nineteenth century (Chiu, 1967; DuBois, 1970 [1935]; Foner, 1988; Lowe, 1996;
Martinez, 1998; Takaki, 1989). That is, incorporating Chinese labor functioned to
intensify rather than erase racialized labor exploitation; moreover, the
epistemological foundations of Manifest Destiny, evolving out of pre-existing
genocidal logics and movements to produce whiteness, enabled the racialization
of Chinese as this time and place’s “perpetual enemy who must always be fought
but can never be vanquished” (Gilmore, 2008, p. 83). Racial representations
metaphorizing abstract Black inhumanity as Oriental inhumanity mobilized
popular anti-Chinese sentiment and violence and rationalized radical exclusion
(Lee, 2003; Lye, 2005; Saxton, 1995 [1971]; Takaki, 1989).
Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, dominant U.S.
practices in literary culture and education played significant roles in racial
disciplining, and illustrated the latterʼs evolving forms (cf. Gilmore, 1989; Lowe,
1996; Lye, 2005; Said, 1994). For example, all the Southern states by the mid-

62
nineteenth century—prior to the Civil War—outlawed African American literacy,
as a means to re-enforce civil death (cf. Childress, 1984; Douglass, 1993 [1845];
DuBois, 1994 [1903]; Glenn, 2002; Howe, 2009). This also laid a foundation for
methods of subsequent social, political, and economic disfranchisement following
the Civil War. The institution of literacy tests as a requirement to vote in the post-
Civil War period, for instance, helped restrict African American access to
dominant political channels to secure their economic rights; the persistent and
active underdevelopment and racial segregation of post-bellum educational
institutions also functioned to re-secure white supremacist hegemony in the
battle over Reconstruction (DuBois, 1970 [1935]; Foner, 1988).
Also at this time, using positive coercive force, Anglo American
missionaries taught English literacy skills to American Indians, starting on
reservations in 1869 and leading to off-reservation schools starting in 1879
(Smith, 2005, pp. 35-36). However, such work, in contradistinction to what
appears as a form of enfranchisement, involved the coordinated kidnapping of
American Indians to attend boarding schools, and aimed to dismantle the
indigenous knowledge systems and social bonds that continued to sustain
communities under siege (Ross, 1998; Smith, 2005; Woods, 1998). By the
1880’s, European American groups such as “Friends of the Indians” worked
contemporaneously with the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs’ reform programs,
structured after the British colonial model of indirect rule, to bring “savage-born”

63
American Indians “under the civilizing influence of the law” (Ross, 1998, pp. 17-
18; cf. Smith, 2005, p. 36).
Under these different precedents, by the Chinese Exclusion era, dominant
U.S. blocs thus drew from multiple methods to racially subordinate Chinese
migrants, using the power of the literary. The expanding racial milieu, correlated
with U.S. capitalist expansion, created both the urgency and opportunity to refine
pre-existing techniques of control, and led to the application of positive and
negative methods simultaneously. Namely, for the Chinese diaspora by the early
twentieth century, such disciplining included both English literacy tests as a
requirement to enter the U.S. starting in 1917 (Ngai, 2004, p. 19), and the
presence of civilizing activity in California Chinatowns and ports of entry,
primarily targeting Chinese women (Lai, Lim, & Yung, 1980; Takaki, 1989). Such
“racial barriers” hence set boundaries that both constrained and conditioned the
diaspora’s own literary production at this time.
3
√ 2: Making (Family) Trees from Paper
The production of “paper families” indeed produced new knowledge about
community development, race, space, and identity within this context. To
coordinate such activities, systematized citizenship brokerage operations called
jinshanzhuang (in Cantonese, gam saan jong; Gold Mountain firms) evolved,
mostly centered in Hong Kong, and facilitated all major steps in producing paper
families—from matching suppliers and buyers of legal status, to securing full
entry through the rigors of U.S. Immigration enforcement (Lai, 2004, pp. 23-25).

64
After helping concretize new family configurations, merchants focused on
the form of the questions Immigration inspectors would ask migrants in order to
test the integrity of their identities. To do this, merchants collected, organized,
and constantly updated the raw information provided by migrants who knew
about the interrogation process. Collective labor produced and delivered
responses to questions, in the form of “coaching letters,” to detained migrants
who memorized them as they were held for interrogation. As the scrutiny of
questions grew more intense, precisely in reaction to this vibrant life of paper, the
need for research also dialectically grew. Merchants, peasants, migrants, and
their families trained themselves in basic Western methods of geography, history,
anthropology, and sociology, in order to help invent rigorous answers for invented
questions about the place, time, and social relations of peopleʼs lives (cf. Lau,
2006, pp. 77-113), transformed by the distinctly American invention of the need
to prove the legitimacy of a human existence (cf. Anzaldúa, 1987).
Yet, drafting answers marked only the beginning, catalyzing again a
variety of other embodied intellectual labors. Given all the immigration obstacles
designed to make people make mistakes, various other business and
employment opportunities opened up to help address them. The anonymous
letter by “afraid to show his right name” at the start of this chapter, for instance,
mentions immigration schools that opened in Hong Kong, to prepare migrants for
life on the other side of their journeys. The Densmore Investigation also

65
uncovered other components of the operation. For example, (racially and
linguistically) Chinese translators and interpreters who officially worked for U.S.
Immigration took second jobs with Chinese migration businesses, accepting
payment to give correct answers in English during interrogation or in
transcription, regardless of what migrants said or wrote in Chinese. Opportunities
opened for people to serve as dramatic actors, playing the parts of witnesses or
substitute translators in the theatre of interrogation.
23
And, as is common in
various underground economies, many worked as mules transporting the goods,
i.e. information, and/or as general glue connecting different social agents
together.
Because this enterprise unfolded dialectically with how U.S. Immigration
was also using paper to do things, Chinese migrants and merchants also
infiltrated and worked the system more deeply from its inside, in order to access
some of the vital papers upon which success depended. The Densmore
Investigation policed and weeded out its own white Immigration officials, ranging
from stenographers to investigators in the upper echelons of administration, who
exchanged with Chinese migration businesses. The Densmore Investigation
archives reveal that private immigration attorneys, such as Stidger and Kennah,
also set up shop with merchants in San Francisco Chinatown. Janitors,
electricians, plumbers, and night watchmen were employed by migration

66
Figure 2.6: Coaching letter #1, c. 1924. Translation (above) and first page of original
coaching letter (continued), from NARA, RG 85 (Entry 232), Folder 6 of Box 1.

businesses to help steal and/or doctor necessary documents. Prison guards
accepted payments to deliver coaching letters to the detained (cf. Lee, 2003).
This immigration “fraud” produced new meanings and realities, born on
paper. That is, the identities, relationships, histories, and geographies created in
and through coaching letters transformed what people understood of their own
lives, and how they understood them. For example, reading these coaching
letters helps demonstrate the epistemological shifts happening through the life of
paper: that is, how the very act of ordering and representing information in
coaching letters changed peopleʼs worlds:

67
On the one hand, Figure 2.6 translates the
objective information that a paper son needed to learn in
order to become his new self. In these cases, as in all
research, the form of the interrogation significantly
conditions and structures the possibilities of the response
(cf. Freire, 1970; Hise, 2006; Murphy, de Blij, Turner,
Gilmore, & Gregory, 2005)—in the instances of paper
families, bearing urgently on how and whom people
trained themselves to become. The imperative to know
documentary family narratives, as well as seemingly inane
details such as “the location of toilet houses,” disciplined and forced people to
live under extreme duress, needing to account for every fact of their (paper) lives.
Yet under this pressure, “sedimented sites of collective memory” also emerged
(Lowe, 1996, p. 125). For example, the conclusion of the letter gestures towards
meaningful and sustained socialities that developed as part of the process of
making paper families, e.g. new human information circuits and shared time and
energy rehearsing scripts.

Figure 2.6
(Continued):
Coaching letter #1,
c. 1924, original.

68

Figure 2.7 takes a step further, visually representing both family/village
genealogies and their physical geography.
24
This diagram of a Chinese village,
the latter traditionally organized by kinship clans, exteriorizes changes happening
in migrantsʼ “cognitive maps” (Tolman, 1948; cf. Jameson, 1984). That is, the
epistemological constraints of Western history and geography that discursively
bind the questions asked during interrogation, coupled with the physical
constraints of the actual paper of the coaching letter as the material boundaries
of the drafted response, forced the researcher to standardize family histories with
a given descriptive formula, and to produce a schematic map of a flattened
village. In this sense, the order assigned to village life, in coaching letters such as
these, evidence a process of people in the Chinese diaspora grappling with
Figure 2.7: Coaching letter #2, c. 1924. From NARA, RG 85 (Entry 232), Folder 6 of Box 1.

69
Enlightenment epistemology and aesthetic representation, intimately connected
to their humanity and material condition. Moreover, emphasis on the detail of
womenʼs “bound feet” became significant, insofar as Immigration officers began
to use this information to judge the class status of families—normalizing the
assumption among U.S. inspectors that womenʼs bound feet evidenced a
desirable class background (Luibhéid, 2002, p. 49).

Finally, Figure 2.8 indicates ways that the socialization of paper families
produced new human realities. The letter-writer coaches, “Because it is feared

Figure 2.8: Coaching letter #3, c. 1924. Translation and original coaching letter in insert, from
NARA, RG 85 (Entry 232), Folder 6 of Box 1.

70
they will ask who live next or back of Ngee Ging Ancestral Hall, these few people
or houses are added. Be sure that all agree in their testimony.” This instruction
illustrates at least two things. First, the village histories produced in coaching
letters, in asymmetrical correspondence with U.S. interrogation methods and
approaches (Lau, 2006, p. 148), mark brand new ways that diasporic subjects
were learning to see their home communities. That is, people were training
themselves in a particular system of thought, in order that they could anticipate
forms of the question that would confront migrants. Only in response to these
conditions did the few people or houses added to the village—whether or not
they actually existed—appear as parts that needed to be articulated in the
narrative of a place.
Second, and especially as paper families became hyper-extended over
the years, the absolute necessity of shared testimonies/understandings of village
histories and geographies produced real social dependencies. As Estelle T. Lau
argues, the stability of Chinese diasporic communities hinged not only upon
memorizing the fictions of paper families, but living them. New kinships were
realized due both to immigration policing as well as social need. Thus, living the
new intimacies produced through paper families, as well as figuring out how to
articulate pre-existing familial bonds with the new, became the heart of Chinese
diasporic life under crisis (Lau, 2006, pp. 131-132).

71
3
(1)
: This Is a Manʼs World (?)
Densmore called it “immigration fraud.” Yet, for people of the Chinese
diaspora, what truths did paper families shatter, and which did they produce and
reproduce? In fact, the life of paper is where, and how, social authenticity and
fraud converged: both preserving and transforming existing social life in ways
that people in the diaspora themselves could not fully account for or predict.
To segue, then, into the last set of transformations framing this chapter,
i.e. those happening in the realm of the social, I will first examine changes
happening in the social structure in Guangdong, shaped as I mentioned earlier by
Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian traditions. While I have been using the term
“paper families,” the migratory networks that frame this chapter are more
commonly referred to as the system of “paper sons.” This emphasis on male-
reproduction and kinship alludes to dominant ideologies of male supremacy and
gendered norms of labor in both Confucian and U.S. cultures of the era. Their
historical conjoining privileged Chinese men for migration and made them
significant and highly visible actors in the development of the Chinese diaspora.
Indeed, the structure of paper families grew out of the hegemonic mode of social
organization and identification in Guangdong at the turn of the twentieth century:
localized patriarchal clans signified by surname, in the Confucian tradition of
socialized filial piety and moral obligation to family. The ancestral halls that these
groups built represented their status and wealth in a village and served as the

72
villageʼs schools, family or clan meeting grounds, and houses of worship. The
strength of social kinship based on shared patriarchal ancestry—constructed as
biological—and specific to rural Guangdong, marked a “truth” that even U.S.
agents recognized. Haiming Liu (2005) argues:
[A]ncestral halls became far more numerous than in many other regions,
because of intense competition over land, widespread clan organizations,
and epidemic social instability. Many immigration officers noticed this
cultural feature of rural Guangdong through their conversations with
Chinese immigrants, and therefore questions on ancestral halls became
an important component of admission interrogations. Immigration officers
routinely asked Chinese immigrants about the number of ancestral halls in
their villages as a way to verify if a person was really from a given village
(p. 21).
Letters from male migrants in California to their families in Guangdong
expressed some aspects of this social structure under crisis. For example:
Sam Chang to female cousin, 5 January 1922 (in Liu, 2005, p. 97):
25

I have read Brother Zhongpingʼs [Weizongʼs] letter about the bandits and
seen how thin and exhausted he looks in the photo. After guiding the [local
government] army to fight the bandits, my brotherʼs hair all turned white.
He also coughed blood. I could not fall asleep and have composed the
following poems.

Tough is your double responsibility
Suppressing the bandits and protecting the kin.
In five years of fighting,
My brother has gone through fire and water.

Sam Chang to Weizong, 9 March 1922 (in Liu, 2005, pp. 97-98):

You must always keep in mind that we are a weak family branch. Stay
away from the lineage affairs a much as possible. Keep a low profile. It is
a tragedy that strong sibling families bully the weak sibling families within
the wufu [five mourning grades in a lineage]…Remember how Dapei was
killed, how a servant girl was kidnapped, how our property was looted,

73
how a hundred clan members had to flee before that criminal was
sentenced to death…In my observation, the decline and the final dissolve
of our family cannot be helped. The longer you stay in the home village
and Guangdong, the more deeply you will get yourself involved in family
affairs…That is not good.

These two letters from Sam Chang help illustrate at least two things. First,
they reference the particular “fraudulence” embedded in the form of patriarchal
organization of social, political, and economic life at the time—as such order
contributed to the violent deterioration rather than the social reproduction of
peopleʼs lives. Second, the “double responsibility” of “suppressing the bandits
and protecting the kin” alludes to another fundamental fiction involved in pre-
existing constructions of kinship rooted in “blood.” That is, protracted histories of
warfare in this region had already long-created disparate truths inside the
invention and language of biological clan groups. In his (posthumously published)
memoirs, for instance, Tung Pok Chin (2000) writes about the circumstances
leading to his assumption of an alternative identity as a paper son:
Itʼs a sad story, but a common one in a China then overrun by warlords…I
was born in China during a time of intense internal turmoil. The Manchu
Government, or Chʼing Dynasty, had just collapsed and been replaced by
the new “Republic,” and warlords still roamed the village countryside,
supporting themselves by stealing, robbing, and kidnapping young babes
and toddlers to sell to wealthier, barren couples. This, unfortunately,
happened to me. Kidnapped and sold to the Lai family, I never knew my
true name, much less my date or place of birth…(p. 16, my emphasis).

I point this out not to imply that Chinʼs claims to identity or kinship, at any
point in his life, were somehow less than real—in his own words, “false.”
26

Rather, I want to emphasize that social assertions and bonds, in their realities,

74
became meaningful precisely because they were forged through transformative
consciousness and labor that exceeded the existing boundaries of defunct but
not disappeared social orders (cf. Ferguson, 2004; Halberstam, 2005; Lowe,
1996; Moten, 2003).
In addition, other letters illuminate norms of patriarchal respectability, as
they were undergoing change within a Confucian framework of social life. For
example, in this letter dated 13 March 1918, Yee Fon shames his sons for their
failure to exercise proper authority and regulate gendered relations. He writes:

Figure 2.9: Yee Fon to sons Louie Kim Sin and Louie
Kim Min, c. 13 March 1918. Original letter (inserted)
and translation (continued), from NARA, RG 85
(Entry 232), Folder 4 of Box 1.

75

In this letter, Yee Fon teaches his sons several interconnected lessons
about their proper development. Most essentially, in the context of ideal
organization of village life, Yee urges his sons to recognize the centrality of
women and childrenʼs reproductive labor to their own lives and livelihoods. In the
letterʼs avowal of absolute social dependency, however, paradigms of domination
Figure 2.9 (Continued): Translation of Yee Fon to sons, c. 13 March 1918.

76
structure the power of trust, as ideologies of male supremacy order filial
relationships and mutual social responsibilities between elders, men, women,
and children. Thus, Yee enjoins his sons to exert control, towards the purpose of
maintaining the existing order of male-dominated social reproduction. This
creates a double-bind: On the one hand, menʼs ability to control other people in
the family defines menʼs personhood. On the other hand, women and childrenʼs
ready acceptance and performance of their duties, i.e. servitude to preserve the
social and ethical order of the patriarchal community, defines their respective
personhoods. In this framework, then, Yee shames his sons for their failure to
exercise proper authority: both a weakness and an arrogance that has social
consequences—reflected, for instance, in the lack of humility the sons also allow
women in the family to exhibit, which in turn, further disrupts the semblance of
social harmony in the village.
On the other hand, in contrast with Yee Fonʼs assertions of dominance,
Guey Hock shares an acknowledgement and affective expression of patriarchal
failure, in the following excerpt from a letter to his nephews, dated 4 March 1918
(Figure 2.10):

77

Although the contents of each letter present opposing perspectives, both
men use correspondence as a means to assume their responsibilities as
patriarchs— something that the letter gives them the capacity to do. Furthermore,
both measure their own manhood through terms of both ancestral honor and
material success. Thus, Yee Fon writes with ambition and pride, “Please read the
whole letter, do no keep anything back”; while with shame and grief Guey Hock
instructs, “Do not let people read this letter.” This contrast highlights how
Confucian order has subtly transformed through the life of paper: as fulfilling
patriarchal duties relies on the letterʼs circulation, mediated both through the
letterʼs receiver and/or reader, as well as the socialized act of reading.
Figure 2.10: Guey Hock to nephews Louie Suey
Sang and Louie Suey Wing, c. 4 March 1918.
Excerpt of translation and original letter in insert,
from NARA, RG 85 (Entry 232), Folder 7 of Box 1.

78
3
(2)
: The Sociality of the Her
In the context of this life of paper in the California diaspora then, the
existing common sense of filial duty—within circumstances of protracted
patriarchal war in China and labor demands in the U.S.—privileged Chinese male
workers for migration in service of the family. They thus formed the most
apparent focus of containment efforts in California, as U.S. Immigration officials
grew increasingly frustrated with the augmenting problem of paper families (as
the latter opened channels to legal rights). The detention cells of Angel Island,
built specifically for Chinese male migrants to stop the flow of paper, attest to the
earliest American wrath against same-sex families, these formed through letters
exchanged man-to-man.
Facing circumstances of forced isolation in dehumanizing conditions,
27

male detainees at Angel Island organized to socialize reproductive labor. These
efforts culminated in 1922 with the formation of Zizhihui (Self-Governing
Association, also Anglicized as the Angel Island Liberty Association). Zizhihui
had a formal political structure that elected its leadership primarily from among
those longest detained; its expressed purpose was to provide mutual aid and
maintain order. Their official activities included protesting to secure adequate
quality of food on the Island, as well as organizing social practices to maintain
paper life lines through the collectivized work to read, write, deliver, and receive
letters (Lai, Lim, & Yung, 1980, pp. 14-19). Such socialization at Angel Island

79
also prepared migrants for the predominantly homosocial societies they would
have to build in the U.S. during the earlier period of Chinese Exclusion, distinct
from the traditional family structure they knew before (Eng, 2001; Shah, 2001).
As Lai, Lim, and Yung (1980) note, no corresponding organization
developed among women on the Island. Indeed, gender segregation at Angel
Island both reflected and reproduced the gendered differentiation, inextricable
from the fatal processes of racialization, occurring in California (cf. Luibhéid,
2002; Shah, 2001; cf. Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1981; Spillers, 2003). During this
period, migrant Chinese women suffered their subordinate position in Confucian
social hierarchy, as well as the particularly sexualized form of their criminalization
in U.S. law and popular racial ideology.
Regarding the former, notions of shared ethical community obligation
apparently did not extend to women who performed reproductive labor outside
the boundaries of respectable matriarchal roles and service (cf. Fortunati, 1995
[1981]). Yet, feminized labor “outside” the norms of respectability, as it
intersected with the commercial sector, played a notable role in both
economically organizing and socially reproducing paper families in the diaspora.
Namely, in the structure of opportunity for paper daughters, as opposed to paper
sons, prostitution served as the main avenue through which women paid off their
debt bondage (cf. Chin & Chin, 2000). An excerpt from Wong Som Garʼs letter to

80
his Father (Figure 2.11), dated 18 December 1916 and sent from a min-chu in
Hong Kong to San Francisco, CA, further illustrates:

This letter indicates several things about the particular dangers that
working-class Chinese women faced at this time. First, it calls attention to
changes happening in the lives of poor women in Guangdong, specifically those
with a hyper-subordinate female status in Confucian social structure, such as

Figure 2.11: Wong Sor Gam to Father, c. 18 December 1916. Excerpt of translation (two
pages) and original letter in insert, from NARA, RG 85 (Entry 232), Folder 7 of Box 1.

81
concubines (Chin & Chin, 2000)—whose well-being apparently was not
considered a priority to “everybody at home.” The growth of the diaspora in the
U.S. throughout this time transformed the boundaries of these womenʼs
vulnerability, vis-à-vis exposure or coercion into transnational sex work. This
further exacerbated their vulnerability as targets of racism once they reached the
West, as racial-sexual panic in the U.S., specifically targeting Chinese women,
complexly shaped the terms of their illegality. In fact, the outlawing of Chinese
women in the U.S. through the 1875 Page Act laid the conditions of possibility for
Chinese Exclusion in 1882: the former establishing alien forms of sexuality and
gender that subsequently made possible the broader criminalization of the
Chinese “race” (Luibhéid, 2002).
This letter also highlights the contradictions of both U.S. and Chinese
capitalist culture that shaped the diaspora throughout this time, as Chinese-
American economies underwent significant shifts in their “gender regimes”
(Muñoz, 2008). That is, as certain forms of reproductive labor became
industrialized in homosocial U.S. Chinatowns, such as food and clothing
provision (vis-à-vis restaurant and laundry businesses), members of the diasporic
community ideologically accepted this labor as “menʼs work” (Muñoz, 2008;
Shah, 2001). On the other hand, sexual reproductive labor, as mediated through
the capitalist market relations that began to structure the “immigration business,”

82
remained womenʼs work: re-articulating feminized exploitation and intensifying
sexual and gendered, tethered to emergent class, domination.
Under these conditions, Chinese women became the object of much
ideological investment and social activism among whites in California during this
period. On the one hand, the 1875 Page Act evidences the popularity of early
Progressive discourses about Chinese women as sexual deviants who would
bring disease to white supremacy; on the other hand, such ideologies were
tempered by those of Christian missionaries, who were committed to “rescuing”
and “reforming” the lives of Chinese women. In the language of popular public
health discourse emerging by the turn of the century, religious and increasing
numbers of civic reformers sought to train Chinese women for physical and moral
fitness to undertake the demands of democratic citizenship. These reformers
argued that such activity could eventually sanitize, thereby neutralizing threats
posed by, the whole Chinese community (Luibhéid, 2002; Molina, 2006; Shah,
2001; cf. Sánchez, 1993; Stern, 2005).
28

The following letter, dated 15 December 1887 and written by San
Francisco Customs Surveyor W. J. Simmins in his letter log, speaks indirectly to
the methods of “moral reform” that Christian missionaries used at this time:
29

Hon John S Hager,
Collector,
Sir,

I respectfully report, that on receipt of your letter of the 12
th
inst,
I served on the following day, the notice attached hereto, on Capt E.C.

83
Reed the Master of the Steamship San Pablo, by delivering said notice
to the Steamship Officer in command of the San Pablo, and Capt Reed
was afterwards found on the wharf, and was informed of the contents
of the same, and that it had been delivered to his officer then in charge
of said vessel.
There was at that time fifty-five Chinese females on board the
San Pablo, some of them having arrived here on that vessel and more
being held for examination as to their right to land here, and there were
twenty-six who had been put on board by the United States Marshal.
It is impossible for me to notify the females as to their status, or
right to land, for the reasons,
First, —that they do not speak the English language,
Second— I can not distinguish or identify those put on board by
the United States Marshal from those who come here on the vessel.
Respectfully submitted
W J Simmins
Surveyor

Here, Simmins evokes Chinese womenʻs linguistic difference, even before
physical or visual racial ascriptions, to rationalize Chinese womenʼs radical
alienation from white American civic life. This inclusion of language as an
essential—material yet not always visible—part of racist aesthetic judgment
speaks to the urgency of battles waged through the life of paper at this time: as
Christian missionaries in Chinatown engaged in epistolary training to discipline
Chinese women. That is, writing itself serves a means to give visual form to
language that may otherwise be invisible, thus affecting a sense of knowing, with
greater documentary transparency, more about alien people (cf. Pegler-Gordon,
2006). Moreover, the specific “racial form” ascribed to Chinese populations
during the Exclusion era, as “unrepresentable” people whose “mystery always
points to the presence of something not shown” (Lye, 2005, p. 7), may have also

84
significantly colored this desire to know or “see inside” the mind by employing
coercive practices to exteriorize language-as-thought, vis-à-vis forced literacy
training.
3
(3)
(Conclusion): Paper Before Papers
Thus, with organizational structures of colonial epistolary training already
in place, reformers began developing such forms of racial disciplining for Chinese
women. Reformers taught the latter how to speak English, write letters, and
perform other services towards their conversion to civilized feminine life (Lai, Lim,
& Yung, 1980, p. 16-17; cf. Wang, 1993, p. 12).
30
Such work on Angel Island and
in Chinatowns produced letters such as this:

Figure 2.12: “Letter by a Chinese Girl,” reprinted in Rev. O. Gibsonʼs Chinese in America, 1877.

85

Finally then, deep in the heart of this life paper, I
conclude this chapter by interrogating the social
transformations that occurred through the introduction of
literacy to migrant Chinese womenʼs lives. Whatever may or
may not be “fraudulent” about how Sing Kum speaks of her
life, the significance of her narrative resides in the process
and act of remembering that produce and are produced by
the letter (cf. Kincaid, 1996; Spillers, 2003). In essence, Sing Kum uses Miss Bʼs
assignment, in whatever interrogative form it may have come, to imagine and
write her own paper family: a meaningful gesture, in view of how she remembers
alienation from her natal community, through which she otherwise here still
defines herself. It is within this context of how she knows her own sorrow and
gratitude—elements that are vitally absent in the letter—that her claims matter
(cf. Cvetkovich, 2003; Gordon, 1997).
Within the constraints of her physical and discursive situation, Sing Kum
invokes her ancestors using a foreign language, in an act of subjectification. As
she strives towards “God” in her letter, both the act of writing, as well as the
materiality of the medium, also matter—insofar as her appropriation of
Christianity must syncretize with her pre-existing “ethnic ontology” (Woods, 2002,
p. 66; cf. Mbembe, 2002). Regarding her act of writing, as Tung Pok Chin (2000)
Figure 2.12
(Continued)

86
explains it, “My mother...could also barely read or write. It didnʼt matter much for
an old-fashioned girl anyway, because Confucius said: ʻFor a girl, having no
education is a virtueʼ” (p. 25). Women like Sing Kum then, learning how to read
and write, were in their own ways socially re-positioning themselves, as they
accessed the privileges and responsibilities reserved for the highest literati,
government officials, and religious clergy in Confucian society.
Moreover, recall the sacred value assigned to paper in Chinese folk
tradition. Articulated through her deference to Jesus and God (wherein her
mistaken Biblical recitation may indicate a more fundamental slippage in
appropriation), Sing Kumʼs letter hence also falls within indigenous traditions of
using paper “to give thanks; beg for assistance; express love and devotion; ease
the suffering of the unknown and neglected dead” (Scott, 2007, p. 20). This
particularly resonates within the context of Sing Kumʼs expressed remorse for her
verbal disavowal of her father, a disgrace to the ancestors and violation of
Chinese religious and social tradition. She says, “ I can not write very well, but will
do the best I can.” Thus struggling to figure her place between languages,
between ontologies, between living histories and their recounting, perhaps, as
Hortense Spillers says of Toni Morrisonʼs illegible character Sula (Morrison,
1973), “The importance of this text is that she speaks at all” (Spillers, 2003, p.
117).
* * *

87
Thus, in this chapter, I have covered different structural aspects of the life
of paper for the Detained during the Chinese Exclusion era, at multiple
geographic sites and scales: changing world communities in ways that people in
the diaspora themselves could neither fully account for nor predict. This analysis
also provided a view of the decisions people made, regarding how they would
use their tools—technological, epistemological, social, aesthetic—to mediate the
radical openness of “freedom” as potential (cf. Gilmore, 2002; Kelley, 2003). On
the one hand, in this case study, certain legacies reflect how the diaspora used
potential to reproduce forms of racism, racial capitalism, and gendered
exploitation that conditioned their opportunities. Such reproduction appears, for
instance, in the rampant debt bondage, intra-ethnic class bifurcations, and racial
and gender labor exploitation that came to structure U.S. Chinatowns (Chin &
Chin, 2000; Kwong, 1997; Lai, 2004).
Yet on the other hand, I have also examined how the life of paper created
real opportunities for what Nayan Shah (2001) calls “queer domesticities”:
qualitatively new intimacies and unique configurations of reproductive labor that
subverted dominant race-gender paradigms, on both sides of the Pacific.
Additionally, through rigorous readings of letters such as Sing Kumʼs, we saw
traces of the ultimate Mystery in how different ethnic traditions and worldviews of
the “sacred” are both preserved and radically transformed, as they are displaced
into other forms of appearance.

88
In conclusion then, I'll end at the beginning: back to the worldviews of the
sacred in Guangdong, where our journey began. In the sacred paper rituals
practiced by cultures there, people do not keep paper offerings to hoard or
display. Instead, the nature of the offerings transform, as they are sent to the
ancestors, gods, or ghosts through the papers' burning—and it is this act of
sending into absence that accomplishes the vital transformation connecting the
secular with the sacred (Scott, 2007, p. 20). In this chapter, I explored how the
Detained, in new relations of presence and absence, transformed the
infrastructures of making and circulating their paper offerings. In doing so, I
offered a glimpse of transformations in the technological, epistemological, and
social practices that gave paper its life: a "poetics" bonding the seen and the
unseen to sustain the diasporaʼs hope for collective survival and vitality at this
time.

89

Chapter Three

Interned: Censorship
and the Work of Art (Where They
Barbed the Fourth Corner

Open:

An artist is a person who lives in the triangle which remains after the angle which
we may call common sense has been removed from this four-cornered world.
Natsume Soseki, 1867-1916 (in James Masao Mitsui, 1997, p. vii)

What a Playwright and a Poet Learned on Their Road Trip to Seattle
31

The sirens were already wailing when the U.S. declared war against
Japan on 8 December 1941. Not at Pearl Harbor—but in California, Michigan,
Texas, Florida, and Ohio. Alabama, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Louisiana,
Illinois....Americans were waging race wars at home, and Japan was also already
paying some attention.
32
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt formally gave
new name to the foreign enemy, news from Tokyo immediately saturated the
airwaves: By its own acts, the U.S. in fact fought for white supremacy! Japanese
broadcasters pointed specifically to American racism targeting Chinese people in
the U.S. as evidence that “far from waging this war to liberate the oppressed
people of the world, the Anglo-American leaders are trying to restore the obsolete
system of imperialism” (in Takaki, 2000, p. 119). On 11 October 1943, two
Figure 3.1: U.S. censor stamp (Fiset, 2001)
and letter excerpt from Dear Miss Breed (J.
Oppenheim, Ed., 2006).

