Article Title
Imaging Internment:Teaching Miné Okubo's Citizen 13660 as a Work of Comics in the Contact Zone
Abstract
Although Miné Okubo is an American citizen and the events she records in Citizen 13660 took place on American soil, this essay will argue that her work is nevertheless a work of the contact zone. Furthermore, Okubo’s record of the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II can be usefully read and taught as an autoethnography that constructs a counterhistory of World War II. The juxtaposition of Okubo’s autobiographical record of her internment experience with a variety of “official” images can help students learn about the construction of knowledge. Such classroom work can help students “decolonize knowledge,” to borrow a phrase from Mary Louise Pratt, by demonstrating how knowledge is not neutral but is instead constructed by constituencies with a vested interested in how events are depicted.
Recommended Citation
Beadling, Laura L.
(2010)
"Imaging Internment:Teaching Miné Okubo's Citizen 13660 as a Work of Comics in the Contact Zone,"
SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education: Vol. 1:
Iss.
1, Article 5.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sane/vol1/iss1/5