90
months before Congress passed the Magnuson Act, FDR thus issued the
statement: “China is our ally...By the repeal of the Chinese exclusion law, we can
correct a historic mistake and silence the distorted Japanese propaganda” (ibid).
Ironically yet logically enough then, right in the middle of the Second Sino-
Japanese War, the Japanese imperialist force exacting WWII's “forgotten
holocaust” in China (Chang, 1997) was the one and very same defending the
rights of Chinese people in the U.S.! The Magnuson Act provided an annual
quota of 105 Chinese immigrants and extended naturalized citizenship rights to
an Asian group for the first time since the Naturalization Act of 1790 (Takaki,
2000, p. 120).
By WWII then, it meant something very different in the U.S. to say “I am
Chinese” (cf. Shah, 2001). Chinese American poet Nellie Wong recalls:
When World War II was declared
on the morning radio,
we glued our ears, widened our eyes.
Our bodies shivered...
Shortly our Japanese neighbors vanished
and my parents continued to whisper:
We are Chinese, we are Chinese.
We wore black arm bands,
put up a sign
in bold letters.
(1977, in Takaki, 2000, p. 113)

Less than two weeks after the U.S. declared war, Time magazine issued the now
notorious instructions for “How to tell your friends [Chinese] from the Japs,”
replete with photographs. That same week, Life magazine published different

91
picture diagrams with its own story of “How to Tell Japs from Chinese.”
33
Writer
John Okada perhaps little exaggerated when he remarked,
And so, a few months after the seventh day of the December of the year
nineteen forty-one, the only Japanese left on the west coast of the United
States was Matsusaburo Inabukuro who, while it has been forgotten
whether he was Japanese-American or American-Japanese, picked up an
“I am Chinese”—not American or American-Chinese or Chinese-
American but “I am Chinese”—button and got a job in a California shipyard
(1976 [1957], p. x).

And it's not over til it's over; some camp survivors remember civilian re-
entry as even more painful than wartime imprisonment. A survey conducted by
the U.S. Office of War Information in 1945 found that in Monterey County, CA,
three out of four cars carried a sticker saying “Keep all Japs out of California”
(Roeder, 1993, p. 122). In the face of such unceasing anti-Japanese racism, one
Harry Kitano changed his name to Harry Lee and passed as Chinese so he might
find work as a jazz trombonist in Minnesota (Gall & Natividad, 1995, pp. 658-
659). The brilliant Okada, Seattle native, survived camp in Minidoka, ID, and a
stint in the Pacific under the U.S. Air Force/Military Intelligence Service, only to
die prematurely of a heart attack in 1971, age forty-seven. Upon his death, wife
Dorothy brought his collected papers and correspondence to the Japanese
American Research Project at UCLA for the archives. In addition to notes from
his 1957 classic, No-No Boy, papers included an all-but-finished manuscript,
which Okada once described in a letter to his publisher-friend, Charles Tuttle:
I am now working on a second [novel] which will have for its protagonist an
immigrant Issei rather than a Nisei. When completed, I hope that it will to

92
some degree faithfully describe the experiences of the immigrant
Japanese in the United States. This is a story which has never been told in
fiction and only in fiction can the hopes and fears and joys and sorrows of
people be adequately recorded. I feel an urgency to write of the Japanese
in the United States for the Issei are rapidly vanishing and I should regret if
their chapter in American history should die with them (Chin, in Okada,
1980 [1957], pp. 254-255).

Without even looking at Okada's archive or his next novel, researchers at UCLA
told Ms. Dorothy that it was all worthless and could be burned. So she did it.
Of Letters:
European critical theorists have said many things. Jacques Derrida writes,
“Mixture is the letter, the epistle, which is not a genre but all genres, literature
itself” (1987, p. 48; cf. Cook, 1996, p. 23; Decker, 1998, p. 16). Terry Eagleton
writes,
[The letter] is a private confidence and political weapon, intimacy and
intrigue, a jealously protected space in which you never cease to be
publicly at stake. In Mikhail Bakhtin's term, it is dialogic language. In the
very heart of anguish or confession, the letter can never forget that it is
turned outwards to another, that its discourse is ineradicably social. Such
sociality is not just contingent, a mere matter of its destination; it is the
very material condition of its existence. The other to whom the letter is
addressed is included within it, an absent recipient present within each
phrase. As speech-for-another, the letter must reckon that recipient's likely
response into its every gesture (1982, pp. 51-52).

Carolyn Steedman (2002) notes that popular epistolary fiction disappeared into
the form of the novel in the nineteenth century, when literary publics ceased to
read in the role of voyeur and “became the intended readers of the book in their
hands” (p. 75). This shift represented changes in the functions of, and
relationships between, literature and history (cf. Lowe, 1996). Tongue in cheek,

93
Steedman describes the latter as something like a meta-dramatic labor, wherein
one finds oneself back inside an epistolary fiction: “But the Historian who goes
into the Archive must always be an unintended reader, will always read that
which was never intended for his or her eyes...The Historian always reads an
unintended, purloined letter” (2002, p. 75). Perhaps an example of why Eagleton
says, “Nothing could be at once more intimate and more alienable [than the
letter]...The letter comes to signify...that folded secret place which is always open
to violent intrusion” (1982, p. 54).
Yet so much talk of always assumes a luxurious faith in the timelessness
of history. When serving time is, at best, an agnostic activity, always either falls
apart or becomes never again. In the latter contexts, most letters are addressed
to a purloined other and written for an unintended reader; they must reckon
multiple and contradictory (non-)recipients' responses into their every gesture.
And the letter sees the Historian although the Historian may not see the letter
back. So it is that detained enemy alien Iwao Matsushita, interned at Fort
Missoula, MT; starts a letter to Hanaye Matsushita, incarcerated in Minidoka, ID:
“My dear wife, As the Japanese censor is away again, I write this in English” (in
Fiset,1997, p. 243).
In this chapter, I explore dialectics between dominant U.S. practices and
policies of censorship, on the one hand, and processes of aesthetic production—
through the life of paper—that U.S. “interned” communities engaged, within and

94
through those constraints, on the other. To do so, I examine three layers of
censorship, as they set both the formal and informal constraints on the life of
paper. First, I give an overview of the U.S. governmentʼs production of
categorical boundaries necessary to enact the racial project of mass internment
and “relocation” during WWII. This analysis links the development of the first
comprehensive U.S. censorship program with a longer history of U.S.
involvement in genocidal warfare in the Pacific: both projects articulated at the
scales of body, community, and across nation-states. Next, I focus on the
physical constraints of racial segregation and internment, looking closely at their
costs and effects on “interned” communitiesʼ practices of social reproduction.
Third, I highlight the subjective and dialogical constraints built in to the production
of race through racism, as dominant formal censorship practices exacerbated
rather than resolved social crisis. Across each of these layers, I examine how
such historical conditions shaped acts of letter correspondence, as well as letter
content. Through these dynamics between the macro- and micro-scales, I also
investigate practices of both aesthetic production and social reproduction,
revolving around letters, that the “interned” re-invented in this context: a life of
paper that sustained social bonds through the radical limits placed on media.
The Widely Lesser Known Truth
But out there is in here too, related—
it's a matter of perspective, like lines…
Yes, if I had a big enough piece
of paper, I'd draw the line

95
tracing the way we came, smooth
as tracks clear back to California...
Lawson Fusao Inada (1997, p. 137)
i.
A conspiracy theory that is neither conspiracy nor theory: When FDR
issued Executive Order 9066 on 19 February 1942, Japanese internment was, in
fact, already done. The story of internment actually picks up around 1924, when
the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, aka Japanese Exclusion Act, escalated
already existing imperialist antagonisms between Japan and the U.S.
(Kumamoto, 1979, p. 47; Takaki, 1989, p. 209).
34
Then, when Japan openly
defied U.S. imperialist dreams of an “open door” in the Pacific by invading
Manchuria in September 1931, hardly any person of Japanese ancestry in the
entire Western Hemisphere was formally exempt from U.S. surveillance
(Hirabayashi & Hirabayashi, 1984, p. 88; Kumamoto, 1979, p. 47-49; Robinson,
2009; Weglyn, 1976, p. 40). In an undated report likely written some years
before 1941, U.S. Naval Intelligence found that
The racial and patriotic characteristics of the Japanese are so strong that
it can be assumed that every adult Japanese resident, alien or U.S.
citizen, will furnish information if requested to do so...that a large number
of Japanese civilians aid the Japanese Intelligence is beyond doubt...that
certain Japanese civilians are closely connected with the Japanese
Intelligence Service is absolutely positive (original emphasis, in
Kumamoto, 1979, p. 56).
35

According to Bob Kumamoto, by 1932, the U.S. State Department, the
Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the Commerce and Justice Departments, and

96
Army Intelligence (G-2) began “a cooperative and clandestine surveillance of the
entire Japanese community” within the U.S., as well as in trade zones in Central
and South America and the Caribbean (1979, p. 47). This added to pre-existing
Military Intelligence activities around “the Japanese problem” in Hawaii that
began as early as World War I (Okihiro, 1991, pp. 102-128; Robinson, 2009, pp.
32-33). In 1939, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),
36
in cooperation with
the Post Office, initiated mail surveillance of select “resident aliens” to build the
dossiers on such potential threats to national security—mostly Japanese, to a
lesser extent Germans and Italians—as well as those individuals corresponding
with them (Fiset, 2001, p. 3). To augment information gathering on internal
enemies, FDR also set up a secret White House intelligence unit: establishing the
basis for the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which eventually
became the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) (Daniels, 1993, pp. 24-25).
By the start of 1941 then, almost a year before the U.S. declared war on
Japan, the FBI had already whittled its focus and completed data collection and
analysis on just over 2,000 people of Japanese ancestry living in the U.S. During
the course of this research, the FBI had concluded that not “every adult
Japanese resident” was a spy, as earlier reports had suggested—since FBI
believed that Japan wanted to avoid using, for purposes of espionage, people
born and raised in the U.S. (nisei and sansei, second- and third-generation U.S.
citizens, respectively). Thus, the U.S. government built dossier files mostly on

97
male community leaders who were either born in Japan (issei), or born in the
U.S. and educated in Japan (kibei). Correspondingly, by 1941 the FBI had also
already initiated recruitment efforts of nisei men to serve as FBI informants, with
particular interest in the Japanese American Citizen's League (JACL)
(Kumamoto, 1979, p. 57).
37

These latter Intelligence activities reveal, in part, the origins of how U.S.
government officials structurally fabricated, defined, and ascribed Japanese
generational difference in the context of war.
38
This work exploited the group-
differentiated production of legal recognition that granted nisei and kibei
citizenship through birth right while simultaneously disfranchising issei through
naturalization and land laws (Ngai, 2004; Robinson, 2009; Takaki, 1989). Such
“fatal couplings of power and difference” (Gilmore, 2002) metastasized in
people's embodied experiences as kin and, for some, destroyed their ability to
socially reproduce in camp life and afterlife.
An Internee Mourns
For His Son Who Died in Italy

As Thou light a candle
A thin thread of smoke
Rises ever so faintly
Between Thine aged hands.
Sojin Takei (in Soga, et. al., 1983, p. 60)

ii.
Here go the ABC's of FBI methodology and data analysis: Japanese
American (JA) residents targeted as public enemies fell into three categories,

98
hierarchically organized by level of perceived criminal threat to national
security.
39
Group A, the “known dangerous,” included people (assumed to be) in
close contact with Japanese commercial or government interests, namely
fisherman, produce distributors, Shinto and Buddhist priests, farmers, influential
businessmen, and members of the Japanese consulate. Group B consisted of
the “potentially dangerous,” and Group C of peripheral figures watched for their
“pro-Japanese” inclinations or propagandist activities. Specifically, Groups B and
C criminally named Japanese language teachers, kibeis, martial arts instructors,
community servants, travel agents, social directors, and editors of the vernacular
presses (Fiset, 1997, pp. 28-29; Kumamoto, 1979, p. 58). Common to many
repressive political crackdowns across time and space, this orchestrated round-
up of the targeted ethnic community's recognized intellectuals, artists, and
cultural workers helps to explain the great deal of creative work (including letter
correspondence) that would emerge specifically out of the criminally-designated
places within U.S. civilian prison camps during WWII.
Join to this discursive infrastructure its physical carceral geography
(Gilmore, 2007). In 1941, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)
already had in their custody nearly 1,700 “enemy noncombatants,” i.e. German
and Italian commercial seamen captured in international waters since 1939.
When Ellis Island, NY, became over-over-crowded, the INS made detention
centers out of military installations at Fort Stanton, NM; Fort Lincoln, ND; and

99
Fort Missoula, MT. Hence, when Japanese planes dropped bombs on Pearl
Harbor, HI, on 7 December 1941, all the chips were already in place for things to
happen very quickly thereafter. FBI emergency arrests began before sundown,
under a blanket presidential warrant signed by Attorney General Francis Biddle.
Congress declared war on Japan the next day, and within the hour, FDR signed
three restraint-and-removal proclamations against Japanese, German, and Italian
nationals residing in the continental U.S. By his signature, the 314,105 Germans,
690,551 Italians, and 47,305 Japanese residents of the U.S. mainland who had
registered with the state, in accordance with the 1940 Alien Registration Act,
became “enemy aliens.”
Under the first Alien Enemy Act of 1798, as amended in 1918, the
President legally possessed absolute power over enemy aliens in time of war,
including the right to subject them to internment (Fiset, 2001, pp. 1-3; Ngai, 2004,
pp. 175-176). The very next day then, the INS had 1,792 enemy aliens in
custody, among them 1,212 resident Japanese nationals (Fiset, 1997, p. 31).
And so explains how a story about “the detained” has become one about “the
interned.” By the time FDR called for the mass removal of JA's from the West
Coast through EO 9066, 3,021 Japanese people in the U.S. had already been
apprehended by the FBI and/or interned as enemy aliens by the INS (Fiset, 1997;
Hayashi, 2004, p. 86). In fact, these are the specific and only people to whom

100

“internment” really refers, all rounded up before EO 9066 (Daniels, 1986, p. 6;
Clay, Holsapple, & Ina, 2006; Nagata, 1993, p. xiii).
40

iii.
Sept 14, 1942
Stockton Asssm. Center
Stockton, Calif.
Dear sir,
During our four months stay here in
Stockton Assembly Center we had a hope of
our father joining us here, but since he has
been interned to New Mexico, we find that we
need him more than ever. We do miss him
terribly!
I am the eldest daughter of Taro
George Masuda. The family includes mother,
my three sisters, Bessie—13; Susie—11; and
Lucy—10; my brother Richard—7; and I am
fifteen.
Father, hasnʼt done anything bad to
harm this country and he went there for his
own good. He is just as loyal and true as the
rest of us. He is truly faithful and honest and a
loving father.
My sisters and brothers cry for him. I
donʼt think itʼs right that we should be without
father. Mother especially worries so much
about him. It almost makes has her sick.
Life is not complete without him and
we are never happy since his departure.
I hope you know how it is to be without
our father. We have always depended
everything on him so its [sic] really difficult to
take care of us for mother alone. So, please,
will you, just for our sakes and heavens, kindly
find a way to release him and join us at the
earliest time?
We would appreciate it very much.
Hoping and praying that you will be in
our favor, I remain,
Amy Masuda
Bessie
Susie
Lucy Masuda
Richard

Figure 3.2: Amy, Bessie, Susie, Lucy, and
Richard Masuda to Edward J. Ennis, Director
of Alien Enemy Control Unit, U.S.
Department of Justice, 14 September 1942.

101
As this letter demonstrates,
41
by disarticulating families through
internment, the U.S. government waged a war against women and children, as
well as the men targeted as “enemy aliens.” In a meeting on 28 March 2010,
Bessie Masuda remembers the isolation of both internment and EO 9066 as
paradoxically social, as she reflects,
[Another camp survivor,] made a comment, ya know, he said, “Bessie, I
like the stories you tell, because you tell, you talk about your family, ya
know, and not just about yourself…You talk about your mom and your
dad.” And ya know, I says, “Well, itʼs because of what I went through, ya
know, as a child.”

Moreover, as the appeal letter also illustrates, children believed they could
resolve this war themselves, precisely through writing letters. Masuda recalls,
Masuda: …Ya know, at that age, we just thought we were writing to
someone that would help us bring my dad back.
Q: Did you think that if you did it that he might come back?
Masuda: Yeees, yeah.
Q: That you were talking to someone that was going to help you?
Masuda: Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, yeah.

Other details written in this letter gesture towards further effects of their
fatherʼs internment, as well as their own incarceration, on their imaginations.
From Stockton Assembly Center, they write, “Father, hasnʼt done anything bad to
harm this country and he went there for his own good. He is just as loyal and true
as the rest of us.” On the one hand, the phrase “went there,” instead of “came
here,” suggests that the children imagined the U.S.—as a place—as somewhere
other than the place they were. Yet, on the other hand, their argument that their
father, George Taro Masuda, was just “as the rest of us” simultaneously indicates

102
that the children considered themselves, and their father, as neither ʻenemyʼ nor
ʻalienʼ to the place they nevertheless knew they did not belong. Such
identificatory ambiguity is consistent with their primary request neither to be
“free,” nor to be “American,” but merely to be together. In fact, they state this
request specifically in another letter, also written
sometime between August-December 1942:

They move towards the conclusion of the letter in Figure 3.2, “I hope you know
how it is to be without our father.” Interestingly, despite (or perhaps because of)
their conditions of confinement, the children ask for empathy (“…to be without our
father”), distinct from vengeance (i.e. “to be without your father”): a sense of
aspiration that defied the logic of internment.
What the U.S. Shares with the Boer War of South Africa (And,
What People Could Not Write About It)

A wretching anguish rises
As the number “111”
Is painted
A large number of the men now
interned are old and are not in
the best of health. For some of
them the end of their life span is
not far distant. We, their children
and wives are anxiously hoping
that by some way we will be
permitted to go and live with
them. In so doing we are ready
and willing to submit to such
regulations and restrictions as
the authorities may see fit to
impose to safeguard the
interests of this country.

Figure 3.3: Mrs. Chiyomi and Amy, Bessie, Susie, Lucy, and Richard Masuda to Edward J.
Ennis, stamped by DOJ “Answered: 12/2/1942.”

103
On my naked chest
In red.
Muin Ozaki (in Soga et. al., 1983, p. 39)

i.
Bob Kumamoto notes the paradox of EO 9066, that it ordered
...the mass evacuation of the entire Japanese community—but it also
thereby undermined any legitimate justification for the initial ABC roundup
and called into question the efficiency of the ten-year counter-intelligence
surveillance. Hoover recognized this nuance and declared his steadfast
objections to 9066 on the contention that the roundup had encompassed
all potential saboteurs (1979, p. 71).

Historically speaking then, the persistent, politicized confusion about what to call
the camps that EO 9066 hailed and created, reflects the most basic ambiguities
about what they, in fact, were.
42
Various historiographers note that FDR himself,
on at least two occasions, used the term “concentration camp,” the name favored
by many camp survivors who recount their time in these family prisons (cf.
Castelnuovo, 2008; Daniels, 1993; Inada, 2000; Robinson, 2009). The qualitative
differences between European and American concentration camps during WWII
have led others to use alternative terms. “Prison camp” has become an
increasingly common nominative, as camp survivor Toru Saito remarks:
And I hate this damn word, internment camp, relocation camp, those are
just words that people use...Uh, I always use the word prison. We were
put into a prison camp, we were imprisoned. I don't say this bullshit, “We
were interned; we were relocated”! I worked in the jails! I never had one
guy tell me, “Hey uh, I've been relocated into this jail cell.” Fuck! You're in
prison! You're in jail man!
43

104
Shirley Castelnuovo (2008), citing other JA historiographical literature,
explains her choice of the term “concentration camp” as adhering to
the distinction made by Hannah Arendt in her 1951 Origins of
Totalitarianism. There were three basic types of concentration camps:
Hades was the relatively mild form used during the Boer War in South
Africa; Purgatory resembled the Soviet Union's slave labor camps; and
Hell corresponded to the Nazi death camps. I use the term concentration
camp with this typology in mind noting that the American concentration
camps fall into the Hades category (2008, p. xxii; cf. Arendt, 1951. pp.
443-445; Drinnon, 1989, p. 6).

According to Arendt, concentration camps “emerge for the first time during
the Boer War…and continued to be used in South Africa as well as India for
'undesirable elements'; here, too, we first find the term 'protective custody' which
was later adopted by the Third Reich” (1951, p. 440). From 1899-1902, British
forces designed concentration camps as part of their “scorched earth” tactic to
liquidate their colonial antagonist in South Africa, Dutch Boer guerilla armies.
British imperialists made concentration camps to cut off guerillas' social
reproduction by attacking and destroying the source, i.e. Boer families—women,
children, and elderly who produced predominantly male guerilla labor-power
(Nasson, 1999, pp. 192, 218-224; Pakenham, 1979, pp. 248-250).
44

Britain, however, did not invent concentration camps in the Boer War: an
important point insofar as a more detailed history clarifies U.S. WWII prison
camps as consistent with, rather than outside of, traditions and practices proper
to developing the U.S. nation-state itself.
45
In fact, during imperialist wars at the
turn of the twentieth century, concurrent with the Boer War, the U.S. government

105
also formally instituted their own concentration camps to organize genocide. In
1895, four years prior to the outbreak of the Boer War, Spanish imperialist forces
had already implemented a “reconcentrado” program of forced resettlement and
internment, in reaction to revolutionary guerilla armies in rural Cuba (Nasson,
1999, p. 267).
46
Regarding the latter, U.S. President McKinley addressed
Congress, “This cruel policy of concentration...was not civilized warfare. It was
extermination” (in Kramer, 2006, p. 153; cf. Welch, 1974, p. 245). The public
denunciation of such atrocities helped change the form of U.S. intervention in the
region, from diplomacy towards Spain to declaration of imperialist war (Kramer,
2006, p. 153).
The 1898 Spanish American War marked a quick and easy military victory
for the U.S., in which Spain ceded the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico and
transferred "occupation" of Cuba to the U.S. in the Treaty of Paris, approved by
the U.S. Senate on 17 March 1899 (Lazos Vargas, 2001).
47
However, after
Filipino nationalists, who studied the guerilla tactics used in both Cuba and South
Africa (Kramer, 2006, p. 131), declared war against the U.S. on 16 March 1899,
the concentration camps deemed so objectionable in Cuba did not prove so anti-
American in the Philippines. Starting in December 1900, the U.S. implemented its
own policy of reconcentration that lasted through 1902. According to Paul A.
Kramer,
The policy aimed at the isolation and starvation of guerillas through the
deliberate annihilation of the rural economy: peasants in resistant areas

106
were ordered to relocate to garrisoned towns by a given date, leaving
behind all but the most basic provisions. Outside the policed, fenced-in
perimeters of these “reconcentration camps,” troops would then undertake
a scorched-earth policy, burning residences and rice stores, destroying or
capturing livestock, and killing every person they encountered (2006, pp.
152-153).

According to E. San Juan (2005), the slaughter of 1.4 million Filipinos from 1899-
1905 by U.S. military forces constitutes genocide, as “by-product” of imperial
expansion.
48
Thus, if the camps erected with EO 9066 were indeed
“concentration camps” for 110,000-120,000 JA's on the West coast, they were
not the first in U.S. history.
While historical representations diminish the malnutrition, disease, and
brute force prevalent in specific areas among all the camps (Daniels, 1993, pp.
46-47; Kazue de Cristoforo, 1997; Sturken, 2001), U.S. WWII prison or
concentration camps, as part of a global campaign of racist terror, also sustained
the machinery of human sacrifice that had no center (cf. Gilmore, 2002). Among
other things, the global incarceration of diasporic Japanese people, based on
ideologies of racialized inhumanity as criminality, directly related to the pogrom
war strategy deployed by Allied forces distinctively in the Pacific and helped
legitimize the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended WWII (Craig &
Radchenko, 2008; Linderman, 1997; Takaki, 2000). Particularly in the context of
the nascent Cold War and nuclear arms race, U.S.-bred white supremacist
ideology preceding and informing Nazi fascism; the history of U.S. colonialism
and racism in the Pacific; and the racialized dehumanization that undergirds

107
hegemonic consent for modern prison camps and wars of elimination; all created
the conditions of possibility for the massive annihilation of people who lived in a
convenient site for atomic experiment (cf. Kühl, 1994; Lifton & Mitchell, 1995;
Okazaki, 2007; Stern, 2005; Takaki, 2000; Yoneyama, 1999, pp. 9-13). This
nuclear holocaust came at the heels of a war in which, as U.S. Air Force B-29
gunner-turned-poet John Ciardi put it,
We were in the terrible business of burning Japanese towns. That meant
women and old people, children. One part of me—a surviving savage
voice—says, I'm sorry we left any of them living. I wish we'd finished killing
them all...I did want every Japanese dead...We were there to eliminate
them (Terkel, 1984, pp. 200-201; cf. Linderman, 1997, pp. 143-187).

On evidence, it seems that people don't have to die inside concentration camps
for prison sites to mark killing in a diffusely concentrated way.
ii.
As Ruth Wilson Gilmore once told me, these things are difficult to speak
about for many reasons, “some of them unsayable and others easy to voice if not
explain.” And some are both; the architecture of prison camps makes sure of this
too. According to Louis Fiset (2001), in addition to concentration camps, the Boer
War in South Africa also produced the first systematic program to develop pre-
existing censorship technologies, creating the template for both British and
American censorship regimes during WWI (cf. Nasson, 1999). As urgently as it
controls information,
Censorship also engages the populace; every letter is an exercise in good
citizenship, and acquiescence to its regulations represents a contribution

108
to the war effort. In WWII, postal, cable, broadcast, and press censorship
affected the lives of civilian and military personnel in virtually every country
of the world, both belligerent and neutral. WWII produced the world's
largest censorship operation—one that has not yet been matched (Fiset,
2001, p. 4).

Prior to 1941, U.S. censorship practices directly tied to the international
war effort remained relatively unofficial.
49
Then, on 4 June 1941, FDR approved a
plan, involving the U.S. Army, Navy, FBI, and Office of the Postmaster General,
to develop a modern national censorship program for international
communications, including post, cable, radiotelegraph, and radiotelephone
circuits. The plan came to life immediately following the bombing of Pearl Harbor,
alongside Japanese internment (Fiset, 2001; Roeder, 1993, p. 8). On 19
December 1941, FDR signed EO 8985 that authorized the creation of the Office
of Censorship (OOC) under the War Department.
50
FDR authorized OOC
director, Associated Press news veteran Byron Price,
51
to censor international
communications to “his absolute discretion,” with “absolute control over cable
traffic, the mail, broadcasting, and the press” (Fiset, 2001, p. 5). Within the week,
a virtually non-existent Army postal-censorship staff grew to 349 people,
employed in field stations from New York City to Honolulu. The number of postal
censors grew to 3,547 by March 1942; according to Fiset,
At its peak, in September 1942, more than 10,000 civil service employees
opened and examined nearly one million pieces of incoming and outgoing
overseas mail each week at eighteen censor stations and substations
throughout the United States and its territories (2001, p. 5).

109
Particularly threatened by multilingualism, INS camp administrators initially
required that interned Japanese civilians write outgoing letters in English only, in
effect completely isolating issei who could only communicate in Japanese or who
could not find an English scribe.
52
Then, with an increasing number of U.S.
citizens also held in detention or internment in Asia and Europe, in 1942,
Germany, Italy, Japan, and the U.S. agreed that they would each treat captured
civilian detainees and internees in their jurisdiction under the 1929 Geneva
Convention's guidelines for the treatment of POW's (Fiset, 2001, pp. 5-6;
Hayashi, 2004, pp. 83-85; Weglyn, 1976, pp. 62-63). Under these conventions,
people held in captivity must be allowed to send and receive letters and
postcards in their native language, and censorship of their outgoing mail should
be carried out “expeditiously.” Thus, the INS censorship division, the OOC, and
the Provost Marshal General's Office (U.S. Army) recruited as Japanese-
language censors, resident aliens of Korean ancestry who knew Japanese as a
colonial language (Fiset, 2001, pp. 5-6).
Other basic rules defining objectionable mail included government ban on:
...information relating directly to camps, [for example]: physical layouts,
internee arrival and departure dates, population size, location, strength of
guards, and transfers from one camp to another. Complaints about mail
restrictions or personal treatment, governmental agencies, or the Red
Cross were also prohibited…In an ironic twist, inmates were advised to
avoid exaggerating any favorable conditions of detention that might lead
the U.S. citizenry to conclude that enemy aliens were being coddled and
treated better than American soldiers (Fiset, 1997, pp. 102-103).

110
Because direct reference to these or any other camp conditions could result in
restriction or loss of precious mail privileges, or more extremely in corporeal
punishment, most internees of war made efforts to not violate rules (Fiset, 1997,
pp. 102-103). Although officially such restrictions could only apply to enemy
aliens, both the relational nature of letter correspondence, as well as the general
impunity granted to U.S. camp authorities, made censorship rules differently
applicable those in civilian camps, as well as in civil society, too. FDR and the
OOC, after all, facing budgetary constraints, intentionally designed domestic
censorship to rely primarily on voluntary compliance by civilians and the press
(Roeder, 1993, p. 8). In this context, Bessie Masuda recalls of the letters she
both wrote and received, to and from her father as well as childhood friends
outside camp:
I remember receiving letters [from dad] and itʼs all censored. You canʼt
even read it because itʼs all cut out. The letters are censored. Ya know, so
why they, why they even delivered, I donʼt know…But we were forever
writing, [though] maybe we didnʼt send…And I was always keeping in
touch with [friends who were not in camp]… you know I was writing to
friends. And they would write too but itʼs always censored so, whatʼs the
point?...My sister, she was writing to a service man, ya know, in the 442?
And his letters were always censored, cut out, too.

Such stories give deeper meaning to the popular saying among people in camp:
Shikata ga nai, “It cannot be helped.”
iii.
Thus, on the one hand, official and unofficial censorship policies structured
absences, such as those found in the following letter:

111
Fort Missoula, Montana
Feb 9, 1942

Dear Wife Kazue Hatashita and family,
...This place is nice, not as cold as I imagined even snow falled
about eight inches deep last night. How are all the family at home after I
left? I am all right, don't worry. All officers are understanding our position,
very kind, treating us with sympathy.
It was wholesale eviction of alien Japanese fisherman in Terminal
Island [CA], far inland.
When we arrived Missoula, our group separated in three part, our
group [censored] persons encamped at Missoula, last of other part of
group gone for North Dakota. In the camp at Missoula are about
[censored] Japanese. In one house forty persons are living and sleeping
side by side. My bed, mattress, and blankets are all new, so it's better than
my twenty-years-old bed at home. [censored] I received my suits case. I
want some more shirts my black shirts which I weared when I was fishing,
jacket, safety razor, heavy kubimaki, looking glass, etc. [conclusion lost]

[Isohei Hatashita]
(in Inada 2000, p. 82-83)

On the other hand, official and unofficial censorship policies also strained
what became presented, as Isohei Hatashitaʼs first paragraph, disclaiming the
violence attached to the act and conditions of writing, illustrates. Similarly,
Chiyomi Masuda, writing from Stockton Assembly Center, started her letter to
Edward J. Ennis, Director of Alien Enemy Control Unit:

Figure 3.4: Chiyomi Masuda to Edward J. Ennis, c. July 1942.
Dear sir,
I wish to express my
gratitude for your sincere and
considerate feeling towards
the Japanese, especially the
interned aliens. My interned
husband George Taro Masuda
has written frequently of his
kind treatment in the camp at
Bismark, North Dakota.

112
Lastly, Figure 3.4 evidences a full cycle of coerced positivity: as U.S. censorship
policies dictated the terms of George Masudaʼs writing from internment camp,
which Chiyomi Masuda reproduced in her writing from civilian camp, reporting it
back around to U.S. government officials in the form of gratitude.
iv.
Indeed, living under siege, in prison camps, during a world war, placed
unique significance on letter correspondence. As Hanaye Mastushita, agonizing
over her separation from husband Iwao, writes him on 30 December 1942:
53

I've been inquiring around about your internment camp. I worry that
impediments will arise in trying to correspond with the outside if I move to
your camp and am given the same treatment you receive. I want to
consider this a bit longer. After a request for a transfer, decisions take two
to three months, but I don't want to ask for a transfer until after the hearing
decision [to reverse Iwao's “enemy alien” status, allowing him to join her at
civilian camp in Minidoka]. There is nothing I can do about the fact that I
may have to continue living alone...I must also consider the possibility of
your coming here or our being forced to repatriate to Japan together. If I'm
outside at that time, I can take care of things and we can return to Japan.
It's important to consider the various possibilities. I want to see you as
soon as possible, but I also want to go on to a new camp only after
investigating its regulations regarding family.

Just as it was when you were at the Seattle Immigration Station, where
you could see a visitor for only five to ten minutes once a week and had to
speak in English, there are times now when it's easier to communicate by
letter, although in New Mexico or Louisiana, English letters take five or six
weeks to arrive. Important news is apparently sent by telegram. At night,
unable to sleep, I lie in bed thinking about what to do but am still at a loss.
Let me know how you feel about the situation (in Fiset, 1997, p. 219).

As this example illustrates, the contradiction of confinement and forced
movement urged people to prioritize the ability to communicate through paper

113
over being in person. This existential triage reflected the necessity of strategic
planning for long-term collective survival, taking into meticulous consideration the
various radical uncertainties of historical condition. In this context, as Hanaye
argues, letter correspondence could serve as a better form of communication and
means of social relationship than even individual personal (physical) contact.
Thus, she measures their survival options against the circumstances regulating
letter correspondence at different camps, including varied treatment by letter
censors, language policies, and estimated correspondence time lags.
Particularly for issei male internees of war, letter correspondence literally
became the primary medium to stay socially alive. This refers as much to
receiving as to writing letters, as Iwao implores Hanaye relatively early in their
separation, 2 June 1942: “Letters are the sole comfort and assurance when we
are far apart like we are. I realize that you aren't an ardent letter writer, but please
write at least once a week” (in Fiset, 1997, p. 149). In fact, in certain instances,
internees needed letters written by others to express the meaning and
aspirations of interneesʼ own lives. Namely, as Bessie Masuda recalls of her
familyʼs experience, internees of war, struggling to repeal their “enemy alien”
status, placed their hope in letters written to the U.S. government by “character
witnesses” from their pre-WWII communities. As this excerpt from a five-page
handwritten letter, written by ranch owner Charles Beckman on behalf of his
agricultural employee, Taro George Masuda, illustrates:
54

114

In this situation, hope for overturning an “enemy alien” conviction came from
others' advocacy for, and narration of, the internee's life through letters. The
internee of war, whose very status censored him from speaking for himself, thus
placed his faith in the narratives others could or would write in letters in his place.
“Just Like Being Pregnant”
Outlaw women are fascinating—not always for their behavior, but because
historically women are seen as naturally disruptive and their status is an illegal
one from birth if it is not under the rule of men.
Toni Morrison (2004)

Making an origami model is, at heart, an engineering problem: like, how do I get
the paper to do this? And so, people who are interested in learning how things
…Mr. Masuda came to this country in 1920 at the age of 16. During that time he
has made two trips to Japan once in 1924 for a period of 3 months to get married, and in
1927 to go back and get his younger brothers who were left homeless by the death of
their parents. Mr. Masuda was 18 years old when both his father and mother died and
upon their death took complete custody of his 3 sisters and 2 brothers all of whom were
born in this country except one sister. Mr. Masuda reared his two brothers and sent
financial support to Japan to his 3 sisters.
…In conclusion I have always thought of Mr. Masuda even though a Japanese
citizen as a true American believing and practicing our American traditions. He is a man of
fine character, a student deeply interested in anything that would increase his knowledge,
and a man highly respected in this community.
Yours very truly,
Charles Beckman Sr.
Figure 3.5: Charles Beckman, Sr, to the Director of Alien Detention, 18 April 1942.

115
work, how the universe works, how nature works—would also be interested in
seeing how a piece of paper works when you fold it up.
Tom Hull (in Gould, 1998)

i.

Inseparable from the limits produced in and through language, the
physical constraints of racial internment—involving coerced racial, gender, and
generational segregation—constituted perhaps the most visceral form of
censorship that transformed interned communitiesʼ practices of social
reproduction. Namely, the systematic removal of issei males through internment
produced the conditions under which single motherhood competed with the two-
parent patriarchal household as the normative reproductive unit in civilian camps.
Yet, the militarized violence that caused this to be so also worked to incapacitate
women's ability to perform as head of household, or perhaps more urgently, to
generate new configurations for social reproduction under the duress of camp life
(cf. Gilmore, 2008; 1999; Griffin and Woods, 2009; James, 2007; Pulido, 2009).
This duress manifested in tolls on women's physical, mental, and emotional
health. For instance, Hanaye Matsushita (Minidoka, ID) writes to husband Iwao
(Fort Missoula, MT) on 15 July 1942:
I want to write more often but my eyesight seems to be going. It's probably
my age. My nerves are also on edge, and when I take up a pen my heart
leaps into my throat and I can't write. Forgive me...Every day keeps me
busy, with little free time to do what I want...Please know that I'm working
as hard as I can. I continue to pray to God that we will see each other as
soon as possible. I'm overwhelmed with thoughts of how you spend each
day. While I realize that I need to stay level-headed, it's depressing to feel
as though I have to take care of everything myself (in Fiset, 1997, p. 155).

116

And the pain caused by state violence passes down, as Toru Saito, four
years old when he went to prison camp in Topaz, UT, recalls:
Certainly, my formative years have been, you know, moulded around my
mother's feelings, I mean, what I perceived my mother's experience being
because my mother didn't speak English....She went through hell, and I
remember that hell through my mother's eyes. From her inability to explain
or to understand. So it was, I think it magnified things for me, you know.
When you see your mother suffering, you suffer (in Holsapple & Ina,
1999).

Saito makes sense of his familyʼs suffering by contextualizing their “hell” within
the political situation that produced it, as he explains:
I can't even say those goddamn words, “with liberty and justice for all,” you
know. If you look up the word 'liberty' in the dictionary, it says, 'the legal
right to freedom from restriction and control.' That's what liberty means.
'With liberty and justice for all?' Is there justice for all in this
country?...[People say,] shut up Toru, everything is equal, you gotta, just
don't go into these areas. Well, either you have freedom or you don't, you
know. It's just like being pregnant. You can't be part pregnant! You're
either pregnant or you're not pregnant, you know? You have freedom or
you don't.
55

In his comments here, notice that Saito does not clearly distinguish between
individual and collective subjects of freedom (in the ambiguous switch in cases
from “...for all” to “You have...”). In this sense, I interpret Saito's stream of
consciousness to suggest not so much that freedom is all or nothing, but perhaps
moreso that it is all or none.
Likewise, from a similar perspective of collective being, Bessie Masuda,
fourteen years old at the time, wrote in her letter to the Department of Justice:

117

Compare this letter (Figure 3.6) to the one written by the Masuda children on 14
September 1942 (Figure 3.2). Time transformed the question, “So, please, will
you, just for our sakes and heavens, kindly find a way to release him and join us
at the earliest time?”—to the one here: “Why canʼt he be released?” The more
direct forms of questioning and appeal in this letter reflect the intensified urgency,
mediated through letter writing, to seek “Sirʼs” humanity in order to secure their
fatherʼs release. Moreover, Bessie contextualizes this urgency by explaining, “I
am writing this letter for the sake of my mother…I donʼt want her to worry
because she has been ill so many times. I am asking you again to please release
Block 19 Barrack 9 Apartment F
Relocation Branch
McGehee, Arkansas
February 15, 1944
Dear sir,
We want to know when our father may
come back to us. It has been so long since was
away. Our father was taken on the night of
Washingtons birthday and that was February
22
nd
, 1942. Oh please, will you release him and
have him join us? Weʼve been praying that he
would come back to us soon and we hope that
will be true. He does not want to stay there, but I
know he wants to join us. Why canʼt he be
released?
We do not want to go to Tule Lake if we
have to go. Itʼs awful there and I know he wonʼt
like it their [sic] either. I am writing this letter for
the sake of my mother. She always worries a lot
and I donʼt want her to worry because she has
been ill so many times. I am asking you again to
please release my father. He hasnʼt done any
harm to this country and I know that he will not
do such a thing as harming this country.
Yours very truly,
Bessie Masuda,
daughter of Mr. Taro Geo. Masuda

Figure 3.6: Bessie Masuda to the U.S.
Department of Justice, 15 February 1944.

118
my father.” Here, Bessie makes the explicit link between her fatherʼs
incarceration, her motherʼs illness, and her own act of letter-writing on both their
behalves. In fact, letters became a place to release suffering at multiple points in
this chain, as Bessie also recalls,
My mom cried every night. And you know when you hear your mom crying
you cry too, you know, really. And she, at night, I could hear her sobbing
away, she would write letters every night [to my father].
56

Fathers cried too. Family therapist, professor, and popular historian Dr.
Satsuki Ina, born 1944 in prison camp in Tule Lake, CA, remarks,
[F]athers who were issei's, very authoritative and highly respected and we
did exactly what he said, right?...lost all their power. You know? They were
not, um, head of household anymore; they actually had succumbed to
some other greater power [i.e. the U.S. government and military/camp
authorities] that was influencing what the family dynamics were. Family
meals and things like that were not organized in family groups anymore.
57

This systematized form of emasculation and disempowerment contributed to the
significant consequences of incarceration on men's physical, mental, and
emotional health.
58
As Gwendolyn M. Jensen (1997) notes about cases of
suicide in issei men, “The flip side of male privilege was duty; men were expected
to provide for the family” (162); the inability to do so drove men to despair. As
issei resident alien Toshio Kimura wrote to a friend from the “assembly center” at
Santa Anita, CA (c. 1942):
59

I never dreamed I would see my children behind barbed wire. This is a
terrible place to raise children. We are not cattle but three times a
day...you hear the gong, gong, gong, of the bells. Then and there you will
see men, women, and children come out of stable-like shelters. Every time
I see this sight, I cannot help my heartaches (in Oppenheim, 2006, p. 68).

119

ii.
Indeed, the coordinated dismantling of social life through internment
produced suffering at simultaneously macro- and micro-scales of articulation. At
times, even the life of paper failed as a means to mitigate ruptures in pre-existing
forms of social reproduction. For instance, Iwao Matsushita writes to wife Hanaye
on 15 July 1942, from Fort Missoula, MT:
I was very glad to receive your four-page letter dated the 26
th
. Whenever I
see your letter, I can't help feeling hopelessly inadequate for not being
able to be there to see you through all the anxieties. Although there are
people to whom I owe my thanks for looking after your welfare, I've not
written because I sense many are wary of having any correspondence
from this camp. Can you please give them my regards and thanks? (in
Fiset, 1997, p. 231).

This letter illustrates how the physical fact of forced isolation, coupled with its
subjective impact, produced forms of self-censorship beyond the scope of any
formal internment policy, thus preventing people from corresponding at all. Yet,
Hanaye Matsushitaʼs response to her husband demonstrates that willed acts of
self-censorship could also re-animate the life of paper—as Hanaye Matsushita
stopped writing four-page letters about her anxieties. Instead, Hanaye reports
that, in the absence of being with her partner, she would become him (cf.
Halberstam, 1998). She responds to Iwao on 20 August 1942:
I'm resigned to trying to live a bachelor's life. Aunt Kaneko and I are doing
well living together. I owe a lot to her. Two or three single women will
move in nearby since here are not enough living quarters to go
around…(in Fiset, 1997, p. 168).

120
As, this letter illustrates, communities in camp responded to external
constraints by transforming gendered agency and sexual divisions of labor. As
described by Hanaye, the external constraints refer primarily to the spatial and
physical ones imposed by the prison camp and its administrators. Further
constraints were also imposed by other JA's in camp, e.g. intra-community
ascriptions of gendered and sexual deviance which re-enforced forms of coerced
isolation and segregation. For example, Hanaye writes to Iwao on 21 July 1943,
Mr. Moringaga, who lives in Block 2, is a very considerate person, opening
my windows, etc. for me. Unfortunately I can't invite him to dinner to repay
his kindness because single women in this camp have to be careful about
rumors being spread about them…(in Fiset, 1997, p. 250).

For all these reasons, women in the position of “living a bachelor's life”
embraced parts of their female masculinity and did what they could to cultivate
same-sex communities for collective survival. This living situation included the
socialized labor of letter-writing, as more educated or physically-able women
served others as scribes (Fiset, 1997, p. 107). However, while such labors re-
invented the means of social reproduction in significant ways, both within and
across camps, women living communally as female “bachelors” also had no
other choice but inadvertently to re-inscribe the disappearance of males in their
communities. Hanaye writes on 20 August 1942:
When I dwell on this situation, I have suicidal feelings, but I've got to keep
myself together until your return. I imagine you're also experiencing rough
times. I have come to understand what it's like to live alone in this world.
People tease me, calling me the Montana widow... (n Fiset, 1997, p.168).

121
Issei men thus suffered the grief of living as the husbands of their own
widows, fathers of their own fatherless children. As Marion Kanemoto remembers
of being in camp in Minidoka, ID, “[T]here was a period when we just kind of gave
up, thinking, my father wasnʼt going to come back.”
60
Yet, in this context of
premature mourning, Kanemoto notes that people turned to the life of paper to
keep the in-visible bonds between them alive. She recalls, after the FBI took her
father from their home in Seattle, WA, for internment at Fort Missoula, MT,
Well, we corresponded, but I remember all our letters were censored with
the holes either cut out or blacked out. You could hardly make heads or
tails out of the message, but nevertheless, it was his handwriting.
61

iii.
The work of letter correspondence, under these conditions, required
collectivized labor: an un-romantic dialectical process that bonded a community
through the dynamic tensions and stresses among them in day-to-day camp life.
Another letter from Hanaye Matsushita to Iwao, dated 6 August 1942, further
illustrates the point:
Every day has been busy. I just finished cleaning the bathroom and now
hastily pick up my pen to write. I'm behind in responding to you because
my left eye has worsened and it makes it hard to write. It's probably just
age, so don't worry. I told Uncle about it, but he ignores my complaints, so
I cling to God. Most days we don't see each other all day long. I look
forward to living by myself after the move...[Uncle] continues to
demonstrate the usual disregard for anything and everything. I've finally
gotten it through my head that he's a completely unreliable
person...Writing a letter in English is difficult and it frustrates me that Uncle
won't help me (in Fiset, 1997, p. 165).

122
Similar frustrations punctuated life in DOJ camps too. For instance, Iwao
writes back to Hanaye on 3 April 1943:
I haven't been able to do any studying on my own or write letters when I
want to because of the extra duties I've assumed [as a camp leader]. I
want to write to Doc and Tsune-san, but please tell them what I've said (in
Fiset, 1997, p. 240).

In addition to the “duties” that Isao Matsushita alludes to as a recognized “sensei”
among the internees (Fiset, 1997, p. 235), this excerpt also exemplifies how
isolated senders imagined and wrote letters with a collective audience in mind,
regardless of—yet completely related to—whom they formally addressed. This
communal imagination embedded in letter correspondence functioned
reciprocally, i.e. addressees, in the context of incarceration, also received letters
as a broadly social experience. For example, on 18 April 1942, Sonoko Iwata
was awaiting evacuation in Thermal, CA, and wrote to her husband Shigezo
Iwata, internee of war taken to Santa Fe, NM:
62

When I receive words from you, I let [our friends and family] know. At other
times, I do not speak of you unless they mention you first because I don't
want them to know how I feel (in Litoff and Smith, 1991, p. 216).

Here, Sonoku expresses that mediating information about Shigezo exposes more
about her own vulnerabilities than it does about his: an inter-subjectivity calling
attention to the porosity and fluidity of personal boundaries, normally perceived
as separating rather than connecting people (cf. Cvetkovich, 2003; Freccero,
2006; Gordon, 1996; Honma, 2010).

123
iv.
The work of internment, to dismantle social life through physical isolation,
disrupted targeted groupsʼ intellectual communities as well as families. Namely,
internment also split apart pre-WWII poetry societies, or free-verse haiku “kai,”
that flourished in cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles, as well as in
rural towns such as Stockton and Fresno, CA (Kazue de Cristoforo, 1997, pp. 23-
25, 42-43).
63
Foreseeing immanent danger by mid-1941, Neiji Ozawa—founder
of the Valley Ginsha Haiku Kai in Fresno, CA, and co-founder of the Delta Ginsha
Haiku Kai in Stockton, CA—instructed poets to use haiku to preserve their
experiences for future historians (Kazue de Cristoforo, 1997, p. 16).
64
Once in
camp, paper itself played an important role in this endeavor, as poets commonly
wrote and carried around their work in secret. Under these conditions, poets such
as Sojin Tokiji Takei “managed to write approximately 200 poems per sheet in
minute handwriting on thin rice paper stationery which could be easily carried
around without official notice” (Soga et. al., 1983, p. 5). Unfortunately, however,
most of the poems written in internment have been lost, due to “forced
evacuation and ongoing relocation from camp to camp” (Kazue de Cristoforo,
1997, p. 24).
65

In this context, the vibrant life and love of poetry in issei culture, with an
emphasis on forms of haiku, tanka, and an avante-garde form called kaiko,
66
re-
constituted during internment by intertwining with issei letter correspondence. For

124
example, this syncretism occurred in the in the case of the Central Valley poets,
for whom—forced with other JA's into diasporic dispersal beyond their control—
letter correspondence became the medium that facilitated the preservation and
continuity of their collective creative work. According to Kazue de Cristoforo,
former member of the Valley Ginsha, Ozawa was transferred to the Gila Indian
Reservation Sanatorium in 1942 after contracting tuberculosis at the Fresno
Assembly Center. Kazue de Cristoforo notes, “In spite of this unforeseen
development, he still managed to correspond with members of both the Valley
Ginsha and Delta Ginsha, wherever they were, to give them advice and to
critique their work” (1997, p. 44).
Isseisʼ creative training in poetry could also explicitly shape the form of
their letter correspondence. Iwao Matsushita, for instance, turned to haiku on
many occasions to express sentiment that perhaps prose could not channel,
especially given the formal restrictions placed upon it by U.S. censors—some of
which, incidentally, the asceticism of haiku could well accommodate. He writes to
Hanaye on 5 March 1942:
67

...I regret I can't celebrate with you, but please remember that my heart is
always with you. I like to dedicate the following poem which I composed
for your birthday:

[line in Japanese characters]

(Translation— 700 miles away amidst snow in Missoula,
I alone celebrate beautiful flower's day of birth)

125
It is allowed now to write letters in Japanese, so you may do so, if it is
more convenient for you. Take good care of yourself and write, please.

Your loving husband Iwao Matsushita (in Fiset, 1997, p. 128)

Finally, epistemological perspectives, mediated through haiku, add
dimension to the meaning of letter correspondence itself. Kazue de Cristoforo,
citing an anonymous haiku poet, notes that “haiku is only one-half of a circle; it
invites each reader to join the poet” (1997, p. 10). The hermeneutics of haiku
relies on this intimate dialectic between poet, reader, and often, an aspect of the
organic environment that the poem appreciates. Haiku's formal austerity
mediates this dialectic and paradoxically structures a wealth of meaning,
organized through the subtle relationships between the simplicity of the words
and the abundance of their surrounding silence. In this sense, silence actively
both communicates and amplifies knowledge, i.e. silence speaks. The
essentialism of haiku thus reveals a different epistemology of silence that
somewhat inflects common narratives of silence as the mark of oppressive
burden (cf. Lippit, 2005; Saldaña-Portillo, 2003). As such, recognizing the
interplays of speech and silence, presence and absence, in this poetics can
inform our view of the life of paper for the interned: that is, how this
epistemological perspective contributed to the conditions of possibility for letter
correspondence to affect social reproduction as powerfully as it did, even in the
face of extreme censorship.

126
Of Letters (Reprise):
i.
Eagleton called them Mikhail Bakhtin's “dialogic language.” And Bakhtin
(1981 [1975]) describes dialogic language as words between distinct historical
subjects whose sharing brings to life a transformative dialectic of understanding
and response:
Thus an active understanding, one that assimilates the word under
consideration into a new conceptual system, that of the one striving to
understand, establishes a series of complex relationships, consonances
and dissonances with the word and enriches it with new elements. It is
precisely such an understanding that the speaker counts on. Therefore his
orientation toward the listener is an orientation toward a specific
conceptual horizon, toward the specific world of the listener; it introduces
totally new elements into his discourse...The speaker strives to get a
reading on his own word, and on his own conceptual system that
determines this word, with the alien conceptual system of the
understanding receiver; he enters into dialogical relationships with certain
aspects of this system. The speaker breaks through the alien conceptual
horizon of the listener, constructs his own utterance on alien territory,
against his, the listener's, apperceptive background. This new form of
internal dialogism of the word is different from that form determined by an
encounter with an alien word within the object itself: here it is not the
object that serves as the arena of the encounter, but rather the subjective
belief system of the listener (p. 282).

The necessarily violent encounter, i.e. break through, between different
“conceptual systems” through language opens up an in-visible space where
censorship can also take place. FDR's domestic censorship plan that relied
heavily on voluntary compliance in fact depended on colonizing and controlling
this utopia. That is, the quality of violence characterizing the dialogical
production, reproduction, and/or transformation of “subjective belief systems”

127
(which, in contact with the objective world, I would call “ideology”) can easily
become pernicious to sadistic when the context in which the dialectic/dialogue
unfolds is either prison or its specter. Under these material conditions, the
invaginated, productive dialogical space between subjects becomes carceral too:
Speech is not free as long as people are in prison. Furthermore, unless this
carceral condition is recognized among people as shared, the space actually
becomes anti-dialogical, punctured and punctuated by relations of coercion
rather than gift exchange (Freire, 2000 [1970]; Hyde, 2007[1983]). FDR and the
U.S. government knew this spatialized political-economy of language, that the
mere existence of camps was enough to put words in people's mouths and
through their heads, and/or take them out. Citizens followed:
Dear Miss Breed,
...I may have complained about my new environment but I know it will be
difficult to adapt myself to the new surroundings right away. I am sure
everything will brighten up soon and in a few more weeks I will begin to
love this place almost as much as my home in San Diego. When I stop to
think how the pilgrims started their life, similar to ours, it makes me feel
grand for it gives me the feeling of being a pure full-blooded American.
Most Sincerely,
Louise Ogawa [age seventeen]
(in Oppenheim, 2006, p. 127)

ii.
More specifically, the process I am describing manifests in how
censorship is built in to the production and hegemony of dominant racial
ideology, evidenced in the dialogical space of letters between members of white
civil society and people in camp. Moreover, because racial ideology is personified

128
and embodied, dialogism's internal “arena of encounter,” as Bakhtin called it, is
both the space between the word and its objective referent (persons), and
between the word and subjective belief systems of the dialoguers, and finally in
the nexus of objective and subjective as the configuration of the human.
In letter correspondence between these parties—as Louise Ogawaʼs letter
illustrates—prevailing racist logics, socializing the belief that incarceration of
racial Others guaranteed the freedom and safety of citizens, conditioned the
dialogical encounter. Censorship worked through the mandate that racism
produced in interned communities, through the total architecture of binary
oppositions: the mandate to argue and prove, within the very physical and
dialogical boundaries that rendered them vulnerable to premature death, that
they were American/citizens rather than Japanese/enemies, aliens, or criminals.
This imperative did not necessarily include dialogue about whether or not
ascribed racial identities in abstract were either right or wrong, but merely that
whatever the hegemonic “conceptual system”—as subjectivized in the citizen—
constructed as Japanese, they were not; and moreover, that whatever it
constructed as American, they were.
Although adorned as a sentimental and ethical discourse of appropriate(d)
personhood (as well shall see, through rhetorics of loyalty and service), such
language, shorn of embellishment, represented a material and economic
relationship of power. This relationship governed access not only to mundane

129
commodities, but to political channels to change the material reality of
confinement as such. For instance, in the Dear Miss Breed letters anthologized
by Joanne Oppenheim (2006), nisei youth regularly wrote Miss Breed, their
librarian back home in San Diego, CA, letters whose main body asks:
...I wonder if you come up on the 14
th
if you wouldn't be too
inconvenienced by getting me a few things. I have enclosed a money
order for the sum of $5.00. If you cannot bring them would you please
send them. If you come, please bring them because that is the best
excuse I have for seeing you—I hope you know what I mean. I would like
the following items: [List of eight line-items, including price by piece,
subtotals, and grand total].
68

In such examples, the addressee Clara Breedʼs active consent to white
supremacy structured the dialogical space of letters, as much as it gravely limited
her well-intentioned political advocacy and activism on behalf of JAʼs. For
instance, in her June 1942 Library Journal article, “War Children on the Pacific,”
Breed writes of nisei patriotism and courage: “They believe in America, and they
believe in democracy, and they intend to prove their loyalty to the doubters” (in
Oppenheim, 2006, p. 93). In this conceptual system, Breed's anti-camp ideology
and public campaigning rests on her argument that JA's belonged to whiteness
through common U.S. nationalist chauvinism and will to aggression, framed as
defense. Thus, for JA's struggling for relief from prison camps, maintaining Breed
as a needed or desired ally depended upon assimilating her words into their alien
conceptual systems through dialogue.

130
In fact, Breed publicly cited nisei letters, such as Louise Ogawa's, as
evidence for her claims that the U.S. should not criminalize and imprison JA's:
placing tremendous pressure on youth like Ogawa to understand certain words
as keys to their freedom. Sansei (third generation JA) Ellen Yukawa—who, prior
to internment, attended school with Breed's biographer and literary executor,
Joanne Oppenheim—also corresponded with Miss Breed while in camp. Yukawa
and her community had the following conceptual system to contend with, as
Oppenheim represents it:
Ellen and her family were the first Japanese Americans any of us ever
met...I remember our surprise that Ellen spoke English just as we did. Not
only that, she knew how to jump rope, play softball, and, at lunch, ate the
same food we did. If or when we asked where she had come from, I think
she told us California, and that was true (Oppenheim, 2006, p. 11).

Such was the alien conceptual horizon and terrain for JA's in the dialogical
encounter, the background upon which their own word was determined.
iii.
That over half of people in camp were children complicates the situation
further, putting them in danger along axes of both race and age (cf. Holsapple &
Ina, 1999). Letter correspondence for developing young people performed
pedagogical functions, particularly in cases such as the Miss Breed letters, in
which students entered into dialogue with an adult Other formally recognized as
their educator. In these contexts, letter correspondence mediated a distinct
relationship of power and trained in youth the proper rules of civic engagement:

131
situated in prison camps, letters in fact constituted a form of highest stakes
testing. Paulo Freire characterizes the educational process thus:
Thus, the dialogical character of education as the practice of freedom
does not begin when the teacher-student meets with the students-
teachers in a pedagogical situation, but rather when the former first asks
herself or himself what she or he will dialogue with the latter about. And
preoccupation with the content of the dialogue is really preoccupation with
the program content of education. For the anti-dialogical banking educator,
the question of content simply concerns the program about which he will
discourse to his students; and he answers his own question, by organizing
his own program (2000 [1970], p. 93).

In this sense, dominant preoccupations with white citizenship and
sameness organized an anti-dialogical program for youth, mystifying precisely
because it took the form of appearance of letters, understood as dialogical
language. This manipulation, combined with the vulnerabilities particular to youth,
had long-term ideological effects. Amy Iwasaki Mass, six years old when the
government issued EO 9066, testified before the Commission of Wartime
Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) on 6 August 1981:
[Years later] I have come to the realization that we lulled ourselves into
believing the propaganda of the 1940s so that we could maintain our
idealized image of a benevolent protective Uncle Sam. We were told that
this was a patriotic sacrifice necessary for national security. The pain,
trauma, stress of the incarceration experience was so overwhelming...On
the surface we do not look like former concentration camp victims, but we
are still vulnerable. Our scars are permanent and deep (in Oppenheim,
2006, p. 224).

How white the roof
where no soul resides.
Iwao Matsushita (in Fiset, 1997, p. 197)

132
Yes, It's Right to Recall
the directives
of the War Relocation Authority
their threats and lies
the meetings, the strikes
the resistance, arrests
stockades, violence, attacks
murder, derangement
pain, grief, separation
departure, informers
recriminations, disagreements
loyalty, disloyalty
yes yes, no no, no yes
Issei, Nisei, Kibei.
These are words now
but they were lived here.
There were deaths and births
and lovemaking in the firebreak
with the warden's flashlight
shining on you.
Hiroshi Kashiwagi, 19 April 1975 (in Tule Lake Committee, 2000, p. 124)

Physical, subjective, and dialogical constraints only intensified as the war
continued, as internment and dominant censorship practices exacerbated rather
than resolved social crisis. That is, using words to make up the rules marked only
the beginning or middle, but certainly not the end, of a big contradictory problem,
as censorship laws designed for social control performed this work by
simultaneously producing categories. This productivity, in turn, further vexed the
problem of control (cf. Foucault, 1965; Hussain, 2003; Moten, 2003; Ngai,
2004).
69
By the close of 1942 then, the chaos of internment noticeably vexed
claims that camps would maintain order: chaos due not only to restlessness

133
inside camps, but to the unavoidable need for U.S. officials to address the
contradictions of interned life, war, and premature death—as Muin Ozaki put it:
Sailing on the same ship—
The son,
A U.S. soldier;
His father,
A prisoner of war.
(in Soga, et. al., 1984, p. 29)

Then came 1943, when the U.S. government officially revised the crisis of
categories and produced new, and/or exacerbated old, forms of disorder. By this
year, contradictory imperatives reached a definitive head: on the one hand, to
release some JAʼs from camp for school, work, or military service; and on
another, to further criminalize other JAʼs for the various ways they were not
cooperating with the terms of their incarceration.
70
Thus, in February 1943, the
U.S. government attempted to resolve the problem of properly differentiating one
group from another by issuing the camp questionnaire: a nearly-identical
document alternately called “Statement of United States Citizenship of Japanese
Ancestry” (Selective Service Form 304A) for draft-age nisei males, and
“Application for Leave Clearance” (WRA Form 126 Rev) for issei of both sexes
and nisei females over the age of seventeen (Weglyn, 1976, p. 136). Infamous
questions #27 and #28 required, respectively, that targeted people consent to
serve in the U.S. armed forces, and pledge unqualified allegiance to the U.S.
while disavowing any form of allegiance to Japan
71
(Castelnuovo, 2008; Densho,
2008; Weglyn, 1976, pp. 134-136).

134
Popularly referred to by both the government and camp prisoners as the
“loyalty questionnaire,” it officially mystified political relations of coercion and
consent through the language of emotional affiliation, moral character, and
ethical value judgment. In such an “infrastructure of feeling” (Gilmore, 2010b), the
category “loyal/disloyal” represented the political reproduction of binary tenets of
good/evil, civil/criminal, and human dignity/shame, as defined by the ideologies of
white supremacy that legitimate human sacrifice (cf. Kim, 2005; Okihiro, 1973).
Forced to personify and embody one or the other binary pole, many JA's did not
know how to answer, although the government made sure JA's knew how they
were supposed to. Moreover, the questions placed issei in a particularly
impossible position: since they could not claim U.S. citizenship rights without
breaking the law; and since many—both issei and kibei—trapped inside that
moment of war with no foreseeable end, seriously considered non-military
allegiance to their (other) 'home' country as perhaps the only viable possibility to
escape U.S. prison camps (Calstelnuovo, 2008; Densho, 2008; Clay, Holsapple,
& Ina, 2006; Masuda, 2010; Weglyn, 1976).
Thus proliferated, as by-products of the questionnaire, new or re-invented
problem categories: war resisters or conscientious objectors; renunciants of U.S.
citizenship or residency; and “NoNo's” or “No-No boys”—negations of the
negation (cf. Halberstam, 2008).
72
For these groups, on 15 July 1943, the WRA
officially began converting the camp at Tule Lake, CA—already known for its

135
particularly defiant population—into the Segregation Center for about 9,000
“disloyals” (Fiset, 2001, p. 15; Tule Lake Committee, 2000 [1980]; Weglyn, 1976,
p. 157).
73
The year 1943 saw the transfer of more than 15,000 people both in and
out of Tule Lake, alongside numerous strikes, uprisings, and mass
demonstrations. In response to these latter acts, the WRA constructed yet
another inner ring of confinement called the “Military Stockade” or “Area Three.”
Stockade prisoners, many fifteen to seventeen years old, were not allowed
visitors or communication with family members and faced twenty-four hour
surveillance by floodlight and submachine gun (cf. Takei and Tachibana, 2001, p.
30). When this still did not neutralize prisoner strikes, authorities declared martial
law on 13 November 1943.
74
The last large contingent of JA's marked for
segregation, about 2,000 men, were transferred into Tule Lake in February 1944
(Tule Lake Committee, 2000 [1980], p. 17).
75

The Purloined Purloined Letter
Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with
his limited medium.
Henri Matisse (in Gould, 1998)
i.
As with the ABC round-up, the U.S. loyalty questionnaire forced
separations, both hyper- and hypo-visible: violations that manifested most
apparently along axes of generation and gender. The loyalty questionnaire
intentionally reduced the different times, places, and historical conditions of JA

136
communities—the boundaries for the production and reproduction of culture—to
a series of Yes/No answers on one or another side of a gun, a guard tower, a
wall, a war, and an ocean. Distorting the heritage of difference, WRA Director
Eisenhower, in helping to prepare the questionnaire, projected that 50 percent of
issei would not be “loyal,” compared to just 15-20 percent of nisei, and urged
FDR to make a strong public statement on behalf of “loyal Nisei” (in Daniels,
1993, p. 57). These marks left impressions on people, regardless of what they
ultimately answered among the impossible options.
This fatal ascription of generational difference, formalized by pre-war
secret intelligence reports and more deeply exploited by the ABC round-up,
changed in dimension when people of Japanese ancestry were forced to make
identity claims using terms not of their own making or choosing. Militarized action
enabled by and directly following the questionnaire again systematically removed
remaining male members from the normative reproductive unit (i.e. their families)
as thousands more issei, kibei, and nisei joined those on original ABC-lists in
DOJ or criminal segregation camps, and thousands more nisei were shipped to
war. Yet, despite concerted efforts to categorize in order to divide, people wrote
letters to defy ascription, for example:

137

In this letter, Mikio Masuda
speaks for himself, at once within and
transcending the terms assigned to
him as well as his brother. Through
the letter, Mikio explicitly asserts his power to say what he means, as he writes:
“This may sound kind of a craze to you, for me it isnʼt…This may mean another
letter to you, but to me it isnʼt, and I mean every word of it.” In his claims, Mikio
neither consents nor reacts to the meanings imposed upon him; rather, he
references dominant identificatory categories such as issei, kibei, loyal, and
disloyal in order to give them his own meanings, ones which refuse reduction to
February 2, 1944
Blk. 19-7-F
Relocation Branch
McGhee, Arkansas
Hon. Edward J. Ennis
Director of Alien Enemy Control Unit
Department of Justice
Washington, D.C.

Dear Sir:
I hereby requesting [sic] a release of
my brother, Taro George Masuda, who is
now interned in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My
reason for his release as follows. If the Army
is taking loyal Japanese American under
draft age like me for instance, then why
should my brother be interned and classify
as disloyal person for which he is not [sic].
I am not saying this because I donʼt
want to be in the Army. Iʼm only saying that
before Iʼm draft for which I will be for sure, is
that I like to see that my brother is given a
square deal and to see that he will be able to
unite with his family. I like to see both his
wife and kids happy together before I leave
for the Army. If this is not granted I rather be
in jail I donʼt care how long. This may sound
kind of a craze to you, for me it isnʼt. I really
love this country itʼs a swell place, but I love
my brother even more. Heʼs only person I got
left in this world. This may mean another
letter to you, but to me it isnʼt, and I mean
every word of it. So please think it over.
Please answer.
Yours truly,
Mikio Masuda
Figure 3.7: Mikio Masuda to Edward J.
Ennis, 2 February 1944.

138
yes/no. This subversion of fatal binary oppositions allows Mikio to identify himself
through terms beyond patriotic nationalism and racism: as he simultaneously
avows love and duty for the U.S., while asserting himself through a love for
people and a principle of justice that take radical priority over formation of
country. Equally profoundly, the former also override dominant notions of
freedom—notions that, in contradiction, both rationalized the draft and defined
the jail.
ii.
Intensified use of U.S. military force against internees also threatened
members of the entire family in other ways, mirroring the original ABC round-up.
For example, Lucy Masuda writes on 15 February 1944:

February 15, 1944
W.R.A.
McGehee [sic] Ark.
Dear Honorable Sir,
When will you let my father
come back? We have been waiting
for so long. It is nearly two years
now. He didn't do any thing bad.
Why don't you let him come back.
We do not want to go to Tule Lake.
We do not want to go to some
other place too. We want to stay in
Arkansas with my father. Won't
you please let him come back?
You know how it feels?
Yours very truly,
Lucy Masuda

Figure 3.8: Lucy Masuda to Edward J. Ennis, 15 February 1944.

139
As Figure 3.8 illustrates, retaliation against criminalized issei extended to
all their kin, under the duress of simultaneous forced separation and forced
movement to unknown locations. In her letter, Lucy Masudaʼs fears allude not
only to concern for her fatherʼs whereabouts and well-being, but to the threat of
the entire familyʼs transfer to Tule Lake, in a state of martial law, to await an
unspecified fate. This uncertainty included potential round-up at Tule Lake in
order to face individual or collective deportation: a threat that further
contextualizes the Masuda childrenʼs increasingly desperate letters of appeal (cf.
Clay, Holsapple, & Ina, 2006; Tule Lake Committee, 2000[1980]). Under these
conditions, the letter serves as Lucy Masudaʼs only means to locate, address,
and hold accountable the “you” responsible for her familyʼs own displacement, as
she repeats: “When will you let my father come back?...Why wonʼt you let him
come back…Wonʼt you please let him come back? You know how it feels?”
iii.
Efforts to deport the interned included the passage of Public Law 405, or
the Renunciation Act, signed by Congress on 1 July 1944. This measure
pressured JA dissidents to renounce their U.S. citizenship and repatriate
“voluntarily”—a temptation for those strategizing ways to keep their families
together, in the possibility that the U.S. would ultimately deport issei internees to
Japan involuntarily (Clay, Holsapple, & Ina, 2006; Tule Lake Committee,
2000[1980]). In this context, as letters acted as a primary means of social

140
coordination and cohesion, the interned were willing to take tremendous personal
risks to steal the time, space, and words in order to facilitate their life of paper.
Many of these tactics were deployed at micro-scales, as Fiset (2001) finds,
Initially, the censors at Santa Fe and Fort Lincoln were largely successful
in shutting down [inter-camp] correspondence, leading some writers to
devise means to send secret messages in packages, such as packs of
cigarettes that only appeared to be sealed. Others asked visitors to
smuggle letters out of the internment camps and drop them in the mail at
distant post offices. Individuals caught attempting to evade censorship
faced time behind bars. One writer spent two weeks in the guard house
after a censor discovered invisible writing on a piece of his outgoing mail.
Others with greater imaginations were never caught. One couple cleverly
sewed messages into the lining of clothes sent to the wife for mending (p.
16).

The last example refers to kibei renunciant James Ina, interned at Fort
Lincoln, ND, and Shizuko Mitsui Ina, in prison camp at Tule Lake, CA, with two
children Kiyoshi and Satsuki. The Ina's created alternative measures to send and
receive letters in response not only to restrictions governing content, but also to
form. James wrote to Shizuko on 23 July 1945, “As far as correspondence is
concerned, there is a rule that we can send two letters (each letter within 25
lines) and one post card a week” (Clay, Hosapple, & Ina, 2006). Thus, according
to Satsuki Ina, who inherited her parents' archive after their passing, James Ina
stripped his bedding, wrote letters onto the cloth, rolled them up, and hid them
inside unstitched and re-sewn waistbands of pants, sent as laundry to Tule
Lake.
76
As he instructed Shizuko c. September-October 1945: “When I send you
a package with Satsuki's name, I may enclose a letter so be watchful. Please

141
send me another pair of thick wool pants. If you sew it well in the same place, it
may not be found. I already received your letter inside the belt” (Clay, Hosapple,
& Ina, 2006).
Additionally, Shizuko Ina innovated other tactics that succeeded in
mitigating censorship. Describing the extremities of the censors at that particular
time and place, Dr. Satsuki Ina says, “All the other [letters, besides the secret
ones] are cut up and you know, you open them up and some of them are just
flaps of paper.” In this context, Shizuko thought dialectically and acted in
contradiction to evasion. According to Dr. Ina:
[T]hen there's one (slight laugh) of my favorite letters my mother wrote,
before and after this one letter they're all cut. Some of them, for long
periods of time they didn't cut anything, and then, when the idea [occurred]
that my father may be deported...the intensity really heightens 'cause
she's in the other camp with the two children and my father's over here,
being threatened to be deported back to Japan after the war was over.
And so she writes to my father and says, you know, let's give up our plans
to return to Japan. This will be suicide for the children, blah blah blah blah,
and at the bottom she says, “Dear Censor.” (Interruption: “No way!”) Yeah!
“Dear Censor, For the sake of my children please do not cut this letter up.”
And it's one of the few letters that's not chopped up (laughs).
77

Conclusion: The Work of Art in Ages of Social Reproduction

Censorship truly triumphs when each citizen is transformed into the implacable
censor of his own acts and words. The dictatorship turns barracks and police
stations, abandoned railroad cars and unused boats into prisons. Does it not turn
each person's home into a jail as well?
Eduardo Galeano (1983, p. 78)
When you put a crease in a piece of paper, you're essentially changing the
memory. I'm essentially changing the memory of the paper.
Eric D. Demaine (in Gould, 2008)

142
In this chapter, I have examined the articulation of categorical, physical,
and dialogical constraints, within the inextricable practices of building
internment/prison camps and systematizing censorship. In my multi-scalar
analyses of these processes, I also highlighted the “fatal couplings of power and
difference” (Gilmore, 2002) that they produced along axes of race, gender,
citizenship status, and age. Furthermore, I investigated not only how these forces
of coercion shaped the form, content, and meaning of letter correspondence for
interned communities, but also how interned communities turned to the life of
paper in order to struggle for social life under this density of war. In the latter
sense, I have thus explored how aesthetic practices, vis-à-vis the life of paper in
the context of censorship, sustained or created possibilities for social
reproduction surviving forced separation, movement, and confinement.
In his letter (Figure 3.7), Mikio Matsuda wrote, “I really love this country itʼs
a swell place, but I love my brother even more.” In fact, the life of paper for the
interned has created an archive to keep this love alive: the histories of eros as
“aesthetic love,” philia as “intimate affectionateness between friends,” and agape,
“the love of [the divine] working in the lives of men” (King, 1986 [1957]). That is,
the life of paper continues to re-generate, shaping memory and meaning in the
afterlife of camp experience. Through the letter, for instance, Lawson Fusao
Inada recalls childhood friendship, in “Poems from Amache Camp” (1992, p. 26):

143
I.

“Dear Lawson,

2 Ys U R,
2 Ys U B,
I C U R
2 Ys 4 Me!

Your friend,

Bobby”
II.

“Dear Lawson,

I meet you early,
I meet you late,
I meet you at
Amache Gate!

Always,

Naomi”

Later generations have also used letters to vindicate the dead (cf.
Benjamin, 1968; Derrida, 1994; DuBois, 1970 [1935]; James, 1996; Moraga &
Anzaldúa, 1981). For instance, daughters such as Dr. Satsuki Ina, who have
access to remaining literary materials, translate their elders' words into different
forms of meaning: each one uniquely preserving again the stories of issei in the
U.S.—thus relieving novelist Okada of his “regret if their chapter in American
history should die with them.” Such work articulates across language and
aesthetic genre, as Dr. Ina collaborates with other artists to cross-translate her
parents' archive from Japanese to English back to Japanese back to English

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again, in order make films, write books, and host events on the legacies of camp.
About the process of working on her family's book (forthcoming), Ina explains:
So, what I had access to is, these, my parents writing letters to each other.
[But because of third-party and self-censorship], the letters exchanged
actually, um, they're so restrained; it's almost stunning how restrained they
are. Then I have, on my mother's side, her diaries...she's writing much
more about what her personal private struggles are....And then, my father
had a haiku journal...So I have all these notebooks because he wrote
“Notebook 1,” “Notebook 2,” and there's hundreds. That's gonna be a
second book....So I'm trying to weave all those together in my book...I'm
actually going to include in the book, all of her diary entries woven in with
the letters...Some of his haiku I will, but there's so much in his haiku...
78

Yet, the majority of people do not have such an abundance of literature to
work with. In part because of the generational rifts and estrangements, induced
between issei and nisei males in particular, much material thus also comes out of
the archives of silence. And silence becomes the backdrop of memory through
which men across time and generation, named the other's enemy in war, love
each other. Hence, James Masao Mitsui, in camp as a child at Tule Lake, CA,
puts into poetry what he learned about survival from his father while “Watching
Bon Odori from a Vantage Point with My Three Children” (1997, p. 11):
Not the oldest one, at 16 he had left their farm
in Nagano, gone to Tokyo, a descendent of samurai,
and had been thrown out of a club
that taught lessons in self-defense.
Right into the street, he would brag, just like this
as I held his still-strong grip and pulled him
up off the floor where I had tackled him,
not knowing judo. When you fall, he said,
before you land, hit the floor harder first
with your hand and arm; it won't hurt.

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Chapter Four

Imprisoned:
Pages of Stolen Life, Or,
Collectively Re-embodying
the Human

Apparently, activists who eventually won reparations from the U.S. for
WWII internment under the banner “Never again” must re-consider that phrase,
given the saying common among today's prison abolitionists, “Too soon for sorry”
(Weingartner, 2001; cf. Gilmore, 2008). Poet Etheridge Knight, writing from
Indiana State Prison, described the wars in the decades following WWII thus:
Everywhere it is said that “crime” is rising; and everywhere there are
prison walls, growing higher and higher. Walls—we live in a world of walls:
from the wall of racism that shut Martin Luther King out of Gage Park,
Illinois, to the walls of fire in Vietnam and Newark, to the gray stone walls
of San Quentin. And it is all too clear that there is a direct relationship
between men behind prison walls and men behind the myriad walls that
permeate this society...[C]rime/criminality/alienation is a matter of
definition. And when a people set out, with a gun in one hand and a Bible
in the other, to exploit and enslave and imprison all the other peoples of
the world (and succeed), and then the exploited and enslaved are called
the criminals—it is time to redefine the terms. It is time to put the proper
shoe on the proper foot (1968, pp. 5-6).

Starting from this perspective on mass imprisonment since the social
movements of the 1950ʼs and 1960ʼs, this chapter explores how battles to re-
Figure 4.1: Cell check at Pelican Bay State Prison, CA.
Photo by Martin Jimenez, Pinnacle Online, 23 April 2006.

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define or abolish the terms of exploitation, criminality, and ʻenslavementʼ take
place in and through the life of paper. That is, I begin by looking at the
emergence of the letter in the midst of “a world of walls”: situating what letters
mean, in the context of where contemporary U.S. imprisoned letters come from.
As Knight points out, the worldʼs walls divide at the same time as they extend
across places and peoples; in turn, letters to and from people in California as well
as beyond—united by shared visions to destroy the walls—make their way into
the remainder of this chapter. In the sections that follow, through analyses of
several pages of “stolen life” from publicly recognized and unrecognized sources
(Moten & Harney, 2004; Moten, 2008), I consider letter correspondence as a
“process of moving body into the world” (Mohanty, in the Sangtin Writers &
Nagar, 2006, p. xiii). On the one hand, I investigate how this process involves
confronting systematic violence that tortures the letter and the human bodies it
moves. On the other hand, I flesh out how and why people risk and endure such
torture for the life of paper.
In this chapter then, I weave through ten aspects of disembodiment and/or
re-embodiment, mediated through letters. I examine a continuity of practices that
have remained consistent, even if/as the prison-industrialized world has changed
dramatically over the last fifty years: aiming to clarify how, in this imprisoned
context, we can only understand what letters are in relation to what letters do.
This relationship, in which letter correspondence represents or sustains

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possibilities for social reproduction, frames what happens both to letters and to
the people who write them. In these cases, the brute force characterizing the
conditions for the peculiar productivity that is the life of paper politicizes the
essence of the activity, inextricable from the struggles that induce it. Under this
duress, the urgency to preserve old, and forge new, bonds, shapes the
emergence of distinct forms of intellectual labor, intimacy, and racialization in and
through the fight for life. As such, the life of paper also plays a unique role in
these broader social processes, bringing forth “the words of history” (Ranciere,
1994) that mediate nascent terrains of meaning and its making.
1: Letters and Doing Time

Consider the last line of the 1970 “Folsom Prisoners Manifesto of
Demands and Anti-Oppression Platform,” written amidst prisoner strikes and
rebellions happening from California to New York (Bernstein, 2010; Bissonette,
Hamm, Dellelo, & Rodman, 2008; Davis, McGee, & Soledad Brothers, 1971):
In our efforts to keep abreast of the outside world, through all categories of
news media, we are systematically restricted and punished by isolation
when we insist upon our human rights to the wisdom of awareness (in
Davis et al., 1971, p. 63).

The 1971 Attica Manifesto, tied to the rebellion following George Jacksonʼs
murder at San Quentin, CA (Hampton, Rockefeller, Ott, & Massiah, 1990),
repeats the preamble of the Folsom Manifesto before picking up where the latter
ends:

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We, the imprisoned men of Attica Prison, seek an end to the injustice
suffered by all prisoners, regardless of race, creed, or color.
The preparation and content of this document has been constructed under
the unified efforts of all races and social segments of this prison.

...Due to the conditional fact that Attica Prison is one of the most classic
institutions of authoritative inhumanity upon men, the following manifesto
of demands [is] being submitted:

“Man's right to knowledge and free use thereof” (in James, 2005, p. 303).

The priority granted in both documents to the rights, technologies, and
socialities of knowledge, as a means to justice, provide the backdrop for the life
of paper in this context. Namely, as recently as 8 January 2011,The New York
Times ran the front-page headline: “The handwritten letter, an art all but lost,
thrives in prison.” In the story, journalist Jeremy Peters argues,
Prisoners send handwritten letters not out of any romantic attachment to
the old-fashioned craft of letter writing but out of necessity. Many prisons
do not allow inmates access to computers. And prisons that do hardly ever
allow inmates access to the Internet or to conventional e-mail systems. In
California, for example, prisoners are not permitted e-mail contact (p.
B4).
79

Indeed, as they say, “the time is out of joint” (cf. Derrida, 1994). That is, in
this contemporary world filled with highly complex networks of virtual realities,
handwritten letters remain today as relevant as they ever were in 1972, or 1942,
or 1882, precisely because of the dehumanizing deprivation defining prisons that
radically represses all media and forms of human communication. Yet, in this
context, imprisoned peopleʼs continued innovations in epistolarity, the latter
widely viewed as “an art all but lost”—as dead, ineffectual, or obsolete—

149
creatively exposes and defies the lie of Eurocentric “civilization” as a natural,
predetermined destiny of technological advance that universally defines all social
movements. As Nelson, Tu, and Hines note,
[Subjugated peoples] are experts at ʻrefunctioningʼ old/obsolete
technologies or inventing new uses for common old ones…[fashioning]
technologies to fit their needs and priorities. In the process, they have
become innovators, creating new aesthetic forms…new avenues for
political action, and new ways to articulate their identities (in Tal, 2002, p.
68).

From this perspective, the life of paper can evince sustained connections
to different, counter-hegemonic histories and epistemologies of time, space,
information, and technology: distinctive from Eurocentric forms of sociality and
creative of human identities as such (cf. Cvetkovich, 2003; Gordon, 1997;
Halberstam, 2005; Keeling, 2007; Kelley, 1993; 1998; Lowe & Lloyd, 1997;
Nelson, 2002; Weheliye, 2005, 2002). Insofar as the “prison-industrial complex”
re-fashions dominant technologies of premature death that have appeared so
starkly as the history of specifically anti-Black racism in the U.S. (Davis, 2003;
DuBois, 1970 [1935]; Gilmore, 2008; James, 2003; Rodríguez, 2006; Woods,
1998), the life of paper for the imprisoned thus also evolves significantly out of
Black cultural traditions that have evaded social movements for captivity (Kelley,
2002; Moten, 2003; Robinson, 1983). In this latter sense, several scholars, as
well as imprisoned writers themselves, assert that U.S. prison writing in general
either grows directly out of, or is shaped by, conventions of the slave narrative
(Hames-Garcia, 2004; Jackson, 1972, 1970; James, 2003, 1999; Mumia, 1995;

150
Rodríguez, 2006; Shakur, 1987; Wideman, 2005). Rather than record aspects of
space and time conceived and rationalized through European epistemologies,
this form of literary engagement takes the “masterʼs tools” to participate in the
making of peopleʼs own histories radically in danger (Lorde, 1984; cf. Baker &
Redmond, 1989; H.B. Franklin, 1978; V.P. Franklin, 1995; Jablon, 1997; Jones,
1999). Pedagogically, the slave narrative also functions differently than other
genres of “minor” literatures, as Michael Hames-Garcia argues,
I want to distinguish this autobiographical pedagogy [of contemporary U.S.
minority writers], typically centered on questions of self-improvement and
enlightenment, from the distinct pedagogical objective of the slave
narrative, which sought to educate its audience about the evils of slavery
and to propose new models for conceptualizing freedom…[A] defining
feature of the nineteenth-century slave narrative [is] its organic role within
a social movement for the abolition of slavery (2004, p. 102, 115).

While I am not making the claim that all prison writings or letters decisively
advance contemporary abolitionist movements, the pages of “stolen life”
specifically comprising this chapter either come directly from such literatures, or
have been influenced by these literatures in the process of making sense. As
such, even when they are not written for purposes of public consumption or
political protest, these pages are aware of themselves as pieces of writing that
enact a “textual resistance” (Harlow, 1992) to the social systems animating
“carceral geographies” (Gilmore, 2007) and “penal democracy” (James, 2005).
Furthermore, as communities accept embodied risks and dangers to engage in
acts of correspondence through the walls, these letters—similar to Latin

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American testimonio (Esparza, 2010; Pérez-Huber, 2009; Solórzano & Yosso,
2002) and transnational women of color literary praxes (Evans, 1984; Moraga &
Anzaldúa, 1981)—also represent journeys: ones that produce knowledge “to
constitute ourselves as political actors in institutions and processes both near
and far” (Sangtin Writers & Nagar, 2006, p. 154).
Lastly, prison letter correspondence in particular, in ways distinguishable
from prison writing in general, is formative of the very experience of serving time:
a process of social exchange that shapes, as much as it is shaped by, the dense
realities of imprisoned life. For instance, Marxian theorist Antonio Gramsci, best
known for his Prison Notebooks written during his years as a political prisoner in
fascist Italy, is less known for his letters. Yet, in one letter to his mother, dated 24
August 1931, he writes:
This is what I think: people don't write to a prisoner either out of
indifference or because of a lack of imagination. In your case and with
everyone else at home I never even thought it could be a matter of
indifference. I think rather that it is a lack of imagination: you can't picture
exactly what life in prison is like and what essential importance
correspondence has, how it fills the days and also gives a certain flavor to
one's life. I never speak of the negative aspects of my life...But this does
not mean that the negative aspect of my life as a prisoner does not exist
and is not very burdensome and should at least not be rendered more
onerous by those who are dear to me. In any event, this little speech is not
addressed to you, but to Teresina, Grazietta, and Mea, who indeed could
at least send me a postcard now and then (in Rosenthal, 1994, p. 58; cf.
Harlow, 1992, p. xvii).

Compare Gramsciʼs reflections to that of a different generation of political
prisoner,
80
incarcerated in another time and place for his struggles for human

152
rights. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. concludes his famous 1963 “Letter from a
Birmingham Jail”:
Never before have I written so long a letter. Iʼm afraid it is much too long to
take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much
shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can
one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters,
think long thoughts and pray long prayers? (in James, 2003, p. 46)

In both cases, the sociality specific to letter correspondence—acts of both
receiving and writing letters—literally fills the dead space-time. As such, prison
letters, as a category in themselves, may also have a traceable genealogy linked
not only to literary genres inherited by imprisoned populations, but also to the
political development and use of prisons themselves, as institutions for social
containment. Tethered to these material conditions, letters are, as Gramsci points
out, acts of imagination that give flavor to life; they are, as King writes, bound to
long thoughts and long prayers occasioned by forced isolation.
2: Open Letters
When Los Angeles-based Communist activist Ethel Shapiro-Bertolini
embarked on a national prison letter correspondence project in 1972, she found:
Almost overnight the problem became staggering, overwhelming, and all-
consuming…The request of ALL was that we continue writing them…We
soon realized that we were buried by an avalanche. We were snowed
under by an unexpected outpouring of deep emotions from a suffering and
aching group of people who requested that their cries be heard through
the wall. They all wanted to tell their stories. They all wanted the outside to
hear them out in detail, objectively (1976, pp. vii-viii).

153
Shapiro-Bertolini remarks here on the arena that letters provide, to “be
heard through the wall”—a need that, as one person tried to meet it, became
immediately “staggering, overwhelming, all-consuming.” A generation later,
speaking about this “avalanche” from another perspective, political prisoner
Mumia Abu-Jamal writes of his struggle to publish Live from Death Row (1996),
In Live from Death Row, you hear the voices of the many, the oppressed,
the damned, and the bombed. I paid a high price to bring it to you, and I
will pay more, but I tell you, I would do it a thousand times, no matter what
the cost, because it is right!...As you read this, know that I am being
punished by the government for writing Live from Death Row, and for
writing these very words. Indeed, Iʼve been punished by the United States
government for my writings since I was fifteen years of age—but Iʼve kept
right on writing. You keep right on reading! (Abu-Jamal, 1997, pp. 2-3,
original emphasis; cf. Hames-Garcia, 2004, p. xviii)

Abu-Jamal published these comments as preface to his follow-up book,
Death Blossoms: Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience. Is it not also an
“open letter,” written by him directly to us? In fact, as Elizabeth Cook (1996)
argues, the epistolary form has not only historically shaped Western thought
across institutions, fields, and genres; it also distinctively highlights “the
contradictions between private document and public book” (p. 2), enabling a form
that is at once “writing from the heart” and “calm and deliberate performance”
(pp. 16-17). In the case of imprisoned epistolarity, as Abu-Jamalʼs open
letter/reflections demonstrate, this form of address—as it uniquely blends
features of political manifesto, prison autobiography/“neo-slave” narrative, social

154
theory or criticism, and personal letter—can accomplish things that other forms
cannot.
Specific to Abu-Jamalʼs example, in which he directly addresses the
reader in an open forum, at least three things occur. First, by naming and
speaking to a “you” that is simultaneously personal and generalized, he is able to
socialize a message through what remains an individualized address. Secondly,
and perhaps more urgently, the use of first- and second-, instead of conventional
third-person, directly implicates readers in both the structures of injustice that the
first-person suffers, as well as public accountability for transforming those
structures to redress the injustice.
Lastly, through this form of address—enabled by access to publication—
Abu-Jamal is able to retain the emotive force of a personal letter, while also
retaining himself, rather than a third-party letter correspondent, as the main voice
who amplifies “the voices of the many, the oppressed, the damned, and the
bombed.” This removal of an additional interlocutor does not ameliorate broader
problems embedded in conditions of production, circulation, and consumption of
texts by the imprisoned: in which the latter must engage dominant publics who
derive their sense of being from the very structures that keep the imprisoned in
prison (James, 1999, pp. 135-136; Wideman, in Mumia, 1996, pp. xxix-xxxiv).
However, in these instances of direct address, the ability to bring stories directly
to the public, rather transmit them through letters in dialogue with a specific

155
individual or specified editor, can eliminate additional or particularized limits that
the addressee brings to the dialogical terrain.
This radically changes the discursive boundaries—namely, in this
instance, Abu-Jamal points out the consequences he shares and suffers with the
many, those an interlocutor not in prison does not. Paradoxically, as Abu-Jamal
decisively withstands the brutality he faces, he is not “snowed under” by the
voices (in this sense, neither does he speak directly to nor through the anxieties
of those who are), but is instead empowered by the voices, and speaks from this
position. Thus, invoking this sense of solidarity, as well as naming the misery he
endures to produce it, Abu-Jamal then also extends the injunction to “you,” whom
he asks to join in acts of what “is right,” beginning with the bond of the word.
On the other hand, in other types of open letters, writers mobilize
opportunities afforded precisely by addressing a specific person or persons,
rather than a general public (Lloyd, personal communication, October 24, 2010):
presenting or re-presenting the former to the latter through terms that “speak a
truer word about [ourselves]” (Spillers, 2003, p. 203). For example, going back in
time again, consider James Baldwinʼs “Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Davis,”
penned 19 November 1970, in which he concludes:
We know that we, the Blacks, and not only we, the Blacks, have been, and
are, the victims of a system whose only fuel is greed, whose only god is
profit. We know that the fruits of this system have been ignorance,
despair, and death, and we know the system is doomed because the
world can no longer afford it—if, indeed, it ever could have. And we know
that, for the perpetuation of this system, we have all been mercilessly

156
brutalized, and have been told nothing but lies, lies about ourselves and
our kinsmen and our past, and about love, life, and death, so that both
soul and body have been bound in hell.

The enormous revolution in Black consciousness which has occurred in
your generation, my dear sister, means the beginning or the end of
America. Some of us, white and Black, know how great a price has
already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new
people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are
worse than the murderers hired in our name.

If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—
which it is—and render impassible with our bodies the corridor to the gas
chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us
that night.

Therefore: peace.

Brother James (in Davis et al., 1971, pp. 13-18)
In this open letter, in which the public is included in a “private” exchange
between Baldwin and Davis, Baldwinʼs political arguments derive their persuasive
force from the intimacies he produces through the personal form of address.
Beginning with a relationship Baldwin writes in terms of kinship, readers of the
open letter encounter Davis, at that moment vilified as a public enemy, not only
as a political prisoner, but as “my dear sister.” This reversal resonates with how
Hames-Garcia (2004) describes the work of political prisoner autobiography:
[Assata Shakurʼs] autobiographical form serves not merely to “disguise”
what might otherwise have been a handbook on activism and guerilla
warfare. This method of presentation allows Shakur to draw her reader
into the world of a revolutionary. In a country where revolutionaries are
made into “horrible and hideous monsters” [Shakur, 1987, p. 181],
Assataʼs persona is humanized and her decisions and choices are
presented with clear, reasoned justifications (p. 138).

157
As Baldwinʼs example demonstrates, the open letter can also perform
these functions, with the ability to “humanize” not just one persona or
perspective, but a multiplicity: at once the letterʼs writer, the letterʼs formal
addressee, the letterʼs public readers, and finally, the dialogical encounters in the
myriad combinations of the three—that is, in this example, Baldwin-Davis,
Baldwin-public, Davis-public, Baldwin-Davis-public, and the nexus of each of
these relations in the letterʼs totality. This multi-dimensional sociality animates
Baldwinʼs letter, propelling it beyond the boundaries of dominant discourse to
take us into the heart of the latterʼs homicidal moral interior. By the conclusion of
the letterʼs journey through the real “heart of darkness,” the life of paper has
taken us to a different precipice, as Baldwin first uses the letter to tell us what we
know, and then finishes, “If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it
were our own—which it is—and render impassible with our bodies the corridor to
the gas chamber.” In this call, the struggles we have traversed on paper, through
participating in the correspondence by the act of reading it, transforms into the
fight to embody the knowledge we now share, in the service of collective life.
If letters such as Baldwinʼs bring us back to life by showing us what we
know, other open letters can illuminate the potential that resides in what we donʼt.
Consider the radical uncertainties that punctuate Fr. Daniel J. Berrigan, S.J.ʼs
“Letter to the Weathermen”: initiated as a voice recording from “underground” in
1970 and publicly delivered in 1971, following his arrest for burning draft cards in

158
Cantonsville, MD (Berrigan & Coles, 1971). In this letter, Berrigan addresses
fellow anti-imperialist activists in the organization Weather Underground,
regarding unresolved tactical differences in each of their approaches to end war.
In fact, the precarious bond between people and paper—its relations to
violence—conditions this very exchange, as Berrigan contrasts his activism with
the direction he feared the Weathermen would take, “I never tried to hurt a
person. I tried to do something symbolic with pieces of paper” (Berrigan & Coles,
1971, p. 62). In these regards, to clarify shared confusions, Berrigan writes,
Let me express a deep sense of gratitude that the chance has come to
speak to you across the underground. Itʼs a great moment; I rejoice in the
fact that we can start a dialogue that I hope will continue through the
smoke signals, all with a view to enlarging our circle. Indeed the times
demand not that we narrow our method of communication but that we
enlarge it, if anything new or better is to emerge...The threat is a very
simple one; we are making connections…connections with prisoners and
Cubans and Vietnamese…We are guilty of making connections, we urge
others to explore new ways of getting connected, of getting married, of
educating children, of sharing goods and skills, of being religious, of being
human, of resisting…And I am guilty of making connections with you (in
James, 2003, pp. 242-243).

Berriganʼs efforts to “do something symbolic with pieces of paper” have
transformed in this open letter, from making connections by burning paper to
making connections by speaking through it. His gestures of gratitude and
invitation “through the smoke signals” enact a meaningful solidarity through
disagreement. Furthermore, as an open letter that intentionally assigns the public
a passive role in the exchange, Berriganʼs speech act simultaneously deactivates
the capacity for outside parties to intervene in the relationship and cloud the

159
“signals.” Yet, Berriganʼs writing breathes precisely through the publicʼs engaged
passivity, as Berrigan mobilizes it to vitalize the letterʼs function as connective
tissue: joining an alienating yet shared no where (“the underground”) with an
emergent “new or better” that all readers are also now “guilty” of, implicated in the
“enlarging circle” of communication as they read.
3: Letters and Torture
Under ideal circumstances, we can easily forget that reading and writing
letters are intensely physical labors, shaped by our relations to the means,
conditions, and infrastructures that make letter correspondence possible. Normal
prison circumstances, in contrast, burn this fact into muscle memory. The
complexities of this urgent problem may again first begin with what letters are in
this context. As Terry Bradford writes to Ethel Shapiro-Bertolini, from a California
prison on 17 June 1974:
Correspondence is one of the basic ways of keeping a society in sight and
alleviating some of the pressures present in our every day life. It is a
welcome change to have something to look forward to besides two meals
a day and a sandwich, exercise every three days, showers once a week
and a change of clothes whenever they have them. Just getting up in the
morning looking at the shotgun across the tier doesn't make me feel good
in the least…All I have to do is get frustrated and give a guard a bloody
nose and they can send me to the gas chamber. With nothing to keep my
mind off the way I'm being treated, because of my being classified as a so-
called black militant, I have one foot there already. This is existentialism
(in Shapiro-Bertolini, 1976, pp. 225-226).

By Bradfordʼs definition, the imaginative force of letters, which “keep a society in
sight” and give “something to look forward to,” hinge in contradiction with a mind

160
and body undergoing torture; letters, imbued with a corporeal ability to “alleviate
some of the pressures,” intervene in practices of torture by “keeping [the] mind
off” physical and existential agony.
Under these conditions, U.S. prison officials have fine-tuned their methods
of incorporating letters in their practices of torture: manipulating the life of paper
to intensify physical and sensory deprivation applied to people. Using letters for
torture occurs perhaps most discernibly in practices of unbridled censorship and
repression. Samuel D. Billings, for example, lays out a ruthlessly cyclical
continuum of the ways that prison officials directly link brute force with control
over letter correspondence. He writes to Shapiro-Bertolini from an unspecified
location on 3 August 1974:
Please remember, that if thereʼs an interval in our Correspondence it can
only mean four things: 1. that Iʼm in solitary confinement, 2. or Segregation
Confinement, 3. Hospitalized, 4. the Prison Officials have terminated our
correspondence. When you are in Solitary, or Segregation, your rights to
mail letters, and to have visitors are forfeited until released…Itʼs very
important to understand, that the Prisoner is Spoken For, by the Prison
Officials, they donʼt allow us to Speak. When the Officials tell a lie…we
have no way to refute it, because we are not allowed to write to the Media,
and another reason is, the Media is indifferent to Prison letters. The only
way the Prison will let a letter out is, that it supports the Prison. Prisoners
donʼt write the Medias for other reasons; the punishment of the prison
officials is so great (in Shapiro-Bertolini, 1976, pp. 147-148 [original text]).

The imprisoned have also testified to the forms of torture they face, as
they struggle to secure the means of letter production and put them to fruitful use.
In one instance, Eddie L. Taylor writes of the micro-aggressions that frustrate his

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attempts to correspond successfully with Shapiro-Bertolini. He writes to her on 5
August 1974 (location unspecified):
I have a letter I sent to you returned to me twice now for a so-called
institutional rule violation, (I'm only supposed to put two sheets of paper in
an envelope) which is seldom enforced unless prison authorities wish to
harass a prisoner for some reason. I may have to start sending you my
story in manila envelopes (about 20 sheets at a time) because I cannot
afford the cost in envelopes (we are limited in the number of envelopes we
can purchase) at only two sheets per envelope; I have other people I
correspond with (in Shapiro-Bertolini, 1976, p. 115).

Moreover, the lack of access to adequate materials, coupled with the
physical conditions of confinement, characterize the heinous conditions of writing
as labor. As Lee Brown, writing to Shapiro-Bertolini from Vacaville State Prison,
CA, remarks, c. 1974: “To speak of getting comfortable is ineffable[,] e.g. have
you ever tried writing on a book placed across your knees when the book is
smaller than the paper itself?” (in Shapiro-Bertolini, 1976, p. 26). Miguel Nevarez,
writing on 28 June 1974 from solitary confinement at Leavenworth Penitentiary,
KS, describes his situation:
However, I must remind you that I am living under very primitive
conditions[. S]ometimes I am without paper and pencil for days on end. I
am constantly moved from cell to cell and have no idea when I'll be
released to population. If our correspondence is somehow disrupted it is
because of the above reasons or reasons which I can't possibly go into
right now. There is no consistency or direction contained in the unlawful
actions of my keepers (in Shapiro-Bertolini, 1976, p. 310).

These approaches to “progress” have only become more, not less, routine
over time. For example, former political prisoner Laura Whitehorn, alongside
recently passed political prisoner Marilyn Buck,
81
testify to the dehumanization of

162
prisons that vexes correspondence in more recent years, from solitary
confinement to overcrowding:
I think it's typical of Marilyn not to complain in an interview [with Susie Day]
about her own conditions. When we look at the two million people in the
federal and state systems [c. 2001], the proportion of women in those
numbers has gone way up. What that means to someone like Marilyn is
tremendous overcrowding: You're living the rest of your life in a tiny cell
that was built for one person and now houses three. It means you have no
property, because there's no room...It means you have no desk. Marilyn
Buck, like many prisoners who fight very hard to get an education, has to
sit on a cot and write on her lap. The overcrowding means that people are
treated like problems and like baggage (in James, 2003, p. 261).

If, on the one hand, such struggles involved in reading, writing, and
circulating letters index the anti-sociality of prisons; on the other hand, U.S.
government and prison officials also exploit the life of paper to help socialize a
broad culture of torture. One visceral example comes from a better-known
collection of letters, Soledad Brother (1994 [1970]), by murdered imprisoned
revolutionary George Jackson. In a letter to (Robert) Lester Jackson, dated July
1965, George Jackson rages against his father for failing to register the intimate
relationship between the body of Lester Jacksonʼs letters and George Jacksonʼs
real corporeal body, in the context of war at San Quentin, CA State Prison:
Lester,

I write this letter to inform you that the people who hold me here read that
letter sent them. They read it and smiled with satisfaction and triumph.
You are under a grave illusion, I must now admit. You didnʼt think they
would inform me of it, did you? But you are in serious error. They let me
read it. Apparently every petty official in the prison has read it, all to my
embarrassment. For it sounded like something out of Stoweʼs Uncle Tomʼs
Cabin.

163

It didnʼt just cause me embarrassment. It also has caused me to be put in
a cell that has the lock welded closed. Can it possibly be? It is within the
scope of feasibility that you did not know that to tell these people I was
ʻbent on self-destructionʼ (to use your reference) would cause me harm?
Are you so feeble of mind as to ʻreport,ʼ after a visit with me, that I am bent
on violent self-destruction and think it would cause me no harm! (Jackson,
1994 [1970], p. 65)

In this scenario, prison officials have incorporated social relationships,
which the imprisoned maintain through letter correspondence, into their practices
of retaliatory violence. As Jacksonʼs letter illustrates, such brutality corrodes the
remaining bonds that imprisoned people share with their communities—mediated
through the life of paper—at the same time as it distorts those bonds as a means
to justify torture. Again, these practices from 1965 remain operative through the
twenty-first century. For instance, Viet Mike Ngo, imprisoned at San Quentin in
2002, describes the retaliation he faced, as a result of organizing for prison
education and racial de-segregation of prison housing (cf. James, 2005, pp. 249-
258; Rodríguez, 2006, pp. 92-104):
The Hearing Officer who adjudicated the [administrative charges regarding
involvement in organizing for prison education] dismissed all counts
except one: corresponding with a volunteer, a non-serious offense. He
found me guilty despite stating in his deposition that such correspondence
appears to be allowed by prison regulations.

Prison officials informed me that the four month-long investigation, six
months of solitary confinement, and five transfers was due to a non-
serious, suspect, prison write-up for writing letters…[Ngo, in Zheng, 2007,
p. 75).

164
A final set of examples demonstrates how U.S. government and prison
officials have socialized retaliatory torture by manipulating the life of paper,
specifically along axes of gender and sexuality. In the following instance, dated
back to 8 September 1972 (unspecified location), Ronnie K. Irwin, a member of
the Black Panther Party in Detroit, MI, writes to Shapiro-Bertolini:
I am still receiving repercussions from my involvement in the Party.
Recently the F.B.I. searched my son's mother's house (also an ex-Party
member) and took nothing but all the letters I have written to her since I
was first arrested in April 1971. This illegal seizure was meant to be a
revengeful blow against me for not answering their questions when they
came up here last spring (in Shapiro-Bertolini, 1976, p. 8).

In this example, FBI and prison officialsʼ retaliation and intimidation tactics
have exceeded the boundaries of the prison they seek to enforce, breaking into
the boundaries of the domestic sphere they purport to defend. While Irwin speaks
to the “revengeful blow” against himself that the illegal seizure enacted—
referencing it as retaliation for his exercise of the right to remain silent—other
details add subtext to the event. Namely, the “revengeful blow” against Irwinʼs
family also echoes in the account, as state officials invade their home and cause
intentional distress, inextricable from aims to distress Irwin himself. Moreover, as
state officials force his sonʼs mother to stand between the blow intended for Irwin,
we get an example of how violent retaliation against men of color also
incorporates and affects women of color: particularly as it attacks female heads
of household (cf. Gilmore, 1999), and furthermore, particularly in relation to
normative gendered divisions of labor in political organizing, in which women are

165
commonly assigned roles in information gathering (Harlow, 1992, p. 39; James,
1999, p. 140). All these forms of violence here: fixating on the letters.
Lastly then, as incarceration rates of women of color themselves have
risen dramatically in recent decades (Enos, 2001; Talvi, 2007; Young & Reviere,
2006), these forms of socialized torture practiced in menʼs prisons, revolving
around letters, apply to women in prison in differently sexualized ways. As
contemporary anti-prison activist Stormy Ogden-McCloud speaks about her
experience in prison in Norco, CA, at the turn of the twenty-first century:
While I was in prison I was writing a Mono man that was in Soledad at the
time. His older brother was part of the American Indian Movement, and as
time went by, we started to write more and more about AIM and the
different things that they did and what they did for the Indian community.
One of the male “white” guards on the third watch began reading my mail
more closely and making remarks about my “boyfriend” being one of those
“AIMster Gangsters” and how we have got to stop living in Teepees and
realize that the old days are gone...I was the chairperson of the [American
Indian] spiritual group there and we had an office space where we would
meet once a week. Not too long after the guard starting making remarks to
me about AIM, they began to search the office on a regular schedule after
we had our weekly meeting, with the excuse that they were looking for
anything that might be “gang related.” The guards would also go through
our lockers or search our beds, look through our bead work or sacred
material (personal communication, July 26, 2010).

Andrea Smith (2005) argues that sexual violence—often experienced and
thought in its interpersonal dimensions—originates as part of a system of
dehumanization that penetrates all practices and aspects of civic life. In this
sense, sexual violence is not just a situational problem between isolated
individuals, but lies at the heart of whiteness and the societal habits that its

166
institutions structure and train through all the people they touch. As Smith
demonstrates, specifically from an American Indian standpoint, such ritualized
practices are the work of genocide: impacting or killing bodies at the same time
that they are part of an organized, comprehensive dismantling of people's
relationships to land, knowledge, health, healing, and spiritual essence.
Through this lens, the sexual violence embedded Ogden-McCloudʼs
account becomes clearer. First, prison guards violated her life of paper and
exploited it as a means to humiliate her in explicitly racialized, gendered, and
sexualized terms. Then, the guards abused the intimacies they found in letters,
precisely as Smith argues, to justify assaults on imprisoned womenʼs
relationships to space, knowledge, health, healing, and spiritual essence. Such
comprehensive violence can prompt people to withdraw from the life of paper
altogether. As Assata Shakur later reflected on her time in prison:
I was receiving a lot of mail…I wasn't able to answer all of those letters
because the prison permitted us to write only two letters a week, subject to
inspection and censorship by the prison authorities. It was hard for me to
write anyway. I was also very paranoid about letters. I could not bear the
thought of the police, FBI, guards, whoever, reading my letters and getting
daily insight on how i was feeling and thinking. But i would like to offer my
sincerest apology to those who were kind enough to write me over the
years and who received no answer (1987, p. 49).

4: Letters and Fathers
In the letters of Soledad Brother, George Jackson often tries to
communicate both the weight of his oppression, as well as the struggles of his
being, through frustrated correspondence with his father—in despair, more than

167
occasionally referring to Lester Jackson in terms such as “feeble of mind” (see
the July 1965 passage discussed earlier). Yet, the strong dialogical presence of
both Lester and Georgia Jackson in Soledad Brother attests to their role in
helping articulate George Jacksonʼs political thought and vision, even if they did
not share the same positions. The “terrible beauty” of these relationships (cf.
Brooks, in Knight, 1968; Moten, 2008), folded into the pages of these letters, is
remarkable: contextualized by the radical dehumanization facing George Jackson
at San Quentin, which induced in him a need to “rid myself of all sentiment and
remove all possibility of love,” as he wrote to his mother in June 1964 (Jackson,
1994 [1970], p. 38). Under this tremendous duress, the glimmers of male
intimacy, just below the surface of Soledad Brother, radiate as simultaneously
emotive and politicized forces. For example, George Jackson writes on 2
November 1967,
Dear Robert,

I received both your letters today dated the twenty-ninth and thirtieth. True
I may forget myself sometimes and Iʼll have to redouble my efforts to
control this. I know it is wrong and I know the proper method. It is the
application of method that sometimes causes me trouble. Iʼll redouble my
effort to get over this…

On the subject of injury, there is the real and the imagined…By telling me
that Jon [George Jacksonʼs younger brother] has no chip on his shoulder,
you attempted to make me feel alone and isolated in my attitudes. But you
are wrong in trying to second-guess me, because I have no chip on my
shoulder…I bear no one on earth any ill will…Almost every day I have
something to forgive and forget…

168
Itʼs hard, my friend. Because of my temperament itʼs even harder. I hope I
can make it.

Take care of yourself.
George (1994 [1970]), pp. 143-144)

This letter, born from both intimacy and antagonism, begins with an
allusion to Lester Jacksonʼs own letters, their concern and admonishment that
haunt Georgeʼs response. About his own relationship to Soledad Brother, Lester
Jackson, grieving both his murdered sons,
82
wrote in an article for Ebony
magazine in November 1971:
In prison waiting rooms all over northern California, weʼd repeatedly lock
horns on the issues of the day, often continuing our interrupted talks
through the mail. Georgeʼs ideas are expressed very brilliantly in a
published collection of his letters, Soledad Brother, many of whose
viewpoints were directed at me. My own ideas were considerably less
radical, as I felt—and still feel—that any program for action must pay
considerably more attention to practical implementation. My views have
developed from bitter experience—from 29 years as the head of a family
(Jackson, 1971, p. 72).

In fact, the absent letters of Lester Jackson in Soledad Brother—some of
which this Ebony piece, “A Dialogue with My Soledad Son,” fills in—remind us
that revolutionary icon George Jackson was only twenty-nine years old at the
time of his death, raised under conditions of torture and having completed his
intellectual work, by U.S. standards, in only late adolescence. Again, “the time is
out of joint”: for the imprisoned, as “the head of a family” uniquely knows, there is
no childhood. In this context, letters became only the place where Lester Jackson
would find and learn about his son, as he reflects,

169
It is possible that our difficulties may have started in Chicago, where our
children—George, Jon, and their sisters, Frances, DeLora, and
Penelope—were all born, for no set of parents could have been born more
bourgeois than my wife, Georgia, and I were then…The Jackson kids had
to have the best clothing (at least to the extent that our income could
afford it) and extra money in their pockets to spend. All of them went to
parochial schools, as the public facilities available in the ghetto were seen
by us as inferior in quality. Their every move was under surveillance,
whether by Georgia, myself or one of our neighbors. The house rules
which she and I had obeyed as children would certainly apply to our own
children—or else.

What effect this had upon George I cannot say. But as he later recalled in
Soledad Brother: “My family knew very little about my real life. In effect, I
lived two lives, the one with my mama and sisters, and the thing on the
street…” (1971, p. 74).

Such revelations
about his sonʼs life, which
occurred to Lester Jackson
in time through the life of
paper, ultimately shaped
the latter as the place
where Lester could also
locate himself as “head of a
family”:
Realizing that George had developed intellectually, and had read many
books in his life behind bars, Iʼd plant a seed at the conclusion of each
visit and see if it would grow in his newly expanded mind. Slowly Iʼd notice
these seeds taking root, in letters written on both sides of the paper which
he was permitted to send from the prison each week…Often our
discussions were considerably more heated…Iʼd write to George what the
Figure 4.2: (Robert) Lester Jackson, sorting through letters
of condolence following George Jacksonʼs murder. Excerpt
from the original caption in Ebony magazine reads: “Many
of the letters come from distant parts of the nation where
sales of Georgeʼs Soledad Brother skyrocketed in the
weeks that followed the tragedy” (November 1971, p. 82).

170
whites I knew were saying…In each of his letters for the next few months,
heʼd rave at me for even bringing up “Whitey” (1971, p. 76).

Situated in this context, we can now get a fuller picture of the triangulation
of male bonding between Lester, George, and Jonathan Jackson, happening in
George Jacksonʼs 2 November 1967 letter. Lester Jacksonʼs perspective
enriches what we can see in Georgeʼs hard feelings about the comparison drawn
between himself and Jon, regarding a “chip on the shoulder.” As Lester
Jackson puts it, “Jon, who was 17 years old when he died, was my heart” (1971,
p. 80). The correspondence between George and Lester, then, the aggravated
longings between them, write over shared affection for Jonathan and senses of
responsibility for raising him to adulthood. In the latter regard, Lester writes of
visiting George in Salinas, CA, in 1970, at the preliminary hearings against the
Soledad Brothers (in which George Jackson, John Cluchette, and Fleeta Drumgo
were framed for the January 1970 killing a Soledad guard):
When finally we arrived and were permitted to see George, what shocked
us all was his disheveled appearance…A padlock held a wide belt around
his waist. Both his wrists were handcuffed to his sides…They hadnʼt given
him any underwear or socks. I lit a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth,
accidentally touching his cheeks. They were cold as ice.

“Where are your glasses?” I wanted to know.

“The stepped on them.”

…As I listened to him talk, I had one regret. It was the decision to bring
Jon along. I was beginning to fear what his reaction might be as he
listened to the horrors that his brother was relating (1971, pp. 80-81).

171
Indeed, Jonathanʼs murder just months later, as he attempted to free
comrades of the Soledad Brothers, tragically color Lester Jacksonʼs meditations
on trying to raise and survive his two only sons—George shot a year after Jon. In
the passage above, Lester Jackson expresses the existential liabilities
associated with allowing Jon to visit George in prison, which terrorized Lester, as
he feared for the fate of each and both his sons (there is no mention of the
Jackson daughters). In this ontological crisis, the radical constraints of context
also deepened the urgency of the life of paper: as a relatively safer, less confined
terrain to communicate and to bond. Through letters, Lester, George, and
Jonathan Jackson could love each other, and each could also know that he was
loved. This gave life to revolutionary spirit, as George writes to Jonathan on 25
September 1969:
Dear Jon,

…[Robert (Lester)] mentioned that if you didnʼt show improvement in
things of a scholastic nature, he would be very disappointed.

I am thinking that he feels a lot for you. He really does, I know. He simply
doesnʼt know how to relate to you. When I was young, I felt that Robert
didnʼt care for me very much because he wouldnʼt take me anywhere or
even talk to me in anything less than a shout…But what I didnʼt notice was
that he was feeding me and that whenever I got into a bind with the local
representatives of the oppressors (police), he would always be there to
help me. Always, no matter what I had done or how much he hated what
Iʼd done.

Life has been one long string of disappointments for Robert. It wouldnʼt be
good to just take lightly his wishes to see you become more aggressive in
your development. It isnʼt necessary to disappoint him. You can satisfy
him, help yourself, and serve the cause of black self-determination by

172
picking yourself up and taking Chairman Maoʼs Great Leap Forward (1994
[1970], pp. 194-195).

Such struggles to realize kinship continue on through paper, a generation
later. For example, Yusef Toussaint Omowale (1998) reflects on growing up in
the shadows of his fatherʼs political imprisonment, “[L]etters created for me a
sacred space that reaffirmed my pain, and enabled me to maintain a connection
to my humanity” (p. 96). In this case, letters created a place to explore
possibilities for relationship, under the constraints of both Joseph Omowaleʼs
incarceration in 1983, as well as the circumstances of his political exile preceding
it.
83
As Y.T. Omowale recalls, letters mediated “a long, ongoing back-and-forth
about his choices[,] our understanding of them, and how I may construct him (or
not) as a father” (personal communication, April 5, 2011). Situated in this
protracted struggle, a letter from Y.T. Omowale to Joseph Omowale, dated
September 1990 from Morehouse College, Atlanta, GA, thus elaborates:
You are now my Father. Do you know what it means that I can now accept
you as my Father…Being my father carries a heavy responsibility. To help
my mind and body become as strong as they can be. To be honest. To be
critical. To be sensitive. To be realistic. To be idealistic. To always support
ME, even if you donʼt support what I stand for. To be considerate of
relations. I as Son, carry the same responsibilities (1998, pp. 97-98).

Joseph Omowale responds on 2 October 1990, from federal penitentiary in
Marianna, FL:
Yusef Toussaint,

Njeri told me recently that I tend toward hyperbole in my relations. So i
[sic] am not trying to carry myself away on a magic carpet of happy

173
feelings since reading your letter a short while ago. One day i hope you
too will know such joy! At last, we have arrived at that connection i have
envisioned since i learned of your conception. Considering everything that
our relationship has had to withstand, our unity is definitely extraordinary
and profound. Surely, this depth of feeling can only expand and grow.
Your letter is an offering, a sacrament of forgiveness, understanding, and
love. i take your sacred trust into my soul and guard and nurture it there,
and clothe my heart in it (Omowale, 1998, p. 98).

Fred Hampton said, “You can kill the revolutionary, but you canʼt kill the
revolution” (in Hampton, et al., 1990); in the context of imprisonment, intended to
kill both the revolutionary and the revolution, the letter can act, as Joseph
Omowale expresses, as “an offering, a sacrament” that helps keep everything
alive.
5: Letters and Mothers
Barbara Harlow (1992) notes that narratives of the imprisoned
“necessarily re-write the emplotments of the traditional family romance and
redetermine as well the conventional distribution of character roles, particularly as
these have been delimited according to gender” (p. 233). Letters from the
imprisoned, in all their visions and revisions, are no exception. As George
Jackson wrote to Joan, a member of the Soledad Defense Committee, two days
after the death of Jonathan Jackson (9 August 1970):
Go over all the letters Iʼve sent you, any reference to Georgia being less
than a perfect revolutionaryʼs mama must be removed. Do it now! I want
no possibility of anyone misunderstanding her as I did. She didnʼt cry a
tear. She is, as I am, very proud. She read two things into his rage: love
and loyalty.

174
I canʼt go any further, it would just be a love story about the baddest
brother this world has had the privilege to meet, and itʼs just not popular or
safe—to say I love him (1994 [1970], p. 329).

Indeed, following the death of George Jackson himself, Georgia Jacksonʼs
tireless campaign for justice, speaking around the country that “I bought [the
burial] plot a year ago, I knew they would kill him” (in James, 2007, p. 16), attests
to Joy Jamesʼ assertion that “Suffering…is a maternal skill” (2007, p. 63). Georgia
Jacksonʼs feminized labor and leadership exemplifies womenʼs historical roles in
cohering communities across all different types of the walls, in a world structured
by wars of white patriarchal domination (cf. Brown, 1994; Fortunati, 1995; Hull,
Scott, & Smith, 1982; Gilmore, 1999; Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1981). As George
Jacksonʼs 12 January 1967 letter, recognizing his motherʼs “maternal skills”
exercised through paper, illustrates:
Dear Mama,

Your letter was well received; it left me feeling better than I have felt for
years. I have never felt as close to any human as I do to you now. Your
thoughts mirror mine exactly. Why have you left me alone to my struggle
so long? I know the answer to this must be that we hesitate to reveal or
acknowledge the existence of ugliness to the ones we love, even though
the knowledge of such may better equip them to resist the effects of evil
(1994 [1970], p. 99).

On the other hand, women of color, who absorb much of the social costs
of their sons, brothers, fathers, and kin stolen to prison, have found fewer people
similarly willing or able to assume such obligations as female incarceration rates
have also risen. This emergency has had fatal repercussions both on women

175
neglected in prison, as well as the communities out of which they are taken
(Enos, 2001; Out of Control, 1998; Owen, 1998; Talvi, 2007; Young & Reviere,
2006). In this dense web of feminized crisis, the life of paper can prove obscenely
inadequate, as former political prisoner Ida P. McCray remarks, “Pain is having to
say too often in a letter, 'I love you,' and not being able to be there to comfort
when they need you” (in Schoefer, 2000). Alas, womenʼs distinguishable reliance
on letter correspondence, as a primary form of mothering from prison (Owen,
1998, pp. 120-121), renders women today distinctively vulnerable to
manipulations of mail as a form of institutional retaliation. Stormy Ogden-
McCloud asserts,
For any prisoner letters from the outside are very important and in many
ways their only lifeline. I noticed that during the holidays and especially on
Motherʼs Day, the women were more anxious to receive mail, but it was
also a time when a few of the guards, male and female, were more likely
to play “head games” [by withholding mail] with any of the women that
might “buck” the rules (personal communication, July 26, 2010).

Insofar as women have historically occupied leading roles in reproductive
labor, female bodies become logical sites to wage dominant movements for
genocide, i.e. the coordinated annihilation of a communityʼs social reproduction
and the conditions of its possibility (hooks, 1981; James, 2007, 1996; Roberts,
1997; Ross, 1998; Smith, 2005; Spillers, 2003; Stern, 2005). That is, as Angela
Y. Davis asserts, for enslaved people, Black womenʼs work and presence have
historically preserved the integrity of their domestic spaces, as crucial places of
community autonomy inside structures of racial capitalism (in James, 2005, p.

176
104; cf. Griffin & Woods, 2009; Kelley, 1993). In this legacy, as in all others
where women of color perform this labor, women of colorʼs absence in
communities through their mass incarceration thus distinctively corrodes the
entire collective structure, maintained through womenʼs productive and
reproductive labor.
In this context, women whose lives defy the binary oppositions of private
and public, personal and political, inside and outside—who define these
categories of being as co-constitutive rather than as mutually exclusive—face
tremendous consequences, articulated at the most intimate scales. For example,
as Ida P. McCray
84
writes to Y.T. Omowale from prison in Dublin, CA, c. 1990,
regarding her return from exile in Cuba and subsequent arrest:
When I came back to the states I turned my two young children over to my
mother. I knew I was wanted and knew the possibilities that the police
might just shoot first and ask questions later. I wanted my children to live. I
thought at my mother's house they would be safe.

I remained a fugitive sixteen years in total. When I made a move to try and
recapture some of our lost time together, I asked my son to come live with
me, let's learn together and do as much as we could, I failed. I failed so
hard Yusef that my intention coupled with his resentment and repressed
anger somehow led to him turning against me, calling the “man” on me,
and ending my fugitive status. I got convicted and am still incarcerated.

You spoke of choices well, it's my daughter's choice not to speak to me.
We haven't spoken for a year. Choices, yes I have mine.

Love, Commitment, and Health
Ida (in Omowale, 1998, pp. 102-103; cf. McCray, 2003)

177
The socialization of torture, dismantling while enacted through
communities across prison walls, manifests itself in at times unforeseeable forms
of suffering, (at once) big and small (cf. James, 2009, 1996). In such instances,
in which kin “choose” to not speak with each other, letters, as Omowale asserts,
form “pathways to connections” (1998, p. 95) that can reconfigure community: in
which “speaking the unspeakable has produced loud echoes that bear witness to
the interdependence of our existence and reveals the truths of our pain” (p. 102).
The difficult realities that McCray writes here testify to the embodied challenges
of feminized revolutions, in which
rather than motherhood being the revolutionary act most appropriate to a
woman, revolution becomes the maternal act most appropriate to a
mother. Revolution is a continuation of motherhood, not vice versa. In
other words, it is not that motherhood is revolutionary, but rather that
revolution should be motherly (Hames-Garcia, 2004, pp. 128-129 [original
emphasis]; cf. Bukhari, 2010; Gilmore, 1993; Shakur, 1987).

In this sense, McCray concludes her letter in struggle to come to terms
with her “choices,” spoken here with true “maternal skill.” Such speech acts, as
political prisoner Marilyn Buck argued from prison in Dublin, CA, militate against
the physical and social repression of incarceration, in which,
In one group discussion, women prisoners agreed that they do not write
letters about the world of prison because they do not want to burden
families or friends with the pain and horror of the prison experience.
Women tend to lock up, or repress, the full extent of their horrific
experiences (in James, 2007, p. 242).

In contrast to withdrawal or denial, McCray and Omowaleʼs letter correspondence
exemplifies “the way the letter form positions the subject…as one who, no matter

178
how alienated or isolated has found a tool with which to reclaim herself or himself
as active respondent to and shaper of his or her past, present, and future”
(Bower, 1997, p. 9).
6: Letters and Children
Y.T. Omowale reflects on his childhood:
Letters. Reaching in the mailbox sometimes felt anxious like chasing a
shadow around the corner, or exposed like being on stage without your
lines, or comforting like warm grass on a summer day. The mailbox is
where I encountered my father. His name in the corner struggled to stand
defiant, shackled as it was by his identification number: 03185,
Leavenworth Penitentiary. Only in letters could my father welcome me
home from school and, lacking alternatives, our relationship grew
paragraph by paragraph. We laughed, played ball, talked politics, and
sometimes just sat together as I read behind the closed door of my room.
Letters allowed us to love (1998, p. 92).

In such practices of letter correspondence, “writing was the way I could fully
experience my father and acknowledge the silences I carried within. Silence that
became lasting voices in the pages we shared” (p. 96).
For children with incarcerated loved ones, for whom relationships
significantly take place, as Omowale emphasizes, “in letters,” the materiality of
the medium also becomes an essential aspect of the life of paper. That is, Barton
and Hall (1999) point out how “letters are touched, held, smelled; they are stored
away, hidden, and destroyed” (p. 8). This materiality meaningfully impacts the
ways that divided kin can fathom the layers of absence that co-constitute their
daily experiences of the present. Particularly for children—whose conditions of
vulnerability and dependence upon others are unique—something to hold, touch,

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smell, and keep can go a small way towards suturing their worlds (dis)organized,
as Omowale puts it, through dialectics of silence and chaos.
Thus, Omowale recalls of his youth, “I refused to take notes in class, or
learn the dewey decimal system, yet meticulously catalogued and typed out the
numerous letters my father sent me from prison” (1998, p. 104). This element,
not only of receiving and reading letters, but of personalizing a system of
organizing them, adds more dimension to this life of paper; Omowale reflects,
“With the silence that covers the days [of those] who directly experienced the
trauma [of incarceration], finding hidden/forgotten letters is often how we find out
about ourselves and those we love” (personal communication, November 16,
2009). In this sense, ongoing and transformative interaction with letters, through
activities such as archiving, can help structure youthʼs coming of age: the sense
they make of their lives, identities, and aspirations, inextricable from what they do
to actualize their becoming and—through the pain and suffering of alienation—
with whom.
7: Parole Letters
Possibilities for parole invite the hope that living in absence will not be
eternal. Negotiating for this possibility, however, adds more veils to the life of
paper. On the one hand, the machinations of winning parole, since the earliest
stages of prison expansion, heighten self-censorship, as Albert Hawkins
intimates to Shapiro-Bertolini on 25 February 1975:

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Ethel, lately Iʼve been wondering if the administration has been censoring
my mail, we are able to send out sealed envelopes, but incoming mail is
censored. Please let me know if you are receiving letters from me that
appear to have been tampered with. Lately Iʼve been skeptical about my
letter writing. Maybe itʼs because Iʼm trying to be extra careful not to create
any grounds that will prevent me from making [parole] this year (Shapiro-
Bertolini, 1976, p. 189).

On the other hand, just like writers of slave narratives, imprisoned people
today, writing from U.S. democracy's “dead zones” (James, 2009, 2005), must
figure their way through dominant epistemologies that filter imprisoned voices
through criminal constructions (Edwards, 2003, pp. 38-39). In this regard, as Joy
James argues, dominant ideologies, differentiating criminal and human, constrain
the terms that determine parole—primarily as these terms define redemption
through good “citizenship”; alternatively, victimhood (cf. Spivak, 1988); or in
outlier situations, politicized celebrity. As James characterizes the general
predicament,
Key features of the 'rehabilitation process' in order for [prisoners] to be
mainstreamed is that they (appear to) conform to the cultural norm. That
norm is dynamic rather than static and so has expanded to include traits of
the militant anitracism and feminism of the 1960s...Unaltered features of
the behavioral norm remain employment and a willingness to acknowledge
the errors of past behaviour (1999, pp. 137-138).

Implicit in such norms are both standards and restrictions on what is
speakable for parole, which—especially as letter-writing campaigns have formed
an integral part of this process—also affects the life of paper. For example,
contemporary efforts to help win the release of community members often
include the circulation of letter templates that “help guide you through the writing

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process and [give] you an idea of the necessary contents of the letter” (Ronnie
Nakashima Support Committee, personal communication, May 19, 2010). In this
sense, standardization helps ensure sufficient quality and maximum quantity of
letters to increase chances for someoneʼs release.
Yet in some instances, people do not (pretend to) conform to official
transcripts for routinized parole proceedings (Grass, 2003). For example, Safiya
Bukhariʼs “Letter for the Parole of Jalil Muntaqim,” written on 5 May 2002,
challenges dominant logics of personhood.
85
Instead of received conventions
emphasizing an inmateʼs remorse, rehabilitation, and preparation and eagerness
to become a productive U.S. citizen, she writes to the New York State parole
board:
I write this letter in support of Anthony Jalil Bottomʼs application for release
on parole. Iʼve procrastinated this long in hopes that God would guide my
hand and give me exactly the right thing to say that would make a
difference. Thus far, I have received no such guidance and time is running
short, therefore I can only write what I know about Jalil and what I know to
be his intentions should he be released on parole…I donʼt know the one
dimensional Anthony Bottom #77-A-4823. There is no such person. Jalil is
a complex person. Heʼs a human being, moved by his feelings, beliefs,
and what he perceives to be the right thing to do (in Bukhari, 2010, pp.
202-203).

Given Muntaqimʼs ongoing incarceration and political persecution, some
might argue that such letters prove ineffective. On the other hand, given the
context of both his imprisonment and Bukhariʼs writing—situated in their lifetimes
of shared struggle to transform the terms of humanity—Bukhariʼs search for “the
right thing to say” thus demonstrates an undying commitment to the complexity of

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personhood in the presence of “God”—which in this letter, takes priority over
even the norms of parole.
8: Lost Letters
In the second half of the twentieth century, while the U.S. government
sponsored regimes of torture and disappearance throughout the Americas
(Galeano, 1983; Gomez-Bárris, 2009; James, 1996), government-sponsored
movements for mass incarceration also affected their own forms of torture, as
well as disappearance, within U.S. borders (Sexton & Lee, 2006). The violent,
systematic removal of people from their communities includes and reverberates
through the life of paper, as the disappearance of letters acts as both sign and
finality of a personʼs status as ʻmissing.ʼ In some cases, the emergency manifests
in more mundane details, as when Terry Bradford writes to Shapiro-Bertolini on
17 October 1974,
Well enough of my complaining, this letter was essentially to let you know
that I am throwing in the towel on correspondence. I wrote the postmaster
general about these folks playing with my mail and he tells me that once it
reaches the institution it's not considered mail. Due to this and the
worsening conditions here I must concentrate all my attention on the
situation here at hand (Shapiro-Bertolini, 1976, p. 239 [original emphasis]).

In this instance, Bradford finds himself consumed by the comprehensive isolation
of his environment, thus extinguishing his efforts to reach or be reached beyond
the “the institution” through correspondence.
In other cases, missing letters literally communicate the fact of a missing
person, status and whereabouts unknown. For example, in the case of George

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Jackson and the Soledad Brothers, Lester Jackson, upon hearing of the killing a
white guard at Soledad prison over the radio in January 1971, recalls worrying
about his son:
For days we waited for a word from our son. Our mail during that time was
an array of bills, circulars, and second-class junk. But no letter from
George. Which was very unusual. My wife first suggested—and then
insisted—that we get up to Soledad as soon as we could. I put her off, to
the extent that I could, out of deference to what was left of my mental
health. But she raved! She protested! She criticized my attitude! And she
accurately predicted what was happening to George.

[Days later,] Georgeʼs letter turned up. It was simple and direct: “They
want my miserable life. Please send a lawyer as soon as you can or it will
be too late. I have already been taken in chains to two kangaroo
preliminary hearings in the all-white farm town of Salinas where the dead
guard lived, and Iʼm headed for death row with the help of the local public
defender” (Jackson, 1971, p. 78).

Who knows how many letters have been lost in transfers all along the
“American [gulag] archipelago” over the decades (James, 2007, pp. xi-xiv). In
these cases, the time is not merely out of joint, it has vanished. As Marilyn Buck
voices this despair in her poem “Lost Letter,” written from Dublin, CA:
for Franco Sincich,
Red Brigade political prisoner, Italy

I did write you
it may be a ransomless hostage
disappeared into an anonymous folder
filed in a furtive office
in some hollow-eyed federal fortress
its ashes may lie
inside an incinerator
greedy to gobble up voices

September 1990

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9: Love Letters

In her 1994 short story, “The Letter,” former political prisoner Sylvia
Baraldini writes:
Every day she stood at attention as the officer called out each name. As
the pile of mail decreased, her body slowly slumped; a hint of despair and
sadness taking over her being. She refused to move until the last piece
was identified. Then she dejectedly ambled back towards her cell. Today,
again, the letter had not arrived...Unable to blame him, she refused to
sever contact. She spent hours devising interesting anecdotes, squirreling
events to retell and share, and imagining what his daily routine could be
like in isolation. Although separated from him for ten years, she needed
his companionship...she could not give up their emotional
connection...The next day, at four in the afternoon, she would be the first
at mail call (in Out of Control, 1998, p. 25).

Stolen life, stolen time, stolen pages: As Assata Shakur argues, U.S.
government and prison officials steal letters because
Love is contraband in Hell,
cause love is an acid
that eats away at bars…
We are a conspiracy (1987, p. 130, my emphasis).

In this sense, the refusal “to sever contact,” by persisting through the life of
paper, enacts the conspiracy of which Shakur speaks, a “contraband” love that
preserves or strives for collective being. Indeed, for imprisoned communities, the
struggle to maintain connections that “eat away at bars” can exhaust life. Laura
Whitehorn characterizes it:
You know, it's very difficult to carry on relationships with people on the
outside while you're in prison. Your friends shield you from the things
because either they think you don't want to hear about the great dinner
they had the night before, or you're going to think their problems are trivial

185
because, after all, they're not in prison. It damages your ability to have
human relationships. And I have to say that the people Iʼve seen who carry
on friendships with prisoners are few and far between, and I honor
them…To bring that kind of humanity into the prisons—but most of all, to
bring those prisoners out, back into the communities (in James, 2005, p.
271).

The life of paper, while neither guaranteeing to bring humanity in nor back,
does sustain a condition of possibility—and this sustenance can regenerate
ontological potential, even as struggle exhausts it. As former political prisoner,
Carol Gilbert, O.P.ʼs open letter from Alderson Federal Prison, WV, demonstrates
(written July 2004):
How many ways can I say thank you for your prayers, letters, articles,
books, support, and love? My heart overflows with gratitude. Iʼll close with
a quote from the priest, writer, and friend John Dear, S.J.:

The life of peace is both an inner journey
toward a disarmed heart and a public journey
toward a disarmed world.

These days, that inner journey is most difficult as I strive for a disarmed
heart. Blessings on your inner and public journey!

Deep love, Carol (in James, 2007, p. 265)

“Deep love,” “contraband” love, revolutionary love: the kind of love that
Fred Moten (2008) might define as the essence of Blackness. And yet, as
Malcolm X warned, “You don't know what a revolution is. If you did, you wouldn't
use that word” (1965, p. 9). As everything in this chapter has suggested, the
journey towards transformative total disarmament is a perilous one, as long as
we must continue through the history and materialism produced by whiteness,

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i.e. the genocidal fantasy of mastery over life through human sacrifice (cf.
Gilmore, 2010b, 2009, 2007; Mbembe, 2003; Moten, 2008; Woods, 2002).
The question then becomes what kind of vulnerabilities we will live with,
and die by (if people acknowledge that in this life we all do eventually die). The
pain of whiteness, transmitted significantly through state violence—which
includes prisons, public execution, policing, and war; as well as the general use
of public institutions to privatize wealth and socialize poverty—is pain felt by all,
and yet it feels different for every body (cf. Alexander, 1994; DuBois 1970 [1935];
Gilmore, 2010b; Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1981; Prashad, 2000; Roediger, 1991).
Ruth Wilson Gilmore's definition of racism, as “the state-sanctioned and/or extra-
legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature
death” (2007, p. 247), speaks not only to how ethnic communities have
historically developed in dynamically distinct relationships to Euro-human
enfranchisement and disfranchisement that differentiates vulnerability to
premature death (cf. Kim, 1999; Lowe, 2006; Wynter, 1976). Specifically today,
when so many people live imprisoned, Gilmore's definition also provides a way to
begin thinking through how, within ethnic communities, peopleʼs experiences of
racial state violence is also becoming more deeply qualitatively differentiated: in
such a way as to be producing, as we speak, a qualitatively new race. Joy James
refers to this distinct “racial formation” as “the prisoner....incarcerated individuals

187
and incarcerated communities as unique among the outcasts” (2005, p. xiii; cf.
Omi & Winant, 1994).
Throughout this chapter, I have sought to examine various dimensions of
the life of paper, as they both represent and enact this process of racial
differentiation. On the one hand, we have glimpsed how the dynamics of
whiteness, through socialized torture and disappearance, build contemporary
prisons to make and differentiate race (Gilmore, 2009, 2007). Yet, on the other
hand, we have also seen imprisoned communitiesʼ undying struggles to re-
embody the human, to maintain connections across a multiplicity of walls. In this
sense, within prisons, shared struggles have indeed re-fashioned the ʻraceʼ the
slaveholders made (cf. Genovese, 1979b), as Elliot Barkley pronounced during
the Attica Rebellion in 1971:
We are men! We are not beasts and we do not intend to be driven or
beaten as such. The entire prison populace has set forth to change forever
the ruthless brutalization and disregard for the lives of the prisoners here
and throughout the United States. What has happened here is but the
sound before the fury of those who are oppressed (in Hampton, et al.,
1990).

This re-invention of humanity lives on through time, as when the men of the 1993
Lucasville (Southern Ohio Correctional Facility) uprising—such as Namir Abdul
Mateen [James Were], Jason Robb, Siddique Abdullah Hasan [Carlos Sanders],
George Skatzes, and Keith Lamar—fought for life through self-identifying as a
“convict race” (Lynd, 2004; cf. Gilmore, 2007).

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Yet, concurrent with movements of a distinguishable convict race, the life
of paper also represents struggles to preserve embodied visions of “beloved
community” that radically precede prisons (Gilmore, 2009; James, 2011, 1996;
Kelley, 2003; King, 1957; Moten, 2003; Robinson, 1983). From this perspective,
every letter forming the life of paper is a love letter, as James Baldwinʼs open
letter to Angela Y. Davis was, exclaiming:
So be it. We cannot awaken this sleeper, and God knows we have tried.
We must do what we can do, and fortify and save each other—we are not
drowning in an apathetic self-contempt, we do feel ourselves sufficiently
worthwhile to contend even with inexorable forces in order to change our
fate and the fate of our children and the condition of the world!...We know
that democracy does not mean the coercion of all into a deadly—and,
finally, wicked—mediocrity but the liberty for all to aspire to the best that is
in him, or that has ever been (in Davis, et al, 1971, p. 17).

Such fortified aspiration animates the very essence of the life of paper, if it
is true that “Letter writers…attempt to create and revise both self and addressee;
they must believe they have this power or they would not write” (Bower, 1997, p.
5). And today, in the utopian space of the life of paper—new dimensions of
“double-consciousness” (DuBois, 1994 [1903]; cf. Cruse, 2005 [1967]; Ellison,
1995 [1952]) where we are simultaneously forced through the inner circles of
whiteness as we strive to exist in Blackness—those such as Viet Mike Ngo
exercise their power to write, for “the best that is in him, or that has ever been”:
So I write. I write to say what I know and to find out what I don't. I write for
love, the love of the young and old; for the energy that is me. I want
people to love me and writing is my funnel to their mouths. I write for
history. I write for my ancestors whose history is lost in a grave site;
whose stories are only heard by worms. I write for the future: for the next

189
generation so they'll know who I was. The I who lived and killed and died. I
write so my nephew will know me in a way I don't know my uncles; the
dead from war, the ones dead from life. I want to carry him on my words,
teach him to fly with verbs, soothe him with nouns; sounds from my mind,
through my pen, to his heart. I want him to know the real me.

And I write for me; for the visions calling me when I lay on my bunk and
look at pictures of a past life. These visions are voices, these voices are
words forgotten by man, except from me. I carry their burden. I am their
savior—my nephew, my ancestors, their worms (in Zheng & Asian
Prisoner Support Committee, 2007, p. 117).

10: Postscript

In this chapter, I have searched through pages of stolen life from the
imprisoned in the contemporary era, in order to clarify the relationship between
what these letters are and what they have the capacity to do. I have argued that,
in the face of socialized torture, letters provide a medium through which
imprisoned communities can collectively re-embody the human—as letter
correspondence helps produce alternative forms of intellectual labor, intimacy,
and racialization. As such, the struggles congealed in the life of paper both
represent and enact, even if they do not mirror, biopolitical struggles for life also
happening at other scales of existence.
I conclude this chapter, then, interrogating one last aspect of the fragile
relationship between the life of paper and social reproduction. As Adamu Chan
asks, in a letter dated 16 June 2010 from Lancaster, CA State Prison, while
reading the autobiography of Nelson Mandela (1994):
...[H]e points out many times the relationship between being a freedom
fighter and dysfunctional family life. You get the sense that it's one of his

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greatest regrets and sources of pain, but the sacrifice that must be made
for the greater good. I just think that that's such an interesting question, life
question, for all of us...When balance isn't an option, what is the choice
that we make...?
86
(personal communication, June 16, 2010)

Chan names just one specific manifestation of the total crisis in social
reproduction we confront today, which our letters can help mitigate but certainly
do not resolve. Yet, in this hyper-masculine world bound by bloodshed, feminized
freedom fighters, as I have argued in this chapter, embody how labors of self-
and collective discipline through care giving are also acts of war, striving for
peace: work historically led by women, who toil to produce “love” that coheres
individuals and communities and ensures their potential for growth through
purpose and change. In this sense, perhaps our struggle has always been
precisely to bring freedom fighting and functional communal life into some form of
reconciliation (cf. Baldwin, 1964). As the late Safiya Bukhari put it, reflecting on
her time as an organizer in the Black Panther Party, communications director in
the Black Liberation Army, member of the Provisional Government of the
Republic of New Afrika, and founding member of the Jericho Movement to Free
Political Prisoners:
Today, this minute this hour (as Malcolm would say), I have come to
realize that picking up the gun was/is the easy part. The difficult part is the
day-to-day organizing, educating, and showing people by example what
needs to be done to create a new society. The hard, painstaking work of
changing ourselves into new beings, of loving ourselves and our people,
and working with them daily to create a new reality—this is the first
revolution, that internal revolution (2010, p. 13).

191
Finally then, paper has come to life, insofar as people have created the life
of paper, as a means to carry out our internal revolutions: in a world of prisons
that, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, “have no inside” (personal communication,
September 4, 2007), and in which, as Assata Shakur wrote in an April 1998 open
letter from exile, “All I have is my voice, my spirit, and my will to tell the truth” (in
Out of Control, 1998, p. 9).

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Chapter Five

A Poetics

Aesthetics
On a day that began in no special way that I can remember, I was taught the
principles involved in writing an ordinary letter…It was well known that a person
in the position that I was expected to occupy—the position of a woman and a
poor one—would have no need whatsoever to write a letter, but the sense of
satisfaction it gave everyone connected with teaching me this, writing a letter,
must have been immense. I was beaten and harsh words were said to me when I
made a mistake…[I]t only made me want to write my own letters, letters in which
I would express my feelings about my own life as it appeared to me…
(Jamaica Kincaid, 1997, p. 19)

In his studies of “Self Writing,” Michel Foucault examines two forms of
writing in ancient Greco-Roman culture, the hupomnemata (account, public, or
individual notebooks acting as memory aids) and letter correspondence. He
argues that these two forms each enacted a process of self-training: “a labor of
thought, a labor through writing, a labor in reality,” constituting, in sum, “arts of
oneself” as an “aesthetics of existence” (in Rabinow, 1994, pp. 207, 209). As
such, the practices involved in both of these forms served an ethopoietic
function—writing that “is an agent of the transformation of truth into ethos [Greek:
character]” (in Rabinow, 1994, p. 209).
Figure 5.1: Artwork by Horiyoshi III, from State of Grace, Inc. (2009).

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While Foucault investigates such “technologies of the self” from the
Roman Empire, Sylvia Wynter (1976) interrogates the historical transformations
that poesis, “acts of ʻmakingʼ” (p. 78), underwent in the age of modernity.
Addressing the first international symposium of “ethnopoetics,” Wynter critiques
the contemporary use of the term itself, weary of its potential to re-inscribe rather
than challenge the “MUTATION” of human being that took place in the sixteenth
century (1976, p. 79 [original emphasis]). That is, Wynter argues that uncritically
employing ethno to distinguish “ethnopoetics” from ʻpoeticsʼ subtly perpetuates
the dichotomies produced during the globalization of Western civilization: the
“detotalization of the world picture” and its “retotalization” through the binaries
Christian/heathen, civilized/savage, human/Other, West/rest, and eventually
First/Third World, vis-à-vis racism (pp. 78-81).
Thus, Wynter instead calls for a “socio poetics,” cultural production that
can historicize and anthropologize the West/rest relation (cf. Moraga & Anzaldúa,
1981). Such work functions ultimately to socialize a “concretely universal ethnos
[ʻthe peopleʼ]”: as already brought into being, for example, by the Black
experience productive of “a WE that needed no OTHER to constitute their Being”
(p. 85 [original emphasis]; cf. McKittrick, 2006; Robinson, 1983). The praxis of a
socio poetics entails
approaching the CULTURES OF THE OTHER in order to construct an
alternative process of making ourselves human; and to free the Western
concept of humanism from its tribal aspect of We and the Other,

194
transforming its abstract universal premise into the concretely human
global, the concretely WE (p. 89 [original emphasis]).

Lastly then, the socio poetics of Yunte Huang (2007) brings us full circle:
as Huang distinguishes Greek poesis, from the concept of poetry in classical
Chinese literary criticism, shi yan zhi. In his analysis of Chinese immigrant poetry
written on the walls of Angel Island from 1910-1940, Huang argues that we must
understand it through shi yan zhi, “an expressive-affective conception of poetry
as opposed to the mimetic-representative conception in the Western tradition” (in
Damon & Livingston, 2009, p. 304). Huang explains,
[T]he word poem, with its Greek roots in poima and poein (to make),
suggests an object made, an outside separated from an inside; by
contrast, shi, the Chinese word for poetry or poem, means not an object
made by the writer but actually the writer him- or herself. As Stephen
Owen points out, shi yan zhi [variously translated as “poetry says the
mind” or “poetry expresses human nature”] may well be a tautological
statement. The character shi consists of the components yan and
si...Hence, we may legitimately interpret shi yan zhi as meaning “poetry
says,” with a stress on the intransitive verb…This emphasis [is] not on
something out there to be represented by the poem, but on the act of
saying itself (Huang, in Damon & Livingston, 2009, p. 305).

In sum then, this life of paper, “a poetics,” is Wynterʼs socio poetics before
it knew what to call itself, or, as it was calling itself. I began documenting this
poetics within the onto-epistemologies communicated through shi yan zhi, and
followed it as it has scaled twentieth century “mutations” of human being through
various stages of mass incarceration. Moreover, through the struggles of “the
Other” to say themselves—in veiled language, through letters, facing extinction—
the life of paper returns, through difference, to the essential ethopoietic function

195
of letter correspondence that Foucault examines. Yet, in its return, this
“aesthetics of existence” does not come from “mimetic-representative
conception,” as Huang points out, but rather, in peopleʼs labors to “invest the
vocabulary with something it does not contain yet” (Baldwin, in Standley & Pratt,
1989, p. 81): hence, a poetics, an aesthetics, that preserves creative essence
precisely “in the break” between meaning and its forms of appearance (Moten,
2003). In this sense, as Dionne Brand (1990) argues, “no language is neutral”:
…I have come to know
something simple. Every sentence realised or
dreamed jumps like a pulse with history and takes a
side. What I say in any language is told in faultless
knowledge of skin, in drunkenness and weeping,
told as a woman without matches and tinder, not in
words and in words and in words learned by heart,
told in secret and not in secret, and listens, does not
burn out or waste and is plenty and pitiless and loves (p. 31).

As Brand points out, in this “simple” poetics, embodied knowledge—that
no language is neutral—thus creates the conditions under which, paradoxically,
“what I say in any language” conjoins, in essence and through contradiction,
history, skin, and heart. Situated in this conjunction, the letters of the life of paper
function precisely as “poetical language,” described by Trinh T. Minh-Ha (1989)
as “the language of the interstice” (in Damon & Livingston, 2009, p. 348).
According to Minh-ha, poetical language, analogous to “insider” anthropology (cf.
Woods, 1998), is “the very place where social code is undone, decomposed,

196
desedimented, expanded, and renewed, hence the focal point for cultural
consciousness and change” (in Damon & Livingston, 2009, pp. 348, 351).
The language of the interstice. As such, Brent Hayes Edwards (2003)
argues in his study of The Practice of Diaspora, “The connection speaks…But
the joint is a curious place, as it is both the point of separation…and the point of
linkage” (p. 15; cf. Glissant, 1997, p. 69). From this perspective, the life of paper,
as a distinct practice of diaspora, emerges in its own way from this “strange ʻtwo-
nessʼ of the joint”—in the constant struggles between disarticulation and re-
articulation, as well as between conditions of radical alienation and the cultures
fighting for life within them, between terror and terrible beauty, between desires
for purity and movements of change. Struggles “to be in but not of” (Moten &
Harney, 2004, p. 101): the labor to live, love, and dream in paper (cf. Eng, 2001,
pp. 83-84; Kelley, 2003), through the despair of experiencing the life of paper, in
many ways, as simultaneously so far away from that for which people labor,
conscious at every moment of the real distances between what is and what we
want to materialize. In these ways, this poetics realizes basic truths, that all life is
suffering, or—as James Baldwin puts “the creative dilemma”—“that life is tragic,
and therefore unutterably beautiful” (1962, in Porter, Terrie, & Bennett, 1964, p.
68; cf. Glissant, 1997, p. 20).
Yet, as Wynter makes clear, the suffering that incarceration has produced
is not that of life, but of the latterʼs “mutation” through manmade technologies of

197
premature death. From this perspective, as I have argued, the life of paper—as a
poetics—mobilizes economic, discursive, and political forces within human
cultures to preserve the latterʼs vital potential, and in doing so, radically prioritizes
life over premature death (Glissant, 1997, p. 28). Thus building from Edouard
Glissantʼs “poetics of relation,” the life of paper “is not an amusement nor a
display of sentiments or beautiful things. It also imparts form to a knowledge that
could never be stricken by obsolescence” (1997, p. 81). In this sense, perhaps
this poetics, “surrogated” through something so small as a letter (Roach, 1996),
imparts form to knowledge from what Arundhati Roy calls “the god of small
things” (1997): a process of binding small things to big things (Gilmore, 2010a).
People

won't you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
(Lucille Clifton, 1993)

On the boundaries of aesthetic labor, James Baldwin (1965) once said,
It seems to me that life is much more important than art. By which I do not
mean that art is not important, but it is only important because life is. And it

198
seems to me that, anyway, given me, I can't hide in a room or a closet and
cultivate my talents. I would assume that if my talent means anything it
has to be tough enough to survive life (in Standley & Pratt, 1989, p. 53).

Analogous to this assertion, the literary arts involved in the life of paper derive
their significance from their connectedness to social being, forged through a
poetics “tough enough to survive life.” As such, this poetics, as a practice of
diaspora, is defined through the labor to sustain human relationships, vis-à-vis
letter correspondence: an art of social reproduction enduring various dimensions
of suffering. As an art of social reproduction, or training in a set of collective
practices to fulfill life potential, the poetics of the life of paper transforms how we
know gender, sexuality, race, and diaspora.
Gender and Sexuality
Just as the properties of these letters, in both their content and form, come
from a “strange ʻtwo-nessʼ of the joint”—chained yet not correspondent to any
material reality or temporality, at once appearing as they are and as other than
what they appear, objective and subjective, authoring and authored by a
conditional self, a self who appears as a communication through an Other—just
as letters are thus distinctly, queerly alive, so do they help sustain social life by
re-producing elements of the “queer.” As I have argued throughout each of my
case studies, on the one hand, war, racism, and mass incarceration have
significantly impacted the ways that diasporic communities have re-organized
normatively gendered reproductive labor in order to survive. On the other hand,

199
insofar as the life of paper has played a role in revising these configurations, the
new or renewed intimacies, produced through the totality of labors giving life to
paper, help form relationships that exceed sanctioned gendered and sexual
identities.
In these regards, this poetics, as the struggle to make human connections
that sustain the means to be, also makes epistemological interventions in the
ways people know love, as both object and activity. The life of paper, in order to
fulfill itself as a poetics, must survive the brutality of its environment—the latter
structured by domination through segregation along multiple axes, a form of
compulsory, highly regulated homosociality (intensified, rather than negated, by
the “boutique” development of segregated prisons for transgender people,
Gilmore, 2011; Spade, 2011). This coerced form of homosociality exists in
contradiction with dominant cultures of pathological heterosexuality articulated
through gendered and racial oppression (as the modalities through which class is
lived, Hall, 1980; cf. Dalla Costa & James, 1972; Davis, 1981; Gilmore, 1999).
In this context, throughout this dissertation, I have argued that the life of
paper, as both utopian space and the poetics to create it, mediates the
production or survival of “contraband” love that resists gendered and sexual
violence, as the latter manifests in both homosocial and heterosexual coercive
force. While I have focused on the heteronormative, often heterosexist,
reproductive unit of incarcerated communities, i.e. the “family,” as it exists, I have

200
also emphasized the necessity—if not the striving—mediated through the life of
paper, for different ways to create and re-create oneself, oneʼs family,
community, and social world through love in myriad and dynamic forms. In this
sense, this poetics, at its heart, opens out towards the infinite kinds of vibrant
relationships that are humanly possible, as well as ways to realize them, which
we cannot anticipate and yet each ensure that we survive and thrive collectively
(Foucault, 1981, in Rabinow, 1994, pp. 135-140; Halberstam, 2008).
Race and Diaspora
Through the course of this work, I have attempted to show how, on the
one hand, whiteness, as a category of existence, has progressed through
systematic destruction of racially targeted populations; and on the other hand,
how the life of paper has given form to a distinct process of racialized struggle for
human being. Ultimately, implicit in the trajectory of this poetics—and analogous
to the process of molecular cohesion characterizing how paper itself is made—I
allude to how each instance of struggle re-creates life potential, which can find
and articulate with realizations of “freedom” first envisioned and embodied
through Blackness. This process of ʻabolition,ʼ the annihilation of oppression as
exemplified by the poetics of a “convict race,” forces us to re-think what, how,
and why we currently think about race and racialization.
As this always-emerging poetics helps cohere a dynamic abolitionist racial
epistemology, I began documenting this life of paper in the mid-nineteenth

201
century, when, as Nikhil Pal Singh demonstrates, social movements in the U.S.
for the abolition of slavery helped articulate a Black internationalism constitutive
of, not antagonistic to, frameworks of (Black) nationalism and citizenship (2004,
pp. 44-46; cf. Kelley, 2003; Prashad, 2007, 2001). This sociality also conceived
of, and worked towards, globalized political and economic freedoms,
particularized by place: a framework of universal rights and responsibilities
distinguishing itself from the liberal-republican civil and human rights models that
defined the rule of Eurocentric nation-states (Singh, 2004, pp. 44-46; cf.
Genovese, 1979a; Gilmore, 2008; Hall, 1986; [C.L.R.] James, 1963; Robinson,
1983).
In this tradition, as Brent Hayes Edwards argues, Black internationalism
during the inter-war years appropriated and transformed dominant discourses, as
embodied by the League of Nations, that centered on uniting “the destinies of
mankind” (2003, p. 3). Leaders from different places articulated a Black
internationalism “by organizing around a common ʻelsewhere,ʼ a shared logic of
collaboration and coordination at a level beyond particular nation-states” (2003,
p. 23). In this sense, the claiming of the word Nègre constructed an appeal for
solidarity, “having no ʻrealʼ referent in some population linked by common roots,”
but employed instead as “an act of language to mark certain historical and
material relations of domination and suffering” (2003, p. 37). As Aime Césaire
thus wrote in a letter, “I have a different idea of a universal. It is of a universal rich

202
with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of
each particular, the coexistence of them all” (in Kelley, 1999).
Hence, “The Life of Paper,” from “the detained” to “the imprisoned,” shows
how the ʻreferentʼ—the object of theories creating collective human identities in
Blackness—can enlarge through different historical combinations (of peoples
possibly but not necessarily Black): a form of the human forged through
“organizing around a common ʻelsewhere,ʼ” in acts of language among people
marked by “certain historical and material relations of domination and suffering”
(cf. Gilmore, 2008; Glissant, 1997, pp. 153-154). Each case study, sharing
several basic conditions of racial incarceration in common, also exists within its
own particular relations to whiteness and Blackness that define its historical and
material situation. Yet, the convergence of dynamic practices of social
reproduction, metonymized in full arc of this life of paper, illustrates a “deepening
of each particular” and their possible co-existence: manifest as the poetics of
abolition and the subjects of history it constantly re-creates.
From this perspective, “The Life of Paper” dialogues with Edwardsʼ work
on the practice of diaspora by exploring the latter through inverse dialectics of
content and form. That is, Edwardsʼ poetics highlights the multiplicity and
differentiation of form internal to the production of Black internationalism, while
this poetics highlights the revenant gestalt of multiplicitous productions and
reproductions of diaspora, under threats of premature death (cf. Derrida, 1994;

203
Gilmore, personal communication, June 16, 2009; Moten, 2003). In the latter
sense, this poetics is an essentialist one, embracing James Baldwinʼs basic
observation that “Things are changing all of the time. The form changes but the
substance remains” (in Standley & Pratt, 1989, p. 182). This poetics enacts a
persistent return to the “substance” of life, and as such, also re-imagines
diaspora as a changing form.
Just as Cedric Robinson insists that collectivized strivings to “preserve the
ontological totality” define and bond the African diaspora through time and space
(1983, p. 171), this poetics prompts us to think again about the preservation of
the ontological totality, as the condition of possibility for diasporic formation. The
unfolding of the life of paper both theorizes and evidences how diasporas
converge and/or internally re-double as the revelation of the ontological totality to
a people, in the midst of genocide, also changes. This poetics thus comes from,
as it also enacts, dialectical movements of differentiation and multiplicity inherent
in the ontological totalityʼs revelation, the work of its preservation and
representation, and the resulting production and reproduction of diasporas that
are both bound and open to life as mystery and potential.
Life
The law of yin and yang is the natural order of the universe, the foundation of all
things, the root of life and death. In healing, one must grasp the root of the
disharmony, which is always subject to the law of yin and yang…
Yang is the energy, the vital force, the potential, while yin is the substance, the
foundation, the mother that gives rise to all this potential.
(“Yellow Emperor” Huang Di, in Maoshing Ni (Trans.), 1995, p. 17)

204

In “The Life of Paper,” I have approached letters as a unique kind of
commodity: as a thing that congeals as it re-creates human labor. The letters
comprising this life of paper, even when they have acted as capitalist
commodities, necessarily subvert the properties attached to them in capitalist
forms of exchange (Marx, 1990 [1867]). That is, in order for letters to exist as the
life of paper, the living labor congealed in the commodity cannot extinguish
through consumption; rather, these letters must work as gift commodities, if they
are to work at all: their vital force coming only more deeply to life, the more the
letters are consumed (Hyde, 1983). In essence then, the life of paper, a poetics,
mediates the universally proper re-production and metabolism of energy through
substance, in various transformations in and between paper and human, as
people struggle to grasp and heal roots of disharmony. In doing so, this poetics
also channels the mystery that makes manifest useful labor as such—the latter
“a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society;
[labor] is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between
man and nature, and therefore human life itself” (Marx, 1990 [1867], p. 133; cf.
Gilmore, 2005).
Mystery, the “marvelous” (Kelley, 2003, 1999; Rosemont & Kelley, 2009):
Asked once in an interview to define his political commitments, Cedric Robinson
responded,

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What name do you give to the nature of the Universe? There are some
realms in which names, nomination, is premature. My only loyalties are to
the morally just world; and my happiest and most stunning opportunity for
raising hell with corruption and deceit are with other Black people. I
suppose that makes me a part, an expression, of Black Radicalism (in
Morse, 1999).

Indeed, poetics, as understood through shi yan zhi, communicates human being
through an onto-epistemology in which the “Truth” is inherently unsayable
(Huang, in Damon & Livingston, 2009, p. 304)—a condition that proves rather
than negates its actual and dynamic universality. From this perspective, the
human bonding facilitated by the life of paper—while wholly intentional, re-
cognizable, and realizable—also depends on a contradictory element of radical
mystery that energizes the entire poetics: vital force that runs through as it
constantly escapes substance, since the poetics fulfills itself only when
reproductive labor has transformed into something else. This basic characteristic
of the poetics here is not unlike how Primo Levi has defined the unrepresentable
yet ever-present beauty of photosynthesis, “the sole path by which carbon
becomes living matter, [and] the sole path by which the sunʼs energy becomes
chemically usable” (1984, p. 231). Sharing his expertise about how this process
works “in the world of things that change,” Levi writes, “If my language here
becomes imprecise and allusive, it is not only because of my ignorance…Every
verbal description must be inadequate” (1984, pp. 226-227).
Alas, then, perhaps it can only be said simply of the life of paper, a
poetics: that it realizes “where life is precious, life is precious” (Gilmore, 2007).

206
Thus fulfilling the movement to grace, this poetics lives in the echo of the
question, gifted to the Prophet Mohammad:
Say, "Who is there to forbid the beauty which God has brought forth for
His creatures, and the good things from among the means of
sustenance?" (7:32; M. Asad, Trans.).

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Endnotes

Chapter Two Endnotes

1
The Page Act of 1875 banned working class Chinese women from entry into the U.S. This
paved way for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, banning all working class Chinese from
immigration and citizenship. The Exclusion Act maintained provisions that legalized merchant and
educated elites and certain categories of their families.

2
O.P. Stidger also turns up in Estelle Lauʼs (2006) archival research, as Lau cites this excerpt
from NARA File 14202/4-10: “In the case of Jew Shee Ngee, alleged son of a merchant, ex ss
Mongolia, March 16, 1915. The applicant and his alleged father were this day brought before the
Commissioner for a comparison as to physical resemblance, Attorney Stidger being
present…”(pp. 101-102).

3
One definition Michel Foucault offers for “technologies of the self” is the “techniques that permit
individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies,
their own souls, their own thoughts, their own conduct, and in this manner so as to transform
themselves, modify themselves” (1981, p. 177).

4
During this period in China, at the (then nascent) nation-state scale, numerous historical blocs,
both indigenous and foreign to the territory, continually battled for political control: all of whom
struggled for, and none of whom won, the hegemony. The defunct government of the late-Qing
dynasty identified not as Chinese, but as an imagined community organized around the asserted
divinity and supremacy cohering a minority group originally from Manchuria, referred to as the
Man or Manchus. Allied Western colonial powers fully puppeteered the Manchu government by
the turn of the century, and regional warlordism characterized the illegitimacy of the crumbling
Qing political order. Peasant revolutions culminated into the Taiping Rebellions of 1851-1864 that
targeted both European missionaries and Qing authorities. Various other regional uprisings that
also self-defined by class, ethnic, and religious differences, alongside urban student and
burgeoning revolutionary nationalist movements, eventually led to an extremely unstable Chinese
Republican government in 1911 (Dong, Lu, and Wang, 1991; Elleman, 2001; Hou, 1963, Vohra,
1987; Worthing, 2007). While the latter two movements significantly helped birth a unified,
modern Chinese national identity, it was dominant without being hegemonic (Guha, 1997),
constituting the ideology of a modern bourgeois revolution that could not ultimately reconcile the
material conditions of the ninety percent of the population who were rural peasants (Dong, Lu, &
Wang; 1991; Fields, 1990). From 1911 until the start of the lawless warlord period in 1916,
imperialist Chinese blocs, under former Qing military commander and new president of the
republic Yuan Shikai, reconsolidated and dominated in government positions, advocating for
continued capitalist Westernization and alliance with foreign powers in the name of the Chinese
nation.

5
According to Zhao Yongming (2006), British merchant Henry Shearman published the first
English-language commercial newspaper in Shanghai, the North China Herald, in 1850.
Missionaries in Shanghai published the first Chinese-language magazine there, the Shanghai
Serial, in 1857. The publishers of the English-language North China Daily News set up the first
newspaper in Chinese, Shanghai Xinbao (translated non-literally into English as Chinese
Shipping List and Advertiser), in 1862 (Zhao, 2006, p. 40). From the 1880s-1911 Shanghai-based

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publishing houses adapted the joint-stock limited liability corporation to Chinese conditions and
social hierarchies, as the organizational means to resolve questions tied to new relations of and
between intellectual and material property, labor, and production costs. Historians debate about
the practical effects of this model; Reed argues that the decision to organize as LLCʼs and
merchantsʼ desire and willingness to do so were themselves symbolically important (Reed, 2004,
pp. 23-24; 185).

6
Christopher A. Reed argues that by 1895, mass culture connected to Shanghaiʼs modern
publishing industry spread through print news and modern periodicals. This occurred through a
distinctly Chinese print capitalism that syncretized Western techniques of production and
“progress” with traditional Chinese print and political culture, connected to Imperialist Chinese
social hierarchies and values of public service embodied by the literate elite (2004, pp. 10, 22,
265; cf. Baark, 1997).
In my brief discussions of Chinese (print) capitalism, it will soon become relevant to note:
The categories I will rely on to construct a story, namely the “Imperialist Chinese nationalist” and
“Nationalist Party” blocs, mark more of an attempt to organize and clarify a density of information,
rather than an assertion of these categories as fixed or even adequate; in fact Christopher Reed
argues that there is no historical consensus about this period. I do not to name explicitly a
Chinese “capitalist” or “bourgeoisie” historical bloc, as is more common in Marxian analyses of
capitalist development, because of what I can discern of the basic differences between Chinese
and European capitalisms. Namely, under the weight of both Western (colonial) and Eastern
(Qing) imperialist domination, a unified revolutionary entrepreneurial bourgeoisie bloc in China did
not emerge as powerfully as has been argued it did in other places. Instead, Chinese capitalism
seems to have developed through competing nationalisms, making sense this way for at least
three reasons:
1) Ideologies of secular nationalism easily cohered as the language of liberation from
suffering and as first step in resolving economic crisis, given shared popular desire to destroy
colonialism and Manchu tyranny, both justified through assertions of divine ethnic supremacy (in
the final years of their decay, the Manchu government itself recognized the power of nationalism
and tried to establish peace with Chinese Hans to assimilate it);
2) Chinese bourgeois intellectuals produced ideologies of modern Chinese revolutionary
nationalism through the import of Western ideas that were always-already capitalist, and thus
endorsing Chinese revolutionary nationalism and nation-statism meant the same thing as
endorsing capitalist reform in some way. Even as student nationalist movements in particular
harshly criticized the excesses of Western capitalism, they imagined certain socialist measures
that would make Chinese national capitalism, regulated through nation-statism, qualitatively
different (hence, historians debate about whether or not these movements along with the
Nationalist Party were indeed anti-capitalist, cf. Reed, 2004, 273). In such revolutionary
frameworks, nationalism served as the ideology, and Chinese capitalism as the economic
system, of a republican state; and
3) The nature of late-Qing social order set the conditions of possibility for how national
capitalism could take root and grow. Because of the specificities of the pre-existing patriarchal
government and social structure, alongside the parasitism of foreign capitalism, Chinese national
capitalism was never imagined as a “free market” the same way European capitalisms were.
Starting with the burgeoning of national capitalism in 1860, when the Manchu government
initiated a series of reforms in response to the pressures of foreign capitalism, the Chinese
capitalist class was tethered to the government (in cases where they were not the same entity,
i.e. the bureaucrat-capitalist bourgeoisie). According to Dong, Lu, and Wang, through the 1890ʼs,
Chinaʼs entrepreneurial businesses developed under the policy “government supervision and

209

entrepreneurial management” (1991, p. 2; cf. Reed, 2004, p. 166). The upsurges and declines
thereafter of a small number of fully privately-run, Chinese national capitalist enterprises were not
powerful because of the difficulty of securing sustainable operating capital (Dong, Lu, & Wang,
1991, pp. 5-11). In this sense, the Chinese bourgeoisie and capitalists do not seem to define their
own blocs so much as they were scattered and constantly moving between different blocs all
ultimately articulated through nationalism, all vying for state power with different ideas for how
Chinese national capitalism should be designed and grow, in relation to foreign capitalism.

7
The SMCʼs Constitution consisted of Land Regulations drafted by the land renters themselves,
its governing body elected from among the foreign ratepayers, and its franchise extended
according to tax paid. The SMC did not pay taxes to the Chinese government, nor allow Chinese
members in the SMC until 1928. It self-identified its main tasks as the administration of SMC
police/paramilitary forces, public works, and public health (Dougan, 1981; Haan, 1982; Hou,
1963; Rhoads, 1975).
Territory in Shanghai, Chinaʼs largest city and one of the worldʼs largest ports, was ceded
along with Hong Kong in the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, declaring the end of the first British Opium
War. The International Settlement was formed in the context of broader Western imperialist
struggles for power in China. For instance, Portugal occupied Macao on a leasehold from 1557
until 1849, when Portuguese settlers expelled local Chinese authorities and ceased to pay rents,
making Macao an official Portuguese colony. China formally recognized Portuguese rule in
Macao in 1887, when China also ceded the nearby islands, Taipa and Coloane. Various
European and U.S. settlers also occupied four port cities in Guangdong province: Canton,
Swatow, Hoihow, and Pakhoi. Canton, with Hong Kong and Shanghai, was opened by the Treaty
of Nanjing; Swatow and Hoihow by the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin; and Pakhoi by the 1876 Chefoo
Convention. Foreign settlers at all ports included capitalists, bureaucrats, and Christian
missionaries primarily from Britain, France, Germany, and the United States (Rhoads, 1975, pp.
15-17).

8
Tsʼai Lun (in Wade-Giles Romanization system, or “Cai Lun” in Pinyin): Credited as having
invented paper in the Yuan-Hsing period of the Eastern Han dynasty, or 105 A.D. He is popularly
known as the Chinese god of paper-makers.

9
While the social and economic networks to form paper families began to evolve by the 1880ʼs-
1890ʼs, the networks proliferated after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, when fires destroyed
most U.S. Pacific coast immigration archives and thus created opportunities, literally, to make
people up (Lai, Lim, & Yung, 1980; Lau, 2006; Lee, 2003).

10
Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2009, 2008, 2007) locates the ascent and global hegemony of the U.S.
carceral system within the context of U.S. imperialist expansion, alongside the domestic reforms
of and following Reconstruction: a system deeply connected to yet distinct from the economic
order that organized, and the political and social order that rationalized, the genocidal
enslavement of African diasporic labor and robbery of Native Americans. Rather than to restore
and reproduce pre-Civil War order exactly, the burgeoning prison-industrial complex was
designed to address and control qualitatively new social conditions. After the Civil War, U.S.
capitalism as white supremacy could not accelerate in its changing domestic and global context
without addressing a concurrent development tied to this process: the problem of necessarily yet
excessively “free” people making moves everywhere, creating the need to neutralize perfectly a
surplus surplus labor pool (Gilmore, 2009, p. 81; cf. Ferguson, 2004; Halberstam, 2005; Lowe &

210

Lloyd, 1997). Hence, under the re-configuring U.S. regime,
Jim Crow, then, did not only work to suppress Black people; it was both template and
caution for all who were not members of the sovereign race. [The nineteenth]
centuryʼs globalizing contradictions, characterized by indigenous exterminations,
wars of territorial expansion, socio-spatial segregation, racist science and eugenics,
the redrawing of the worldʼs imperial contours, and the spread of democratized blood-
and-soil nationalism, coalesced at the time of the 1898 Spanish-American war, and
these forces in sum gave both political and theoretical shape to the twentieth
centuryʼs continuing human-sacrifice rampage (Gilmore, 2009, p. 82).

11
Chinese merchants could not access the rawer raw materials to establish the (failed)
Guangdong-Guangxi Mail Steamship Company until 1907 (Rhoads, 1975, p. 149; Baark, 1997).

12
Richard R. John (1995) identifies the United States postal system as the U.S. central
government in the first half of the nineteenth century (p. 4; cf. Brown, 1989; Stillson, 2006). This
system, which John argues formed the national geography (organizing the land vis-à-vis address
grids), largest federal civilian workforce (trumping the army), and central administrative apparatus
of the United States under the reforms of Andrew Jacksonʼs administration (1829-1837) (cf.
Menke, 2009), achieved global hegemony in 1874 with the creation of the Universal Postal Union,
establishing uniform practices and arrangements in the Western nation-states for the international
exchange of mail (Cheng, 1970, p. 2). The majority of mail delivered through national Western
postal systems at this time consisted of newspapers, magazines, and public documents (John,
1995, p. 7; cf. Briggs & Burke, 2005; Howe, 2009).
For their part, three major daily English-language newspapers were being published in
Hong Kong by the Anglo diaspora there: The China Mail (founded in 1845), the Daily Press
(1857), and the Telegraph (1881) (Rhoads, 1975, p. 27), which I hypothesize received news
about the American West, and/or had access to the news sources from England that did.
Furthermore, the first Chinese-language newspapers in the colony were not developed out of the
traditional gazettes and newsprints, but were either spin-offs of these papers or were pioneered
by the Westernized Chinese (Rhoads, 1975, p. 27). These papers too may have unintentionally
received promotional materials intended for Anglo audiences.

13
Remarking on this context of British colonialism formally articulated through infiltration of the
Qing government, John K. Fairbank comments (in Cheng, 1970), the real curiosity of the modern
Chinese post is that “there is no way to say whether it is ʻforeignʼ or ʻChineseʼ” (p. vii).

14
James W. Carey (1989) notes that the need to create coherent U.S. railroad schedules
established Standard Time in 1883 (pp. 223-224), setting the precedent for the worldwide
hegemony of fixed time for transportation and communication.
Additionally, the problem of re-organizing space in China also drove wars over telegraphy
(Baark, 1997). Thomas Wade, British diplomat in Beijing, took charge of negotiating with Qing
officials for telegraphic development. The latter resisted telegraphy on a variety of levels through
the 1870ʼs, until they were forced to consider it a military, not commercial, necessity. Onto-
epistemologically, Qing officials considered telegraphs very violent. For one thing, there existed
no epistemological framework to understand the logic of telegraphic code, through the non-
alphabetic languages indigenous to people in China. More gravely, Imperial Censor Chen Yi
argued in a memorandum to the throne in 1876,
Foreigners believe in celestial ruler Jesus, but they do not believe in ancestors. Thus
everybody who become Christians must destroy his familyʼs wooden tablets. In China we

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serve the dead as we serve the living, and for millions of years this has never changed,
but has been stored “in our flesh” as an extremely important principle. When telegraph
lines are constructed, they penetrate deep into the foundation of the soil; horizontally,
they are thrusting ahead, and vertically, they are piercing through—they go in all
directions and everywhere. The arteries of the earth are severed, the wind is obstructed
and the water discharged—that is the inevitable outcome. How can sons and grandsons
have peace at heart? The classics say: “You should seek out a loyal minister at the door
of a filial son.” If the people of China were willing to disregard the graves of their
ancestors, and allow others to build telegraph lines, how can they then manage to
peacefully observe the principles of respecting their lord and loving their superiors?
(Baark, 1997, p. 107).
Yet, even beyond such concerns over the preservation of Confucian social systems and
of feng shui [wind-water] practices, other political concerns played the most critical role in Qing
policymakersʼ oppositional stance (Zhao, 2006). Namely, Qing officials knew that the invasion of
telegraphs would advance the ultimate political and economic demise of their dynasty, at the
hands of colonialism. In concrete terms, they worried about foreign control of modern technology
inside the country; the flood of further concessions that would follow initial negotiations; and the
historical precedent by which colonial powers demanded reparations from the Qing government
for property damages exacted by anti-colonial popular movements (Baark, 1997, p. 71, 80; Zhao,
2006, p. 14). Nevertheless, Qing officials were forced to approve plans for the Great Northern to
build and operate a line between Hong Kong and Shanghai, starting by 1 October 1870. Prior to
this, following in the tracks of one the earliest colonially-operated railroad lines (the Shanghai-
Wusong Railway built in 1866), the Great Northern Telegraph Company was already busy
establishing an illegal Shanghai-Wusong land line, with the aid of British diplomats Robert Hart
and J. Dick (Baark, 1997, p. 81; Dong, Lu, & Wang, 1991, p. 119).

15
All of the envelopes, as well as the return addresses, for confiscated letters in the DIF archive
give evidence for the many min-chu in Hong Kong that provided letter services to Chinese
migrant communities. Furthermore, in the 1917 interrogation of Lee Tin Yat by INS Investigator
George Parson in San Francisco Chinatown, Lee repeatedly refers to “the unlawful importation of
Chinese” as “the immigration business.” Based on the transcripts, Lee was employed by
merchants in China to run information in California; he also worked at a laundry, where he was
interrogated (DIF, Entry 232, Folder 3 of Box 2).

16
A closer look at the strife among the Imperialist Chinese bloc before the Revolution of 1911,
specifically in the world of print, unveils some of the internal crises that contributed to the
necessity of its re-consolidation, transitioning from a sovereign to a nationalist imagination.
Ironically, Shanghaiʼs print industry assumed a strategic role in the survival of the Qing dynasty,
since the industryʼs productivity and profitability increased precisely through its coverage of
internal uprisings and external attacks that were otherwise burying the Qing dynasty under
(Baark, 1997; Reed, 2004; Zhao, 2006). From the 1850s-1911, this includes escalating civil war
with the Taiping Rebellions, regional ethnic uprisings, and warlordism; fending off the full-scale
military aggression of Britain, Japan, and France and lower intensity warfare with Russia, U.S.,
Austria, Portugal, and Germany; and securing its own imperial assets in Korea, Vietnam, Burma,
and Taiwan (Elleman, 2001; Rhoads, 1975; Vohra, 1987; Zhao, 2006, pp. 40-41; 47-49).
In the midst of collapse, struggles over the direction of print capitalism under Qing rule
served as a microcosm for, and marked a portion of, the larger debate about how to stay afloat.
Disagreements between the pro-merchant faction (embracing commercialization and Western-
style entrepreneurship) and the elite literati (embracing traditional Confucian systems privileging

212

patriarchy over profit) constituted the basic polarity, whose contradictions significantly shaped
Chinese print capitalist culture at this time. The debate over print is taking place in the context of
the Self-Strengthening Movement (1860-1895), wherein Qing authorities are working on how to
best appropriate Western technologies to promote Eastern imperialism. National and local
Shanghainese literati elites, despite some internal debate, generally fought for educational and
cultural reforms promoting a revival of conservative Confucianism dating back to the Tang
Dynasty (618-907). When capitalists defeated the reactionaries, they abolished the educational
system based on comprehensive civil service examinations and replaced it with Westernized
educational reforms. Nevertheless, parts of the reactionary ethos (linking schooling and national
service) survived, as reformers intended that such educational modernization would more
adequately equip students to promote national betterment, achieved through industrialization and
economic reform. These policies enormously impacted the political-economy of publishing and
print, since those industriesʼ primary commodity was the textbook and their largest market the
Chinese authorities who bought them and regulated everything (Baark, 1997, pp. 21-22; Reed,
2004, pp. 166-167; 266; Worthing, 2007, pp. 60-61).
At the turn of the twentieth century, the triumph of commercial capitalism shaped late-
Qing educational and industrial policy reforms to reflect and further induce Westernized re-
structuring. While elitist values from the Imperialist past continued to make an imprint, the literati,
increasingly dependent on financial capital, yielded to the cultural imperatives of a capitalist
organization of production. By 1904-1905, with the abolition of the educational-bureaucratic
system that linked and filtered intellectual elites into government service posts, the bifurcation of
moral and commercial values moved into processes of hybridization, characterized, for example,
by the sale of civil service degrees formerly won through competitive exams (Reed, 2004, pp.
164, 263-269). These internal battles produced the terms through which this historical bloc would
create hotly contested, dominant Chinese capitalist publishing entities, reading publics, and
literary practices (Reed, 2004, pp. 18-19; Dong, Lu, & Wang, 1991, pp. 101-105).

17
“The four great inventions of ancient China” also thematized the opening ceremony of the 2008
Beijing Olympics, as well as the 2009 Beijing Conference and Exhibition keynote address, entitled
“The Silk Road for Technological Exchange” (2009), delivered by U.S. oil speculator John W.
Gibson.

18
The Nationalist Party bloc overlaps with the Imperialist Chinese nationalist bloc in significant
ways. In 1905, Sun Yatsen consolidated various disparate anti-Qing revolutionary groups into the
Teng Meng Hui (Alliance Society), which he hoped to unite under the platform of the Three
Peopleʼs Principles: nationalism (unity among all people as Chinese); democracy (overthrowing of
an imperialist order and establishing China as a modern nation-state); and peopleʼs livelihood
(equalizing land rights through a combination of capitalist and socialist laws and practices). The
strength of the first and second principles, derived mostly from its articulation with essentialist
anti-Manchu fervor, was enough bring people together. However, reactionary resistance to the
third principle, in the struggle to define what Chinese capitalism would be, led to divided and
inconsistent loyalties, with many people switching their allegiances back and forth between blocs
during and following the revolutionary period. While Sun Yatsen himself remained steadfastly
devoted to the Three Peopleʼs Principles, others within the ranks of the Ten Meng Hui itself
espoused different party lines. These primarily refer to a “One Peopleʼs Principle,” i.e. nationalism
based on anti-Manchu hate and Han purity; and the “Two Peopleʼs Principles,” nationalism plus
commitment to a Republican Constitution organizing China as a nation-state (Dong, Lu, & Wang,
1991; Elleman, 2001; Worthing, 2007). Teng Meng Hui re-consolidated as the Goumindang
(KMT, Chinese Nationalist Party) after Yuan Shikai took the republican presidency in 1912 and

213

ruled nonetheless as self-appointed emperor. My cursory research leads me to assume that the
two blocs, Nationalist and Imperialist, eventually consolidated as one under the KMT led by
Chiang Kai-shek, rising to dominance in 1928 and defeated by the Communist bloc in 1949.

19
Among Nationalist Party and petty-bourgeois intellectual blocs, the New Culture Movement
(1915-1921) erupted out of urban centers (namely, Beijing and Shanghai): fusing anti-imperialist
political movements (including the revolutionary May Fourth mobilization of 1919 refusing the
Treaty of Versailles), with populist literary movements seeking to replace conservative
Confucianism with vernacular language culture. This Movement launched a significant campaign
against the Imperialist Chinese blocʼs monopoly print apparatus in Shanghai, the Commercial
Press—leading to the privileging of print as a means the Nationalist Party also embraced as
central to their struggles.

Eight months after the May Fourth revolts of 1919, for instance, Sun
stated, “[The publishing] business provides the people with knowledge, one of the needs of
modern society, and without which there is no progress. All the affairs of mankind need printing to
record them; all the knowledge of mankind needs printing to save it” (in Reed, 2004, p. 270).
In fact, Sunʼs ideas about the role of print in revolution concretized by 1918, when the
Commercial Press refused to publish his work. In 1921, the Nationalist Party established their
own publishing house, Minzhi shuju, with capital raised from overseas patriots. They envisioned a
Party-owned press as a requirement to break with dominant publishingʼs monarchistic,
monopolistic, and reactionary tendencies that jeopardized the nation with its excessive concern
for profit. Likewise, after the New Culture Movement peaked, activists advocated for collective
subscription and loan methods to subsidize the print industry, adaptations of pre-capitalist
Chinese printing practices offered as an alternative to Western capitalist methods (Reed, 2004,
pp. 270-272).
The privileging of struggles through print also relates to the persistence of intensely
restricted rights to education and literacy at the core of political dispossession in China (distinct
from the growth of popular literacy and public education among white working classes in the West
with the rise of print capitalism). Because of this super-structural configuration, class divisions
and contradictions arose perhaps most starkly in the printing industry. Specifically, the social
organization of print capitalism in Shanghai created qualitatively new class divisions within and
among the ruling class, managerial class, and intellectual, retail, and manual labor (Reed, 2004,
pp. 20-22, 274). Nationalist Party and intellectual blocs mobilized around these divisions mostly at
the bourgeois intellectual and retail levels, concerned with intellectual freedoms, speech rights,
commercial ethics, and liberally democratizing literary culture.

20
Christopher A. Reed (2004) found that, although the Chinese Communist Party was not
officially founded until July 1921, organizational cells were set up earlier than that, and the first
Chinese printersʼ strike occurred at the Commercial Press in March 1917, when printing shop
director Bao Xianchang attempted to introduce a piece-rate pay scale (pp. 220-221). In 1920,
budding labor leader Mao Zedong helped organize a new-style, class-based printersʼ union in
Changsha, Hunan, which went on strike in 1922 (with Mao as lead union mediator) (p. 273). The
“young print worker” became an archetype that Communist spokespeople such as Mao Zedong
and writer Mao Dun would publicly praise, using him both to socially valorize the role of workers
and to represent the importance of fully democratizing print culture (pp. 274-279).

21
All poems translated by Him Mark Lai and Genny Lim.

22
Original footnote reads: “An island in the Nan Hai (Southern Lake), west of the Forbidden City
in Peking. Emperor Guangxu (1875-1908) was imprisoned here by the Empress Dowager Cixi in

214

1898 after a coup dʼetat to halt his reform programs” (p. 100).

23
This raises a particularly fascinating conundrum in thinking about the methods through which
U.S. Immigration officials verified truth and legality, as “validityʼ resided in the extent to which the
made-up self-narrative of any given migrant was consistent with and corroborated by others.
Thus, truth-value literally rested upon how well however many people could memorize the
growing details of persistently thicker plotlines of historical fiction; also, how well the writers of the
plot could keep the story internally consistent. This raises serious questions about what is
ideology and what it can do. For example, it was common among paper sons to literally not know
who they were anymore: in fact, the condition of possibility for diasporas to flourish if people ask
themselves the right questions and pursue them.

24
For more examples, see Lau, 2006, pp. 55-57.

25
Haiming Liu (2005) compiled, translated, and analyzed the Chang family archive of letters
spanning three generations. The archive is now housed at the Chinese Historical Society of
Southern California, who also generously supported and assisted my research for this chapter.
26
This excerpt comes out of Chin Tung Pokʼs explanation for his decision to not “confess” his
paper son-ness during the “Chinese Confession Program,” implemented by the Immigration and
Naturalization Service from 1955-1970. The program grew out of McCarthyism and the Cold War,
fear of Communist China, and desire to construct and differentiate “good” and “bad” immigrants
(Chin & Chin, 2000; Lau, 2006, pp. 116-120). Pok writes, “My name as a paper son was Chin
Tung Pok. The family that purchased me as a boy of three named me Lai Bing Chan…Being a
man of principle, confession merely meant replacing one false name with another, so there was
no point in it for me” (2000, pp. 16, 52).

27
By 1922, Assistant Secretary of Labor Edward J. Henning and Commissioner General of
Immigration W.W. Husband themselves declared the island facilities filthy and unfit for human
habitation. Nevertheless, Angel Island stayed running until fire destroyed its administration
building in 1940 (Lai, Lim, & Yung, 1980, p. 14).

28
This is distinct from, but not entirely incompatible with, the narratives presented by paper wives
and mothers, who differentiated their respectability from concubines and prostitutes. Additionally,
at the turn of the century, U.S. Progressive activists promoted assimilation of different European
immigrant communities to whiteness, but not other groups such as Chinese, Mexican, or Negro.
At this time, U.S. Progressives employed tactics of racial containment and quarantine to treat the
latter communities. By the1930s, however, Progressive politicians and activists would also
appropriate Christian missionary ideology and tactics to develop racial eugenics movements.

29
NARA (unprocessed), Letter Log: Correspondence from Customs Surveyor to various, Nov 20,
1887 to Nov 18, 1889.

30
Immigration officials also recruited Christian missionaries, or “matrons,” to do this work at Angel
Island. In 1912, Deaconess Katharine Maurer, known as the “Angel of Angel Island,” was officially
appointed to administer feminine civilizing activities, supported by funds and gifts from the
Daughters of the American Revolution (who lobbied for the Page and Chinese Exclusion Acts as
their prior activist project) (Lai, Lim, & Yung, 1980, pp. 16-17; Wang, 1993, p. 12).

215

Chapter Three Endnotes

31
Refers to Frank Chin and Lawson Fusao Inada. See Chin, F. (1976). Afterward: In search of
John Okada. Reprinted in Okada. 1980 [1957], pp. 253-260.

32
Prior to and throughout WWII, U.S. surveillance of “enemy alien” communities occurred
alongside ongoing efforts to destroy Black-led social movements happening within U.S. borders
at this time. In fact, the U.S. government developed wartime intelligence agencies, in part, due to
anxiety that Japanese spies were aiding and abetting radical labor and Black social movements
inside the U.S. (Kumamoto, 1979, p. 50, 51; Lipsitz, 2001). FBI and MID monitoring of Black and
Japanese communities overlapped as U.S. Intelligence units worked to demobilize the March on
Washington, originally planned for 1941 (Crossley & DeVinney, 1986; Kumamoto, 1979, pp. 54-
55). An anonymous State Department communique warned that “the March on Washington
Movement and other Negro movements, organized originally to safeguard Negro rights, have
been subject to infiltration by Japanese groups which desire to direct the Negro minority in a
subversive effort against the United States” (in Kumamoto, 1979, pp. 54-55).
In order to demobilize the March and quell protests for human rights happening across
the country, FDR signed Executive Order 8802 on 25 June 1941 “to provide full and equitable
participation of all workers [regardless of race] in defense industries” (Flamming, 2005, pp. 362-
363; Takaki, 2000, pp. 41-42). Hoping to discipline racialized labor through the rhetoric of proper
citizenship, FDR did not sign EO 8802 until a year after Congress first passed the Alien
Registration Act. This Act authorized the collection of background information on nearly five
million aliens living within U.S. borders (Fiset, 1997, p. 28), as well as required, for the first time in
American history, that all resident aliens over fourteen years old register annually, submit
fingerprints, and report any changes of address to the U.S. government (Daniels, 1993, p. 24).
Apparently, federal resources devoted to such activities left little towards the enforcement of fair
employment that EO 8802 promised: The newly established Committee on Fair Employment
Practices received no more than twelve workers and $80,000 to investigate all employment
discrimination grievances at the national level (Takaki, 2000, p. 42). Such implementation
betrayed intent and re-formed rather than transformed the white supremacist tendencies of the
New Deal (cf. Gilmore, 2007; Katznelson, 2005; Kelley, 1990; Sánchez, 2010).
33
Time (1941, December 22). 38(5), p. 33; Life (1941, December 22). 11(25), pp. 81-82.

34
According to Ronald Takaki, “In 1924, Congress enacted a general immigration law that
included the provision prohibiting the entry of aliens for ineligible citizenship. Although they had
not been named explicitly, the Japanese had been singled out for special discriminatory
treatment, for the Chinese and Asian Indians had already been excluded in other legislation”
(1989, p. 209).

35
Changes in FBI tactics by 1941, to be discussed shortly, suggest that this memo was written
before then.

36
In 1939, President Roosevelt assigned control of all espionage, counterespionage, and
sabotage investigations to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which was part of the
Justice Department, the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department [MID], and the ONI.
By 1940, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover headed all investigations involving civilians in the United
States and its territories (Fiset, 1997, p. 28).

216

37
In October 1941, J. Edgar Hoover issued a communiqué to special agents in the field:
It is believed that a specific reason for this undesirable situation [i.e. meager findings on
Japanese espionage activities] is the dearth of confidential informants among members of the
Japanese race. Accordingly, you are instructed to take immediate steps to secure and develop
confidential informants of the Japanese race (Kumamoto, 1979, p. 57).

38
The secret Munson Report, commissioned by FDR and written by Special Representative of the
State Department Curtis B. Munson in November 1941, contains “four divisions of Japanese to be
considered,” followed by subjective definitions of the following: Issei, Nisei, Kibei, and Sansei. For
clips of the report see Michi Weglyn, 1976, p. 42.

39
My intent in the use of the term “Japanese American” throughout this chapter is to refer
objectively to people of Japanese ancestry living in the United States, not to name an (ascribed or
self-constructed) identity, nor to refer to citizenship status.

40
Foreshadowing the comprehensive censorship program to follow, in 1941 FBI round-ups
included the confiscation of cameras and short-wave radios from all residents deemed “enemy
aliens” (Clay, Holsapple, & Ina, 2006). On a related note, I am greatly indebted to Jane Iwamura
for suggesting the theme of censorship for this chapter.

41
From the Masuda family archive, graciously shared with me by Bessie Masuda, 28 March
2010, Berkeley, CA. Masuda was born in Stockton in 1929, and raised in Lodi, CA. As a teenager
after the camps, she was separated from her family again, working as a domestic in San
Francisco, CA, so she could send money home to her parents. These letters came back into the
Masuda family collection after Ms. Bessie's sister paged their father's FBI dossier from the
National Archives in Washington, D.C. Taro George Masuda, a kibei renunciant, was transferred
across Department of Justice camps and stayed the longest at Fort Lincoln, ND. The Masudas
were finally reunited in the only DOJ family camp in Crystal City, TX. This camp stayed open the
longest after the war, as renunciants waited to know their fate.

42
Equally baffling to what they were, as Hoover notes, is why they were, especially since both the
State Department and the FBI advised against EO 9066. The most basic explanation might be
that racialized camps—by giving structure to genocidal warfare for the purpose of reproducing
racial capitalism—dialectically organized, disciplined, and harnessed hysterical white labor-power
into a productive force. Artist, historian, and camp survivor Michi Weglyn made a unique early
argument, that U.S. prison camps were part of a globally designed American racism that
positioned diasporic Japanese as expendable civilians (hostages) whom, if necessary, the U.S.
could manipulate as collateral or barter as concessions in international prisoner-of-war
exchanges (1976, p. 56; cf. Hayashi, 2004, pp. 5-6; Robinson, 2009, pp. 66-67). As far-fetched as
this may seem, the forced extradition of nisei Marion Kanemoto, fourteen years old at the time, in
exchange for American POW's in Japan evidences the plausibility of such designs (in Holsapple
& Ina, 1999). Conversely, nisei students such as Mary Kimoto who were studying abroad in
Japan when the U.S. entered WWII were not allowed back to the States. Censorship of
international mail prevented such young people from knowing what was happening to their
families back home. Meanwhile, much like the war experiences documented by Kurt Vonnegut,
American citizens like Mary Kimoto were both witnesses to and victims of bombings and air raids
perpetrated by the U.S. military on 'foreign' soil (Tomita,1995).

217

Once underway, questions about where to locate and how to manage prison camps
under EO 9066 were also bound to other contradictions and histories of racialized social
movement and control (cf. Pulido, 2006; Sánchez, 2010). For example, at this time, Black
working classes struggled to bring out the potential of EO 8802 to help end racial apartheid
regimes by facilitating Black migration from South to the North and West, where wartime industrial
jobs were; white planters in the West were also re-organizing their relationship to Mexican labor,
in response to new needs resulting from the dispossession of Japanese in agriculture (Pulido,
2006; Sánchez, 2010; Takaki, 2000, pp. 41-43, 91-93; Wild, 2005). In this context, two weeks
before FDR formally declared EO 9066, Western Defense Command Lieutenant General John
DeWitt, responsible for defending the entire West Coast, submitted his recommendation to not
mass evacuate Japanese entirely from California, but instead to move them from the coastal zone
to the CA interior. After conferring with James Rowe of the DOJ and CA Governor Culbert Olson,
DeWitt agreed with their plan: “They are going to keep [Japanese] in the state. They don't want to
bring in a lot of negroes and mexicans [sic] and let them take their place...They just want to put
them on land out of the cities where they can raise vegetables like they are doing now” (in
Daniels, 1993, p. 42).
“They” then eventually moved many JA's onto land on or adjacent to Native American
reservations, recalling the history of indigenous robbery and genocide and indelibly deepening
histories of both peoples and place (cf. Richard Drinnon, 1989). In the dominant sense, the
overlap reproduced prior relationships of exploitation and expropriation. For example, when
hundreds of JA's contracted tuberculosis in Arkansas camps, they were transferred to Gila, AZ,
under the logic that the dry climate would benefit people's health. There, infectious people were
sent to the sanatorium at the Gila Indian Reservation: reminiscent of both the history of European
genocidal transfer of disease to indigenous peoples, and Progressive Era eugenics/ethnic
cleansing that systematically segregated and quarantined people of color through public health
practices (Churchill, 1997; Kazue de Cristoforo, 1997, p. 70; Molina, 2006; Shah, 2001).
Moreover, people in Jerome and Rohwer, AK, were vulnerable to infectious diseases like TB
because of the coerced conditions of poverty in camp that reflected the long-standing oppressive
situation of Black people living in the Mississippi Delta region before, during, and after the New
Deal (Kelley, 1990; Woods, 1998).

43
Meeting with Toru Saito, 28 March 2010, Berkeley CA. Saito was born in 1937 and raised in
Richmond, CA. He and family were imprisoned in camp at Topaz, UT, and returned to Richmond,
CA, after the war. As an adult, Saito worked as a group counselor at the Alameda County
Probation Department Juvenile Hall, and as a correctional officer at the Marin County Adult Jail
Honor Farm and the Napa County Jail. Saito is an author, musician, and foremost a singer. He
and Bessie Masuda have been married for thirteen years.

44
The creation of segregated Black concentration camps, interning thousands of dislocated
African refugees, both supports and refutes the humanitarian argument used to defend Boer
camps to anti-war critics in England: i.e. that white families abandoned by Boer guerilla heads-of-
household needed protection from the sexual savagery of roaming Black men (Nasson, 1999, p.
220-221). That is, the existence of Black camps could support the humanitarian argument if these
camps could be said to incarcerate African people who pillaged Boer families; these camps
simultaneously refute the humanitarian argument because if these camps did function to
neutralize the threat to white families, then these white families themselves would not need to be
incarcerated too. And, assuming a separate humanitarian argument for placing African refugees
into camp, it nullifies the logical foundation for the original argument defending Boer camps to
begin with. While real numbers remain unknown, official reports count 154,000 Boer and African

218

civilians forced into concentration camps during British conquest; official estimates of death from
starvation, disease, or brute force in camps range from 18,000-28,000 people (Pakenham, 1979,
p. 255, 287).

45
Both Achille Mbembe (2003) and Paul Gilroy (2000) assert that concentration camps evolved
out of practices of European colonial warfare, represented through the logics of anti-black racism,
nationalism, and civilized freedom. The latterʼs articulation of a spatial and political technology of
genocide, i.e. organized mass killing, structured the production and reproduction of white
civilization since the European Enlightenment (Gilroy, 2000, pp. 82-86). In the historical
development of this fatal contradiction, the production of colonial space, as concentrated sites of
war and death which “had been marginalized by a European legal imaginary” (Mbembe, 2003, p.
25), conditioned both nation-states and death camps as the paradoxically rational products of
modernity.

46
According to Sylvia R. Lazos Vargas,
The Spanish military determined that the best way to fight the revolutionary force's
guerilla tactics was to “re-concentrate” Spanish farmers and sugar cane field workers,
deemed sympathetic to guerillas, in garrisons located in major Cuban cities. This
“reconcentrado” program was repressive and cruel, even by standards of the day, and
resulted in rampant starvation and disease. It is estimated that anywhere from 200,000 to
one-half million Cubans died as a result (2001, p. 924).

47
Unlike prior American war treaties that included nominal citizenship provisions to some people
on conquered land, e.g. the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo or the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments; the Treaty of Paris created “territories” that the U.S. could annex without
extending any formal civil or citizenship rights to its peoples. These conditions further influenced
Filipino nationalist revolutionaries to declare war against the U.S. (Lazos Vargas, 2001, pp. 928-
931).

48
This “doesn't include the thousands of Moros (Filipino Muslims) killed in the first two decades of
U.S. colonial domination.”

49
FDR had been considering several civilian and military wartime censorship proposals since 1
September 1939, when he declared a national state of emergency following Hitler's invasion of
Poland. Additionally, throughout most of the 1930ʼs, FBI was already surveilling Japanese civilian
mail to make the ABC lists; on the other hand, prior to the Japanese round-up, INS officials in
charge of German and Italian detainees only gingerly screened detainee mail, hesitant to engage
in illegal activity against European inmates. The U.S. Post Office Department disclaimed
responsibility for any decisions about such work, arguing that letters were in the legal custody of
the INS who should thus determine the postal laws and regulations (Fiset, 2001).

50
FDR issued EO 8985 under the First War Powers Act that granted the President broad powers
in time of war. Just prior to EO 8985, the secretary of war formally initiated censorship of
telephone and telegraph wires crossing international borders on 8 December 1941. On
presidential authority, the postal censorship program began on 11 December, set up by FBI
director J. Edgar Hoover but implemented under the War Department (Fiset, 2001).

51
Similar to this prioritizing of media over military expertise, when the U.S. government set up its
primary wartime propaganda agency, the Office of War Information, in June 1942, FDR appointed

219

Elmer Davis as its director. Davis was a radio commentator and Rhodes scholar with no previous
formal experience in military or government (Roeder, 1993, p. 2,9).

52
The view of language as a tool and function of espionage produced binary results. While
Japanese language was initially outlawed in contexts wherein the U.S. government perceived
itself to be the victim of espionage; it was at the same time also heavily promoted in contexts
wherein the U.S. was the real agent. According to the National Japanese American Historical
Society (NJAHS, 2009), “The War Department budgeted $2,000 to start the first Army Japanese
language school. On November 1, 1941, the Military Intelligence Service Language School
(MISLS) began in an abandoned aircraft hangar on Crissy Field, in San Franciscoʼs Presidio. The
first class consisted of 4 Nisei instructors and 60 students—58 Nisei and 2 Caucasians. After the
war broke out, the language school was moved to Minnesota, first at Camp Savage, then to Ft.
Snelling. In its peak year in 1946, there were 160 instructors, 3,000 students, and more than 125
classrooms” (Retrieved May 12, 2010, from NJAHS website:
http://www.njahs.org/research/references/mis_oralhistory.php ).

53
Unless otherwise noted, all letters between Iwao and Hanaye Matsushita, included in this
chapter, were anthologized by Louis Fiset (1997) and translated from Japanese by Akimichi
Kimura, Megumi Inoue, Christine Marran, and Takehiko Abe (Fiset, 1997, p. 110).

54
The Masuda family archive also includes letters of support and notarized statements from the
local fruit shipping manager, bank cashier, auto dealer, and a neighbor in Lodi, CA, where Taro
George Masuda lived prior to internment.

55
Meeting, 28 March 2010.

56
Meeting, 28 March 2010.

57
Meeting, 31 March 2010.

58
While here I am referring specifically to issei and kibei men, Jensen's work primarily documents
the long-term effects of prison camps on the physical, mental, and emotional health of nisei. The
latter includes quadrupled rates of suicide and statistically significant increases in cardiovascular
disease, a range of environmentally-induced illnesses, and mental health challenges such as
PTSD. All problems were also exacerbated by persistent racism that systematically denies people
access to adequate health care.

59
As read by Toshio Kimura's daughter, Emi K. Fujii, in federal testimony on 23 Sept 1981.

60
From Electric Shadows/ITVS Media online interactive archive, Face-to-Face: Stories from the
Aftermath of Infamy. Retrieved May 16, 2010, from
http://archive.itvs.org/facetoface/stories/marion.html

61
From Electric Shadows/ITVS Media online interactive archive, Face-to-Face: Stories from the
Aftermath of Infamy. Retrieved May 16, 2010, at
http://archive.itvs.org/facetoface/stories/marion.html (my emphasis). Also see interview with
Marion Kanemoto, Elk Grove Unified School District's Time of Remembrance online archive,
retrieved May 16, 2010, from

220

http://www.egusd.net/tor/flash_video/interviews/m_kanemoto/clip2/mkanemoto2.html

62
My gratitude to Mary Uyematsu Kao for introducing me to her aunt's letters in this anthology.

63
For instance, the Delta Ginshu Haiku Kai (Stockton, CA), and the Valley Ginsha Haiku Kai
(Fresno, CA), were highly organized poetry collectives with diverse membership. Members of
these haiku kai met once a month, paid dues mostly in the form of potluck, and upheld rules of
reading, debate, and voting to collectively develop the avant-garde form of haiku called Kaiko. As
the U.S. got ready to declare war against Japan, the Central Valley poets destroyed most of their
collections: anticipating against hope the disasters to come, and understanding their work, i.e.
self-directed socialized labor productive of their own ethnicity, as a political liability putting their
livelihoods in jeopardy (Kazue de Cristoforo, 1997).

64
Perhaps partly to fulfill this injunction, formally structured haiku kai reproduced themselves
inside internment and civilian prison camps, such as the re-organization of several Fresno poets
as the Denson Valley Ginsha in Jerome, AK (Kazue de Cristoforo, 1997, p. 61). Because poetry
was often written in secret, it often spoke more freely about feelings and conditions than other
censored materials being produced (Soga et. al., 1983, p. 5).

65
Kazue de Cristoforo adds, “Similar losses were suffered by Japanese haiku writers in Japan as
a result of the innumerable bombings by the US Army Air Force. In one particularly heavy
incendiary raid on Tokyo, the Kaiko depository of haiku books and literary materials was
completely lost” (1997, p. 24-25).

66
According to Kazue de Cristoforo, Kaiko, meaning crimson sea, “stressed the importance of
fulfilling human nature through direct expression of the poet's emotions and giving circumstances
enthusiastic expression in order to satisfy the creative drive.” This somewhat deviated from “the
restrictive expressions of scenery and objective subtleness associated with the earlier classical
haiku...Love and observation of nature, vivid and youthful expression of detail and elegant usage
of words correlated with the season were to become the focal points” (1997, p. 23).

67
Matsushita translated his own poem here.

68
Fusa Tsumagari [age eighteen] to Clara Breed, 28 May 1942, written from assembly camp in
Santa Anita, CA. In Oppenheim, 2006, p. 94-95.

69
As an example, the instantiation of two categorical sets in early policy-making, i.e. the attempt
to define and maintain, as mutually exclusive binary opposites, domestic/international and
enemy/resident; caused irresolvable inter-agency conflict between the INS and the OOC. When
the OOC hosted a conference to talk about censorship on 27 February 1942, participating parties
from multiple war agencies tabled questions about how to meet the charge of examining 100
percent of incoming and outgoing POW and internee mail. While the OOC had absolute authority
over international mail, they had no statutory authority to censor domestic mail of any kind,
including letters from people who had been “evacuated” to civilian prison camps in California,
Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Texas, and Arkansas (Weglyn,
1976; Fiset, 2001, p. 8; 1997, p. 105). Thus, they remained officially confused about how to
handle incoming mail to Japanese enemy aliens (internees of war in INS custody), sent
domestically from family and friends (resident aliens or citizens in WRA custody) in other camps.

221

From 1942-1943, inter-agency tension mounted, as internees of war were transferred
back and forth between camps operated by the INS (under the Department of Justice [DOJ]) and
those operated by the U.S. Army (Densho, 2008). Internees grew more restless not only with the
stress of constant dislocation, but with the harsher conditions of confinement in Army camps than
in DOJ ones. Particularly for German and Italian POWʼs and enemy aliens, protests erupted in
response to mail censorship measures instituted by both the OOC and the Provost Marshal
Generalʼs Office, stricter than the ones issued earlier by the INS (Fiset, 2001, p. 9). This led to
debate, cross-purposes, and disparate practices between agencies: i.e. between the liberal
practices of INS censors, who interacted with internees on a daily basis and preferred more
relaxed regulation as a pacification tactic; and the more explicitly repressive practices of OOC
censors, who examined mail from outside facilities and preferred tightened scrutiny and control of
information as a war tactic. Throughout internment then, internees of war suffered the
consequences, e.g. delays, freezes, and lost or stolen communication; as INS, OOC, and the
Army could not agree on one set of regulations, and constantly revised while inconsistently
enforced them (Fiset, 2001, pp. 12-13).

70
The loyalty questionnaire tailed both the decision to create the segregated JA infantry regiment,
the 100
th
/442
nd
Regimental Combat Team (Castelnuovo, 2008,12-17; NJAHS, 2009); and
December 1942 camp uprisings at Manzanar, CA,that epitomized sharpening restlessness and
antagonism throughout all the camps. In the latter event, military police used tear gas and
machine guns to neutralize protesters. Military police declared martial law and killed two, injured
at least nine, and arrested, transferred, and jailed (i.e. jailed inside jail) sixteen people (Weglyn,
1976, pp. 122-125). By December 1942, the first WRA penal colonies for “troublemakers” were
also established in Maub, UT, and in Death Valley, CA, followed by another in Leupp, AZ, in April,
1943 (Tule Lake Committee, 2000[1980], p. 16; Weglyn, 1976, p. 125-128).

71
Question #27 is worded two ways. On Selective Service Form 304A it reads, “Are you willing to
serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty wherever ordered?” On WRA
Form 126 Rev., it reads, “If the opportunity presented itself and you are found qualified, would you
be willing to volunteer for the Army Nurse Corps or the WAAC [Women's Auxiliary Army Corps]?”
This latter question particularly baffled issei men, who were forced to answer this generic
question which was not phrased consistently with what they were being asked to agree to be.
Question #28 is worded the same on both forms: “Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the
United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any and all attack by foreign
or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor,
to any other foreign government, power or organization?” (Weglyn, 1976, p. 136).

72
According to Castelnuovo,
By accounts of the WRA, 77,957 residents had been eligible to complete the War
Department's questionnaire. Of these respondents, 68,018 (87 percent) answered “yes”
to the loyalty questions. Of the remaining 9,939 about 5,300 answered “no”; the rest
failed to register for the questionnaire, failed to answer the loyalty question, or qualified
their loyalty in some way [e.g. “Yes, if my constitutional rights are guaranteed in writing”].
Of the 20,679 male citizens...4,850 answered “no” to question 27, and 231 also replied
“no” to question 28 (2008, p. 17, cf. Daniels, 1993, p. 69).

73
According to the community-based organization, the Tule Lake Committee (2000 [1980]), this
entailed the construction of an eight-foot double “man-proof” fence around the camp perimeter
and an increase of Military Police to a full battalion: i.e. the 899 men, thirty-one officers, and six

222

tanks that guarded the camp. Raymond R. Best assumed the administrative lead at Tule Lake,
appointed for his experience setting up the WRA penal colonies or “citizen isolation” camps in
Moab, UT, and Leupp, AZ (cf. Weglyn, 1976, pp. 158-159).

74
By the year's end, the U.S. Army replaced the WRA as primary authority over Tule Lake, and
committed 1,200 men and eight tanks to join 300 camp guards and six radio patrol vehicles on
the prowl twenty-four hours a day.

75
These developments again complicated government censorship laws and practices. On the
one hand, heightened fears of militancy increased government desire to intercept and analyze all
camp mail, generally speaking. On the other hand, beyond questionable legal authority, the
capacity simply did not exist to carry out the task. INS/DOJ, WRA, and OOC were having a
difficult enough time censoring mail already within their jurisdiction, as the loyalty questionnaire
fiasco formally converted thousands more people into “enemy aliens,” no longer “domestic” but
neither “international.” With Tule Lake literally on fire, the most militant of renunciants were
removed from the Segregation Center, sending a flood of new people to international INS/DOJ
camps and overwhelming the mail censors there. Meanwhile, domestic/civilian WRA camps were
not equipped to deal with “enemy aliens” since those camps were not officially designed to house
them, and thus had limited access to censorship resources. Government fear produced two
contradictory results: Afraid of repercussions against American POW's and war internees, camp
authorities remained marginally vigilant about respecting communication rights under the Geneva
Conventions. Yet, afraid of information networks that supported camp uprisings, and still paranoid
about espionage, camp authorities also more intensely violated communication rights (Fiset,
2001, pp. 15, 17).

76
Meeting, 31 March 2010.

77
Meeting, 31 March 2010.

78
Meeting, 31 March 2010.

223

Chapter Four Endnotes

79
Other contemporary news stories relevant to this topic include “Getting cellphones out of
inmatesʼ hands,” The Los Angeles Times (2010, 7 December); “Outlawed, cellphones are thriving
in prisons,” The New York Times (2011, 3 January); and “Allowing phones in cells might be a
sound call,” The Los Angeles Times (2011, 26 March).

80
The name and definition of “political prisoner” matters as a human rights issue, since the U.S.
government continues to deny that U.S. political prisoners exist, and thus do not recognize the
latterʼs rights (as internationally agreed upon and recognized in the United Nations Universal
Declaration of Human Rights [1948] and the Geneva Conventions [1949]). U.S. human rights
attorney Ronald L. Kuby offers this definition: “The definition [of a political prisoner] is someone
whose actions [which contextualize and provoke incarceration] were taken in furtherance of the
principles articulated in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That
document speaks specifically of liberation movements; it speaks of equality among races and
religions. So any individual who engages in a racist act—for example, a white supremacist who
wants to reinstitute slavery or someone who wants to impose his religion on anyone—is excluded
from that definition” (Bukhari, 2010, pp. 222-223).
Started in 1998, the Jericho Movement to free political prisoners and POWʼs in the U.S. is
specific about who falls under the category of “political prisoner.” As Safiya Bukhari (2010)
explains, “Jericho is designed to raise the issues of these political cases. From the very beginning
they were political [because imprisonment is tied to active involvement in collectively organized
social justice movements]. Once we push those through and get the US government to
acknowledge and the world to recognize the fact that these people are political prisoners, then we
can open the door and bring other people through. Then we can bring in those cases of those
people who became political in prison” (pp. 210-211).

81
At time of writing, Marilyn Buck won release after over twenty-five years in prison for her active
support of revolutionary Black social movements. She died of uterine cancer at her home in
Brooklyn, NY, on 3 August 2010. See her biography in James, 2003; obituary retrieved August 9,
2010, from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/nyregion/06buck.html

82
In what remains an unclear series of events, Jonathan Jackson, age 17, was shot and killed on
7 August 1970. Jon Jackson attempted to free James McClain, Ruchell Magee, and William
Christmas from prison during their appearance at the Marin County Courthouse, CA. Law
enforcement officials killed Jackson, McClain, Christmas, and hostage Judge Harold Haley during
the armed confrontation. On 21 August 1971, George Jackson was murdered at San Quentin
State Prison (James, 2003, pp. 85-86).

83
Joseph Omowale, former member of the Black Panther Party, hijacked a plane to Cuba in 1972
amidst escalating COINTELPRO activity in the U.S. His exile, which began the same year Yusef
Toussaint Omowale was born, extended for over a decade. Joseph Omowale eventually returned
to the U.S. and was apprehended by the FBI in 1983 (Omowale, 1998, pp. 92-93). See also
Rosenblatt, A. & Cottman, M.H. (1983, December 5). Miami hijack suspect arrested, Miami
Herald, retrieved August 11, 2010, from http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/hijackers/suspect-
arrested.htm

84
McCray was released from prison in 1995 and established the San Francisco-based Families
with a Future, an organization that reunites families torn apart by prison (in Schoefer, 2000). Her

224

activism focuses on both the state violence that mothers in prison face and the rehabilitative
power of family. See also Nell Bernstein, “Terminating Motherhood: How the drug war has
stamped an entire class of parents as permanently unfit”, retrieved July 21, 2010, from
http://www.asentenceoftheirown.com/Essays%20-%20Terminating.html

85
Jalil Muntaqim, along with fellow Black Panther/Black Liberation Army members Albert “Nuh”
Washington and Herman Bell, were framed by COINTELPRO and incarcerated in 1971 for the
deaths of two NYPD officers (James, 2003, p. 104). Refusal to conform may greatly explain why
the parole board persistently refuses to release him, as he continues to face torture and
persecution by the police and FBI. In 2009, Muntaqim and Bell were the only two of the “San
Francisco 8” who were not exonerated in the 2007 re-opening of a case, in which the state
attempted to re-try the 1971 killing of a San Francisco police officer. The original ordeal, lasting
from 1971-1975, ended in dropped charges due to proof of New Orleans policeʼs use of torture to
extract false confession and testimony (Buhkari Whitehorn, 2010, pp. 33, 167; Freedom
Archives, 2007; freetheSF8.org, retrieved July 2010).

86
Chan further reflects on his own question in another reply: “Ultimately, because of who
[Mandela] was, there was no middle ground, no “balance” option provided him, and he had to
deal with the guilt of his son and mother dying while he was incarcerated. While I do agree with
you there is a definite gendered aspect to this question…[I donʼt believe that] the answer is
navigated by gender. I think itʼs a question of weighing oneʼs responsibilities—responsibilities to
self, family, people, Creator, etc.—weighing them against each other and with each other and
with and against freedom. I think that question is as much generational, and geographic, and
ethnic, and economic. I think regardless of who we are, we are at times forced to make the
difficult decisions based on our circumstance, and then left to contemplate later if we made the
right choice, because itʼs never really ʻhappily ever after,ʼ is it?” (Personal communication, July
28, 2010).

225

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract ""The Life of Paper: A Poetics"" explores the role of letter correspondence in practices of social reproduction, specifically within histories of racism, mass incarceration, and social struggle in California and the West. I trace this life by fleshing out the labors that comprise letter correspondence in three case studies: ""Detained"" focuses on migrants from Southern China during the early period of U.S. Chinese exclusion (1880s-1920s)

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Asset Metadata

Creator Luk, Sharon (author)

Core Title The life of paper: a poetics

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Publication Date 03/27/2012

Defense Date 04/25/2011

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Ethnicity,incarceration,letters,OAI-PMH Harvest,prison abolition,Racism,social reproduction

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Gilmore, Ruth Wilson (committee chair), Halberstam, Judith (committee member), Kelley, Robin D.G. (committee member), Lloyd, David C. (committee member)

Creator Email sharon_luk@yahoo.com,sharonlu@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-1520

Unique identifier UC11287917

Identifier usctheses-c3-1520 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-LukSharon-556.pdf

Dmrecord 1520

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Luk, Sharon

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA