Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Serve the People
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.rafu.com/2016/02/serve-the-people-tells-how-orientals-became-asian-americans/ * https://www.versobooks.com/authors/1909-karen-l-ishizuka * http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2016/6/17/serve-the-people
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.:
n 96122660
LCCN Permalink:
https://lccn.loc.gov/n96122660
HEADING:
Ishizuka, Karen L.
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PERSONAL
Born October 26, 1947.
EDUCATION:University of California, Los Angeles, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, producer, and curator. Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles, CA, former senior curator, senior producer, and director of Media Arts Center. Producer of films, including Conversations: Before the War/After the War, 1986, Something Strong Within, and Toyo Miyatake: Infinite Shades of Gray.
WRITINGS
Contributor of chapters to books, including Oral History and Communities of Color, 2013.
SIDELIGHTS
Karen L. Ishizuka is a writer, producer, and curator. Ishizuka previously served as the senior producer, senior curator, and director of the Media Arts Center for the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. She is the producer of films, including Conversations: Before the War/After the War, Something Strong Within, and Toyo Miyatake: Infinite Shades of Gray.
Lost and Found and Mining the Home Movie
In her 2006 book, Lost and Found: Reclaiming the Japanese American Incarceration, Ishizuka discusses the internment of people of Japanese heritage during World War II. She includes excerpts from interviews with people who experienced those internment camps.
Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann are the editors of Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories. In a lengthy assessment of the volume on the Senses of Cinema website, Adrian Danks suggested: “Ishizuka and Zimmermann’s book is of considerable value in terms of how it gives us a sense of the vast terrain of home movie practice and the ways in which it is used within a contemporary context. The piecemeal and often very localised nature of the examples analysed points towards the value of such specific analysis (something which often hasn’t been achieved in relation to home image production of any form) and the vast history of this practice that can only ever be approximated by such archival and ‘mining’ practices.” Danks added: “Thus although some of the textual analysis contained within the anthology is a little laborious … it is nevertheless valuable in terms of how it treats the home movie as less of a generalised social force (and imaginary) than a repository of often startling (and equally mundane) images that can both escape and be collapsed within overarching narratives of history. The book constantly shows the value of looking at these films in detail—with some limitations, as indicated above—and of exploring both their conventional and less readable elements.”
Serve the People
Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties finds Ishizuka examines Asian Americans’ involvement during the civil rights movements of the 1960s. In an interview with Michelle Chen, contributor to the Culture Strike website, Ishizuka explained how she came to write the book. She stated: “The ‘Sixties’ was a critical time in world history that gave birth to a radical and global consciousness that continues to reverberate and rumble five decades later. Unlike previous historical eras, over the past fifty years there have been hundreds of books and articles dedicated to deconstructing and analyzing its impact and influence, evidence of its continuing significance not just for the past but for the present and future. Most of these books and articles have been written from a white male perspective.” Ishizuka added: “And although the general public is aware of the Black Liberation movement, and some have heard of the Chicano/a movement, very few know about the Asian American (and Native American) movement. That’s why, when I originally proposed a much narrower (geographic and topical) focus on the Asian American movement, Verso felt it was time for a broader, more comprehensive, national overview.”
Joshua Wallace, reviewer in Library Journal, asserted: “This fascinating study is highly recommended for those interested in Asian American history and the civil rights movement.” Writing on the Discover Nikkei website, Lawrence Lan described Serve the People as “a comprehensive, narrative-centered retrospective of the Asian American movement. Ishizuka’s book offers an expansive recounting of, and reflection on, what transpired during that era so that we might consider its meanings for today. Serve the People presents an engaging social history of the AAM that centers the stories, experiences, and reflections of the people who participated in the movement in different communities, settings, and contexts.” Lan concluded: “Importantly, Serve the People speaks to a broad audience of academic, community, and activist readers from varying backgrounds and contexts.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
California Bookwatch, May, 2016, review of Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties.
Library Journal, April 1, 2016, Joshua Wallace, review of Serve the People, p. 105.
ProtoView, December, 2016, review of Serve the People.
ONLINE
Culture Strike, http://www.culturestrike.org/ (August 19, 2016), Michelle Chen, author interview.
Discover Nikkei, http://www.discovernikkei.org/ (June 17, 2016), Lawrence Lan, review of Serve the People.
Rafu Shimpo, http://www.rafu.com/ (February 28, 2016), review of Serve the People.
Senses of Cinema, http://sensesofcinema.com/ (September 13, 2017), Adrian Danks, review of Mining the Home Movie.
University of Illinois Press Website, http://www.press.uillinois.edu/ (August 17, 2017), author profile and synopsis of Lost and Found.
Verso Books Website, https://www.versobooks.com/ (August 17, 2017), author profile.*
Karen L. Ishizuka
Karen L. Ishizuka is a third-generation American of Japanese descent who was part of the Asian American movement in Los Angeles. She is the author of Lost and Found: Reclaiming the Japanese American Incarceration, as well as many published articles, and coeditor of Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories. An award-winning documentary film producer and museum curator, she helped establish the Japanese American National Museum and received her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Lost and Found
Reclaiming the Japanese American Incarceration
Recovering--and recovering from--a dark chapter in American history
Combining heartfelt stories with first-rate scholarship, Lost and Found reveals the complexities of a people reclaiming their own history. For decades, victims of the United States’ mass incarceration of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II were kept from understanding their experience by governmental cover-ups, euphemisms, and societal silence. Indeed, the world as a whole knew little or nothing about this shamefully un-American event. The Japanese American National Museum mounted a critically acclaimed exhibition, “America’s Concentration Camp: Remembering the Japanese American Experience,” with the twin goals of educating the general public and engaging former inmates in coming to grips with and telling their own history.
Author/curator Karen L. Ishizuka, a third-generation Japanese American, deftly blends official history with community memory to frame the historical moment of recovery within its cultural legacy. Detailing the interactive strategy that invited visitors to become part of this groundbreaking exhibition, Ishizuka narrates the processes of revelation and reclamation that unfolded as former internees and visitors alike confronted the experience of the camps. She also ponders how the dual act of recovering--and recovering from--history necessitates private and public mediation between remembering and forgetting, speaking out and remaining silent.
By embedding personal words and images within a framework of public narrative, Lost and Found works toward reclaiming a painful past and provides new insights with richness and depth.
"It would be impossible to recapture the power of the show, but 'Lost and Found comes close, offering a look at an exhibition that became, over time, both sanctuary and community campfire."--Los Angeles magazine
"The reviewer has been teaching Asian American history for twenty years and did not think there was much more about the camps that would surprise him, but this book moved him in ways he had not expected. He recommends it to everyone interested in this dark episode of our national history."--Historian
“Karen Ishizuka’s Lost and Found reclaims an important part of American history that was nearly forgotten. By exploring the meaning of the World War II camps from the inmates’ own memories, this book achieves a level of intimacy that is not only profoundly moving, but is also essential to understanding the significance of the camps and the work of the Japanese American National Museum in preserving this history.”--Senator Daniel K. Inouye
Karen L. Ishizuka is an independent writer and documentary producer who has produced numerous award-winning films including Something Strong Within and Toyo Miyatake: Infinite Shades of Gray, an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival. She served the Japanese American National Museum for its first fifteen years as senior curator, senior producer, and director of its Media Arts Center.
QUOTED: "The "Sixties" was a critical time in world history that gave birth to a radical and global consciousness that continues to reverberate and rumble five decades later. Unlike previous historical eras, over the past 50 years there have been hundreds of books and articles dedicated to deconstructing and analyzing its impact and influence, evidence of its continuing significance not just for the past but for the present and future. Most of these books and articles have been written from a white male perspective."
"And although the general public is aware of the Black Liberation movement, and some have heard of the Chicano/a movement, very few know about the Asian American (and Native American) movement. That's why, when I originally proposed a much narrower (geographic and topical) focus on the Asian American movement, Verso felt it was time for a broader, more comprehensive, national overview."
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MAGAZINE
When Asian America was a Movement
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A Movement Veteran Rethinks the History of Asian American Activism
Written by Karen L. Ishizuka
Seattle March on the Department of Housing and Urban Development (Photo: Eugene Tagawa, via Verso)
As a generation of veteran activists—sometimes known as "movement elders"—enters an age of wisdom, new reflections on past movements have cropped up in the form of memoir and historical scholarship. Karen L. Ishizuka weaves together history and memory in Serve the People, a biography of the postwar Asian American civil rights movement. She takes a critical look at a social uprising that she herself was part of, and details the people, places, organizations and campaigns that formed what became known as the Asian American Movement. It may be seen in some ways as a relatively brief moment in Asian American history, but in many ways, it was the Big Bang that created Asian and Pacific Islander America as a political and cultural phenomenon. In a dialogue with CultureStrike's Michelle Chen, Ishizuka reflects on what the Asian American Movement was, what became of it, and what it still means today.
Read an excerpt of Serve the People.
—Michelle Chen, August 19, 2016
Michelle Chen: Why does Serve the People appear now?
Karen Ishizuka: The "Sixties" was a critical time in world history that gave birth to a radical and global consciousness that continues to reverberate and rumble five decades later. Unlike previous historical eras, over the past 50 years there have been hundreds of books and articles dedicated to deconstructing and analyzing its impact and influence, evidence of its continuing significance not just for the past but for the present and future. Most of these books and articles have been written from a white male perspective. And although the general public is aware of the Black Liberation movement, and some have heard of the Chicano/a movement, very few know about the Asian American (and Native American) movement. That's why, when I originally proposed a much narrower (geographic and topical) focus on the Asian American movement, Verso felt it was time for a broader, more comprehensive, national overview. So I owe that vision to the editorial board of Verso and my editor Andy Hsaio.
Another reason to write this book now is that on the long road to social change, sometimes you take one step forward only to go back two. Diagnosis: historical amnesia. For example, as I write in the book, a 2012 Pew Research report basically concluded that Asian Americans are still the model minority—a dangerous stereotype that we fought so hard to get rid of 50 years ago. And in 2013 an API tweet calling for “a space to use our voices, build community and be heard” went viral attracting the attention of mainstream news outlets around the world. But to those of us who made such a space in the Sixties—or so we thought—it was déjà vu.
What inspired this book personally for you?
"Kill that Gook" (Alan Takemoto, Gidra, 1972, via Verso)
I began a Ph.D. program in the late 1970s and dropped out to work on the ground in the area of Asian American history, culture and community. I wrote and produced films primarily on the Japanese American experience, curated museum exhibits and advocated for the significance of home movies as the only motion picture documentation of people of color who were routinely overlooked in American newsreels and mass media. All good but I realized that the written word still rules in terms of getting us out of the margins and positioning us within the canon of U.S. history and culture. The written word doesn’t require projectors or other playback machines, are less ephemeral than museum exhibits, and are the primary educational tool. Moreover, the written word can be cited by other scholars and writers thereby taking on an after life. Of the over 1 million books per year that are published in the U.S. alone, more than a handful should be on and by Asian Pacific Americans. And, oh, after a thirty year hiatus I went back to school and am now a recently minted Ph.D.
As I read contemporary API commentary and listen to young people, I am struck with the realization that today’s APIs know nothing to little about how Asian America came to be. Just as my generation was never taught about the history that came before us, the current generation—as well as recent immigrants—don’t know the history of how and why Asian America came to be. Before the Sixties and the Asian American Movement (AAM), there was no such thing as an Asian American. We were primarily Chinese, Japanese and Filipinos, the majority of Asian ethnic groups in the U.S. at the time. We were not born Asian American but rather gave birth to ourselves as Asian Americans as a political identity to be seen and heard. Now the terms Asian American and Asian Pacific Islander have been neutralized into a mere adjective.
But as Jeff Chang incisively stated in the Foreword he wrote for Serve the People, “There was a time…when the term ‘Asian American’ was not merely a demographic category, but a fight you were picking with the world.” We cannot change mainstream America’s stereotype of us as model minorities until we realize, like it or not, that we are in a fight.
The Asian American Movement, as you define it, is difficult to periodize, even though (or perhaps because) it spanned a relatively short period of time. Talk about how you periodize this history in your scholarship?
What is generally known as the "Sixties" actually spans three decades. As a global, political era with far reaching social consequences, most scholars mark its beginning as starting in the late 50s with the decolonization of British and French Africa and ending in the mid 70s with the end of the Vietnam War. Within this elongated decade, the AAM arguably began in the late 60s - with the spontaneous arising of organizations such as the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) on the campus of the U.C. Berkeley, Asian Coalition for Equality (ACE), a primarily middle aged, professional group in Seattle, and Asian American for Action (Triple A), a multi-generational, anti-imperialist coalition in New York City. It wound down in the mid-late 70s with the corporatization of the U.S. and return of power to the upper class. It was a relatively short period of time, but without it we would not have the Asian Pacific America as we know it today. Although people don’t connect the dots between then and now, it was the cause and impetus for Asian American Studies, API health and welfare agencies, API professional organizations as well as API cultural institutions.
How did you structure the book to cover the movement as it spread throughout the country?
I struggled with many attempts to come up with the structure of the book—to tell the history of Asian American movement that was both national in scope yet local in execution. I thought about laying it out chronologically, but too much took place simultaneously and I didn’t want to reduce the dynamics and passion of the AAM into a timeline. I thought about structuring it around geographical hubs, but that would further shroud the many other places that sprouted grassroots activism of their own that I wasn’t able to include. I thought about structuring the AAM into major spheres of activism—cultural, political and social—but such realms overlapped and fed into each other. Like all social movements, the AAM was like a cosmic Venn diagram in which personal meaning, political activism and cultural production intersected.
In the end, I took advice from Paulo Freire: “Discovery cannot be purely intellectual but must also involve action; nor can it be limited to mere activism, but must include serious reflection.” Rather than a history of the AAM per se, I focused on the making of Asian America and presented the story in three acts, not that there is a strict linear progression from one to the other. Act I: “American Chop Suey” is on Discovery –why and how Asian America came to be, with chapters on “Growing Up Alien in America” and “Living in B&W.” Act II: “Once in a Movement” is on Activism—various spheres of activism in anti-war, community building, arts, etc. Act III: “Finding Our Truth” is on Reflection—self-appraisals and evaluations. (I took the title from Tom Hayden who said, “If the sixties are not over, it is up to the sixties generation to continue to find our truth.”) This three-act structure of Discovery, Activism and Reflection allowed me to encompass, but not be restricted by, chronology, geography or sociology.
The other key structural element was to foreground individual stories. A movement doesn’t make itself. As much as the AAM was a grassroots movement wherein we worked in a spirit of collectivity rather than individuality, I wanted to put at least some of the names and faces to the many deeds and ideas to remind ourselves of a kinship and mutuality that would otherwise remain unknown. I am a firm believer in the power of stories—with people learning and engaging more from stories than from facts and figures.
Does the Asian American movement still exist?
Of the many Sixties activists I spoke to about the Asian American movement—specifically regarding how and why it ended—only those in Seattle said it hasn’t ended, that an Asian American movement continues to this day. Home to the International District, Seattle is the only place in the continental U.S. where Chinese, Japanese and Filipinos historically comprised one pan-Asian community, they also had strong alliances with the Black, Latino and Native American progressive communities. As Chinatown/Manilatown in San Francisco and Little Tokyo in Los Angeles were overtaken by redevelopment, the International District has managed to thrive, having cultivated continuity between old and young activists in a strong multi-generational, multi-ethnic front.
In general, however, as I conclude in the book, the Asian America of the Long Sixties no longer exists—nor should it. Social movements are not meant to be continuing entities because they must respond to the internal and external conditions of the times. My objective in writing the book was not to resurrect the AAM as it was then, but to know that it indeed existed in order to build upon it. I quote from Jean-Paul Sartre as the epigram of the last chapter: “What is important is that the action took place…If it took place, it can happen again.” Or as our beloved poet Al Robles murmured, “Ah Pilipinos, if you only knew how brown you are.”
Learn more about Serve the People at Verso Books.
Genre:
Nonfiction
Topics:
Community and Activism
Tags:
Asian American, sixties, history, movements
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© COPYRIGHT 2017
PRIVACY NOTICE TERMS OF USE Culturestr/ke, Oakland, California info@culturestrike.org
8/7/17, 6(43 PM
Print Marked Items
Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties
ProtoView.
(Dec. 2016): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 Ringgold, Inc. http://www.protoview.com/protoview
Full Text:
9781781688625
Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties Karen L. Ishizuka
Verso
2016
270 pages
$29.95
Hardcover
E184
Ishizuka, an author, film producer, and museum curator who was part of the Asian American movement, draws on interviews with about 120 activists involved in the movement to describe its history. The activists share where and how they grew up, the people and events that influenced who they became, and their activism, detailing why and how Asian America originated, as Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos in the US came together to transform themselves from Orientals into Asian Americans in a culture defined by black and white; their establishment of organizations, cultural productions, forms of knowledge, and ways of being to create their own political culture; and the memory and meaning of the movement. ([umlaut] Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties." ProtoView, Dec. 2016. PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA474813980&it=r&asid=66f62c22c6f9685a600b90d607ff77de. Accessed 7 Aug. 2017.
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Serve the People
California Bookwatch.
(May 2016): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 Midwest Book Review http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
Serve the People
Karen L. Ishizuka
Verso
20 Jay Street, 10th Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11201-8346 www.versobooks.com
9781761688625, $29.95, www.amazon.com
Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties brings readers back to a time when there were no 'Asian Americans', but isolated ethnic groups billed as "Orientals". The transition of this loosely banded group into a social and political identity that operates from a powerful demographic base today is the subject of a book that uses over a hundred interviews, stories of grassroots activists and movements, and accounts of growing up Asian in a changing America to offer a powerful survey of how Asian America came to be a powerful presence, today. The result is a key acquisition for any collection looking to fill in some social, political, and historical blanks about the evolution of modern Asian communities.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Serve the People." California Bookwatch, May 2016. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA455184465&it=r&asid=d71f176f56a4bf23194ca5c470aec6e0. Accessed 7 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A455184465
QUOTED: "This fascinating study is highly recommended for those interested in Asian American history and the civil rights movement."
about:blank Page 3 of 4
8/7/17, 6(43 PM
Ishizuka, Karen L.: Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties
Joshua Wallace
Library Journal.
141.6 (Apr. 1, 2016): p105. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Ishizuka, Karen L. Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties. Verso. 2016.288p. illus. notes, index. ISBN 9781781688625. $29.95; ebk. ISBN 9781781688649. HIST
Over a period of eight years, independent scholar Ishizuka (Lost and Found) interviewed approximately 120 people who were involved in the Asian American civil rights movement. This book is the fruit of those labors, and it sheds light on the experiences of Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino Americans in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. At that time, many Asian Americans felt alienated as they were not part of the black and white dichotomy of American society. Inspired by the black liberation movement and opposition to the Vietnam War, Asian Americans began to organize to stand up for their rights. Before this uprising, these groups were typically referred to as "Orientals." Adopting the term Asian American allowed people of this heritage to show both solidarity among the various Asian ethnic groups and reflect their Americanness. VERDICT This fascinating study is highly recommended for those interested in Asian American history and the civil rights movement. For a work that covers this history beyond the 1960s, see Erica Lee's The Making of Asian America: A History.--Joshua Wallace, Ranger Coll., TX
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wallace, Joshua. "Ishizuka, Karen L.: Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties." Library
Journal, 1 Apr. 2016, p. 105. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA447931726&it=r&asid=0a7633f6ab83c61843f2c5fbbef95c05. Accessed 7 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A447931726
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Posted On FEBRUARY 28, 2016 Books
karen ishizuka bookUntil the late 1960s and 1970s, there were no Asian Americans. There were only isolated communities of mostly Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos lumped together as “Orientals.”
Karen Ishizuka’s new book, “Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties,” tells the history of how and why the double consciousness of Asian America came to be. It will be released by Verso Books on March 1.
Karen Ishizuka
Karen Ishizuka
Ishizuka’s vivid narrative reveals the personal insights and intimate stories of movers and shakers as well as ground-level activists. Drawing on more than 120 interviews and illustrated with striking images from guerrilla movement publications, the book evokes the feeling of growing up alien in a society rendered only in black and white, and recalls the intricate memories and meanings of the Asian American Movement.
The foreword was written by Jeff Chang, author of “Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post-Civil Rights America.”
Attorney Dale Minami, co-founder of the Asian Law Caucus, said, “Karen Ishizuka has opened a window to an ignored but significant part of American history. I love the captivating cartoons, newspaper and arts sections, but what really enlivens her narrative and adds depth to her work is her personal relationship to this history.”
Warren Furutani, a longtime educator and activist who is in the running for California state senator, said, “As an active participant of the Asian American Movement, I am excited about Karen Ishizuka’s book. It is written by someone who was there, not from the outside looking in.”
“Angry Asian Man” blogger Phil Yu said, “‘Serve the People’ chronicles the hard-fought history of a movement, neither black nor white, but a new awareness — the story of how we became Asian America.”
Ishizuka is a Sansei who was part of the Asian American Movement in Los Angeles. She is the author of “Lost & Found: Reclaiming the Japanese American Incarceration” and was the keynote speaker at the Gardena Valley Japanese Cultural Institute’s Day of Remembrance on Feb. 27. She will also be honored by the Japanese American National Museum, along with Robert A. Nakamura, for their contributions to the museum at its Gala Dinner on March 19.
Ishizuka will speak about “Serve the People” at UCLA on April 20 with noted historian Diane C. Fujino and at JANM on June 18 with a panel of activists Furutani, Mike Murase and Qris Yamashita, who are in the book, as well as younger activist traci kato-kiriyama.
For information on ordering the book online, go to: www.versobooks.com/books/1899-serve-the-people
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QUOTED: "a comprehensive, narrative-centered retrospective of the Asian American movement. Ishizuka’s book offers an expansive recounting of, and reflection on, what transpired during that era so that we might consider its meanings for today. Serve the People presents an engaging social history of the AAM that centers the stories, experiences, and reflections of the people who participated in the movement in different communities, settings, and contexts."
"Importantly, Serve the People speaks to a broad audience of academic, community, and activist readers from varying backgrounds and contexts."
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Connecting Movements and Memories: On Karen Ishizuka’s Serve The People and the Making and Meanings of the Asian American Movement
By Lawrence Lan 17 Jun 2016
437
1
Karen L. Ishizuka
“You have to keep changing, because what has happened and what you have been a part of is no longer there. The ideas that we develop remain in our heads … So our challenge constantly is both to learn from the past and also not be bound by the past.”
—Grace Lee Boggs1
The words of the late political thinker and activist Grace Lee Boggs offer a good reminder that in our struggles for personal and collective transformation, we must indeed learn from the past and also adapt to the changing material conditions of our own experiences. What, then, might we learn from the Asian American movement (the AAM or “the movement” for short), the constellation of community groups, intellectuals, artists, and all kinds of other people who engaged in different forms of activism, art, and political participation in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s?
To help us think through this question, Karen L. Ishizuka’s most recent book, Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties (Verso, 2016) presents a comprehensive, narrative-centered retrospective of the Asian American movement. Ishizuka’s book offers an expansive recounting of, and reflection on, what transpired during that era so that we might consider its meanings for today.
Serve the People presents an engaging social history of the AAM that centers the stories, experiences, and reflections of the people who participated in the movement in different communities, settings, and contexts. Drawing on approximately 120 interviews conducted with Asian American movement participants throughout the United States over eight years, Serve the People makes clear the nuances of geography, time, and personal experience in the movement. Importantly, Serve the People speaks to a broad audience of academic, community, and activist readers from varying backgrounds and contexts.
The stories in Serve the People are wide-ranging and capture the various ways in which the Asian American movement took local form in places ranging from Kalama Valley in Hawai‘i to the International District in Seattle and the International Hotel in San Francisco’s Manilatown to Confucius Plaza in New York City. “Some of the people I talked with were movers and shakers, and others were grunts, the proletariat of movement,” Ishizuka said. “All were makers of history.”
These “makers of history” include Mike Nakayama, who testified at the Winter Soldier hearings in 1971 about how US soldiers mistreated the Vietnamese and also how Asian American soldiers were used as examples of what the enemy in Vietnam looked like.2 These “makers of history” also include Chris Iijima, movement troubadour, who remembered how much fun the movement was in the first place:
Part of the reason people were attracted to the movement may not have been the politics, but it’s where it was happening. It was where the party was! It was a blast! And I think that’s what we never talk about—what a great amount of fun it was! That gets lost sometimes, and we have to remember that.3
Reflecting on the process of finding people to interview and capturing movement stories, Ishizuka discussed beginning in familiar places: “I couldn’t talk with everyone, obviously, nor cover all the places the Asian American movement sprouted in. Originally I included the obvious hotspots—the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York, and then added Hawai‘i, because it so often gets left out, and Seattle, where I discovered some early and little known stories.” These stories included those of Bob Santos, a longtime community activist in Seattle’s International District; and those of Gene Viernes and Silme Domingo, Filipino American labor activists who worked in the canneries and who were murdered in 1981 for their opposition to the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines.
For Ishizuka, a Sansei film producer, curator, writer, and scholar (one who recently earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from UCLA), the unit of analysis has always been the story. “What distinguishes my book from the handful of others on the Asian American movement perhaps is the personal stories that together, tell not only what happened—the history—but how it felt to develop a new world—Asian America.” Ishizuka reflected, “Personal stories—life history, life stories, biographies, memoirs—have always been key in my work as an anthropologist, filmmaker, writer. I produced a film on Issei photographer Toyo Miyatake for JANM [Japanese American National Museum] and have written profiles of Don Nakanishi and Kazu Iijima that were published in Amerasia Journal. Even as a kid, my favorite books were biographies and a historical series called ‘You were there,’ or something like that, that told history from a first person point of view.”
Indeed, the stories that lie at the heart of Serve the People help readers make sense of the particular social, cultural, and political conditions from which the Asian American movement emerged in the late 1960s. In the foreword to the book, journalist and cultural critic Jeff Chang writes, “Serve the People is a history of what it felt like to live in those times—from the intensity and ecstasy of the period of discovery to the terror and betrayal of the spent revolution.”4 For Ishizuka, Jeff Chang’s words ring true. “It is this sense, ‘of what it felt like to live in those times,’ that I attempted to capture in the book,” Ishizuka said.
“While every person I interviewed would maintain that the AAM was greater than their part in it, a movement doesn’t make itself,” Ishizuka noted. “People do. And social movements are more than demonstrations and demands, political slogans and ideologies. They begin with individual epiphanies—‘a-ha moments’ that turn up the volume, demanding to be heard.”
These “a-ha moments” happened everywhere. Nancy Hom was studying to become a gallery artist in New York when she first heard Chris Iijima and Nobuko (JoAnne) Miyamoto sing about garment workers, railroad laborers, people like Nancy’s parents. Nancy went on to become a community artist and helped to grow the Kearny Street Workshop in San Francisco.5 Like most others who joined the movement, Mary Choy, a second-generation Korean American, had been politicized by the anti-Vietnam War movement and the struggle for ethnic studies at the University of Hawai‘i. Choy would go on to participate in organizing efforts to fight the mass evictions of small farmers in Kalama Valley in Hawai‘i in the early 1970s.6 After learning more about the Vietnam War for himself, Harvey Dong dropped out of the ROTC program at UC Berkeley and began actively participating in the anti-war movement.7
Serve the People is a product of over a decade of work. It had its beginnings in the early 2000s, when Ishizuka initially had two ideas for projects related to the AAM—one that focused on its cultural productions, and another that specifically highlighted Gidra, a prominent AAM newspaper based out of Los Angeles and notably, the longest-running movement paper, lasting from 1969 to 1974. In Serve the People, a comprehensive trade book that addresses the Asian America movement broadly, Ishizuka manages to incorporate analyses of its artistic and cultural productions (including the wide array of posters, photographs, films, and literary works) as well as Gidra’s content and images, which showed how the movement unfolded in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
“Stereotypes,” by Mike Murase, Gidra, April 1969.
Retrospective of API posters, two by Qris Yamashita on far left. Bridge Magazine, Summer 1982.
At various appearances and book talks, Ishizuka has intentionally brought her book into conversation with local activists. When Ishizuka presented her book at the Howard Zinn Book Fair in San Francisco, Miriam Ching Louie, Belvin Louie, Nancy Hom, and Kori Saika Chen joined her and spoke to the importance of understanding the meanings that movement activisms have on the present. Harvey Dong and Peggy Saika joined Ishizuka when she was the closing keynote speaker at the Asian Pacific Student Development conference at UC Berkeley and Laureen Chew and Spencer Nakasako participated when Ishizuka addressed the students fighting for Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State.
traci kato-kiriyama
At UCLA, she was joined by author-activist Diane Fujino, who wrote biographies on Yuri Kochiyama and Richard Aoki. In Seattle, Bob Santos, Frankie Irigon, and Sharon Maeda joined Ishizuka at the Elliot Bay Book Company, University of Washington, and South Seattle College. At the June 18th event at the Japanese American National Museum, Ishizuka will be in conversation once again, this time with local activists Warren Furutani, Mike Murase, Qris Yamashita, and traci kato-kiriyama.
Warren Furutani speaking in Harlem in 1971.
Serve the People has received positive reception from a variety of readers—both Asian Pacific Islander and others—from around the country. “The audiences for the book talks has been very diverse,” Ishizuka said. “And at all of them, many API [Asian Pacific Islander] activists, many whom I would have liked to interview, came. And that has been very gratifying—to have it well-received by the people I wanted to highlight.”
Ishizuka also fondly discussed hearing from veteran activist Bob Santos about the book when it was published: “When such an icon as Uncle Bob wrote to me that my book chronicled his life, listed the names of more than 20 people in the book he knew and worked with, and that I had ‘nailed it,’ it was a validation beyond which any outside reviewer could convey.”
In addition to the meanings of the movement that Serve the People has brought to a general readership, the process of putting this book together has also been a journey with personal meaning for Ishizuka herself.
“This first person, personal approach made me privy to not only such awesome—and awful—stories, but to the personalities and hospitalities of people I interviewed,” Ishizuka said. “I got to know old friends better and make new friends in the process. In this way it was a tremendously meaningful experience for me—one that has truly enriched my life.”
Since Serve the People came out earlier this year, Ishizuka has continued to keep busy with various appearances and projects. In February, Ishizuka delivered a keynote speech that discussed the dangers of the continued use of euphemisms like “internment” (rather than “incarceration”) at the Gardena Valley Japanese Cultural Institute’s Day of Remembrance. Recently, in April, she raised the same issue as a guest on Democracy Now! In 2015, Ishizuka completed her Ph.D. dissertation on Gidra as an example of the significance of the dissident press on social movements.8 She plans to use her dissertation as the basis for a future book, and has other written pieces in the pipeline, including an essay called “Kill that Gook, you Gook!” in a forthcoming Routledge anthology on the Global Sixties.
Notes:
1. Grace Lee Boggs in Grace Lee, “Rest in Power, Grace Lee Boggs. 1915-2015,” memorial video, March 2016, accessed June 14, 2016, http://americanrevolutionaryfilm.com/memorial-film/.
2. Karen L. Ishizuka, Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties (London and New York: Verso, 2016),106.
3. Chris Iijima, quoted in Ishizuka, Serve the People, 219.
4. Jeff Chang, foreword to Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties, by Karen L. Ishizuka (London and New York: Verso, 2016), xi.
5. Ishizuka, Serve the People, 139-140, 214-215.
6. Ishizuka, Serve the People, 174.
7. Ishizuka, Serve the People, 99.
8. Karen L. Ishizuka, “Gidra, the Dissident Press and the Asian American Movement: 1969-1974,” PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2015.
* * * * *
On Saturday, June 18, 2016, at 2:00 p.m., author Karen L. Ishizuka will talk about her latest book, Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties, and the Asian American Movement in Los Angeles at the Japanese American National Museum.
Featured will be three activists included in her book: Warren T. Furutani, an educator and politician who is currently in the running for California State Senator; Mike Murase, attorney, current Director of Service Programs for the Little Tokyo Service Center (LTSC), and co-founder of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center; and Qris Yamashita, a graphic designer and artist whose unique graphic style helped to form a visual identity for the Japanese American and Asian Pacific American community. Also joining the panel will be traci kato-kiriyama, artist, educator, community organizer, and co-founder of Tuesday Night Project, a free public program dedicated to presenting AAPI artists and community organizations. The program is free with museum admission.
For more information on this program:
janm.org/events/2016/06/18/serve-the-people
facebook.com/events/153417918406019
© 2016 Lawrence Lan
1960s activism activist anti-war movement Asian American movement author book civil rights movement GIDRA Japanese American National Museum karen ishizuka Serve the People
Author
Lawrence Lan
llan
As part of the Nikkei Community Internship program, Lawrence will be contributing this summer to the Discover Nikkei website in his capacity as the Discover Nikkei intern at the Japanese American National Museum (JANM); he will also be working with the Japanese American Bar Association (JABA) to preserve the legacy of prominent Nikkei jurists in the community.
Update June 2012
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QUOTED: "Ishizuka and Zimmermann’s book is of considerable value in terms of how it gives us a sense of the vast terrain of home movie practice and the ways in which it is used within a contemporary context. The piecemeal and often very localised nature of the examples analysed points towards the value of such specific analysis (something which often hasn’t been achieved in relation to home image production of any form) and the vast history of this practice that can only ever be approximated by such archival and 'mining' practices."
"Thus although some of the textual analysis contained within the anthology is a little laborious ... it is nevertheless valuable in terms of how it treats the home movie as less of a generalised social force (and imaginary) than a repository of often startling (and equally mundane) images that can both escape and be collapsed within overarching narratives of history. The book constantly shows the value of looking at these films in detail—with some limitations, as indicated above—and of exploring both their conventional and less readable elements."
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HomeBook Reviews
Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories edited by Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann
Adrian Danks February 2009 Book Reviews Issue 49
click to buy Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories” at Amazon.comMining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories is a significant and often extremely rich contribution to the existing writing and research on the overlapping fields of home movie and amateur film practice – as well as the existing “archive” of each – within both contemporary cinema studies and a broader historiography. Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann’s book examines the contemporary relevance and use of the home movie within a range of conceptual and theoretical contexts, as well as from the varied perspectives of academics, archivists and practitioners. Even within each of these fields, the book includes an impressive range of contributors, from historians and contextual semioticians, to experts in film restoration and preservation, to filmmakers working within and outside the academy, and numerous others.
Mining the Home Movie emerged from a symposium held at the Getty Centre in Los Angeles in 1998, and the long gestation period of the project – addressed by the editors in their introduction – has allowed Ishizuka and Zimmermann to expand the field and range of contributors, as well as target the particular aspects of home movie “mining” they wish to tackle. This has enabled the book to attain a level of coherency and a degree of associational linkage that was probably not fully apparent in the initial symposium. Nevertheless, this also has some small negative implications for their anthology. Some of the articles have plainly been updated, while others suffer a little from the long period between their completion and publication. Other articles are obviously an outcome of this long gestation, and the combination of these elements, as well as the varied approaches many of the essays take, ultimately grants the anthology an appropriately piecemeal and pointedly selective focus, suggesting the vastness of the existing (and even the no-longer-extant) archive. In the process, this anthology constantly draws our awareness to the kinds of counter-histories suggested by the home movie, and the fragmentary and selective notion of the past that constitutes history. This structure enables the reader to sense and recognise the gaps and limitations of Ishizuka and Zimmermann’s book, a very appropriate response to an anthology that relies upon examining historical artefacts and processes from “below”, including the social and representational practices of daily life, arcane cultural activities and underrepresented elements of society (specifically in relation to culturally and politically marginalised ethnicities, nationalities, classes, castes and genders). Like numerous writers prior to this anthology, including Zimmermann in her seminal writings on home movies and amateur films (1), the various contributors to Mining the Home Movie insist upon the cultural and historical significance of home movies as a counterweight to dominant and often highly commercialised (or government-controlled) forms of cinema. Mining the Home Movie also attempts to counteract the common view of the home movie as an essentially ephemeral form, highlighting its concrete and aesthetic value as historical, textual, cultural, ideological and archival artefact.
Although Mining the Home Movie does provide something of a history of home movie and amateur film forms, it is deliberately localised and expansive in its approach. The book is roughly organised into a series of chapters that match the description of home movie/amateur film works held in various archives – and also details some of the practices and approaches of these archives (some very specialised) – with more extended analyses of particular examples, specific collections, the conceptual challenges faced by those who wish to research and write about this largely unappreciated and predominantly ephemeral practice, and discussions of the contemporary relevance, importance and (re)use of home movie materials. It is the last of these approaches that truly enlivens the anthology, illustrating the richness and potential of home movies and amateur films as challenges to, or “brakes on”, more mainstream and linear forms of history and cultural analysis. The varied perspectives and approaches gathered by the book are ethically appropriate to the key arguments it makes about the value of collecting and preserving such materials. A particular focus of several of the articles commissioned is the critical and often reflexive use of home movie materials within both documentary and found footage practice. In this regard, several films and filmmakers take pride of place, and it is unsurprising to find that Hungarian filmmaker and archivist Péter Forgács’ work is highlighted in several essays in the early sections of the book.
Although the collection draws on writers, collections and films from a variety of regions, nations and cultural perspectives, it is understandably dominated by the discussion of American home movies, amateur films and archives. This discussion itself is in turn dominated by the analysis of films and archives that speak to and from particular and often underrepresented ethnicities and cultural groups. In this regard, the home movie is seen as an essential tool for unsettling conventional notions of film history and the narratives associated with them. For example, in the discussion of The Academy Film Archive’s collection of home movies by Hollywood director Richard Brooks, the focus is primarily placed on specific footage he shot of the Negro Leagues in 1948. The discovery of this baseball footage is used to illustrate a core value of examining and archiving such amateur films and the ways in which they can often show and reveal events, and points of focus, not widely represented elsewhere (such as in the feature film, government and commercial documentary).
Despite the massive array of amateur and home movie materials available to the archivist, historian, theorist and filmmaker, it is unsurprising that the anthology finds its talismanic focus in a particular example or field of amateur/home movie practice. Four chapters are devoted to films related to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II (one of these chapters provides a somewhat contextual perspective by examining home movies produced during the 1920s and ’30s that are held by the Japanese American National Museum). This provides a case study for Ishizuka and Zimmermann’s book that neatly illustrates the importance, historical significance and contemporary relevance of home movie historiography. This is clearly marked in several ways. Several of the chapters focus on the documentary Something Strong Within (Robert A. Nakamura, 1995) (actually written and produced by Ishizuka), illustrating both the significance of particular examples of home movie production and the things that they can show us, and the way contemporary cinema can reframe and re-present these materials. Ishizuka and Zimmermann’s core essay on Topaz, “The Home Movie and the National Registry”, discusses the home movie’s ability to provide an intimate representation of historical, and often traumatic, events where none was previously believed to exist. By choosing this film, which is named after the camp where filmmaker Dave Tatsuno was interned during World War II, the writers highlight the institutional recognition of the home movie as a potential source of public “memory” – Tatsuno’s film was the second home movie, after Abraham Zapruder’s notorious footage of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, to be inducted into the American National Film Registry.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Mining the Home Movie is the way it pairs essays written by representatives of particular archives with extended analyses of specific films, filmmakers or representational tropes (such as work practices and particular localised cultural activities). The links it creates between these essays are rarely one-dimensional, relying on a series of associations that relate to geography, class, gender and specific forms of amateur film practice. For example, a discussion of the work of Cuban American filmmaker Juan Carlos Zaldívar is matched with a short chapter that describes some of the holdings of The Florida Moving Image Archive (and the book examines the varied holdings of national, regional, public, private and commercial archives and image repositories throughout). In some respects, there is something of a schism between the chapters written by archivists (with key exceptions) and those contributed by filmmakers, historians and academics. The standard of the writing also varies significantly in relation to the contrast between relatively naïve and sophisticated responses to the home movie form (mirroring, perhaps, the wide spectrum of practices – from the naïve or folk to the semi-professional and critical – that characterise home movie practice itself). Too many of the chapters devoted to the holdings of such archives as The Nederlands Archive/Museum Institute, Library of Congress and La Filmoteca de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México rely mostly on just describing the material they have, choosing to merely focus on several representative examples. This does allow the reader to get a sense of the range of materials that are held in various archives, some history of their collecting practice, and the different approaches and points of emphasis that are determined by such aspects as ethnicity, typicality, past colonial practices, and absences elsewhere in the film archive. But these chapters also demonstrate the limitation of writing about home movies in a merely descriptive fashion. They illustrate a tension and problem that one confronts when attempting to write about home movies and amateur films. Because one assumes that the reader has not seen the film in question (a perfectly correct assumption in almost every case), and to counter common interpretative frameworks that discount the specificity of individual examples of home movie practice, the writer is required to describe the materials he/she is analysing in some detail. Unfortunately, most of the weakest essays in this collections – including those about several of the archives, “Mule Racing in the Mississippi Delta”, and home movie practices in India – become bogged down in such descriptions, finding it difficult to move beyond such microscopic details to broader and non-generic issues of cultural significance. This illustrates a tension in the home movie – and the writing about it – between its status as a cultural phenomenon and a textual object.
Ishizuka and Zimmermann’s book is of considerable value in terms of how it gives us a sense of the vast terrain of home movie practice and the ways in which it is used within a contemporary context. The piecemeal and often very localised nature of the examples analysed points towards the value of such specific analysis (something which often hasn’t been achieved in relation to home image production of any form) and the vast history of this practice that can only ever be approximated by such archival and “mining” practices. Thus although some of the textual analysis contained within the anthology is a little laborious, as I have outlined, it is nevertheless valuable in terms of how it treats the home movie as less of a generalised social force (and imaginary) than a repository of often startling (and equally mundane) images that can both escape and be collapsed within overarching narratives of history. The book constantly shows the value of looking at these films in detail – with some limitations, as indicated above – and of exploring both their conventional and less readable elements.
Mining the Home Movie also contains numerous essays that do address the nature of the home movie as a cultural form, both celebrating its potential for expressing other viewpoints and histories (and traumas) and questioning its ability to act and exist as a stable historical artefact (or document). In this regard, the most provocative essay in the anthology is that contributed by film theorist Roger Odin, “Reflections on the Family Home Movie as Document: A Semio-Pragmatic Approach”. A key writer on amateur cinema, in this essay Odin warns against the approach taken by several of the writers included in the anthology, and towards the home movie as a document more generally. He particularly warns against regarding the home movie as a more open form of representation, seeing its very circumspect and often highly repetitive range of subjects and poses as a sign of both its stereotypical nature and its ultimate “unreadability” (an aspect which is mirrored by various accounts of the archives represented in this book, who speak of the importance of contextual information to bring the home movie not just to life, but in order to unpack and decipher its informational content). In warning against what he sees as the problematic individualism of the amateur film, Odin concludes: “Relations between democracy and amateur documents are neither always simple nor always positive. We must resist mystifying these productions as much as we formerly scorned them.” (p. 267) Odin’s is an important lesson that several of the more zealous and celebratory (in terms of what home movies and amateur films can reveal) essays would do well to take heed of.
Ultimately, Mining the Home Movie provides a kind of snapshot of the place of the home movie and amateur film within contemporary cinema studies, archiving practice and filmmaking. However, like many of the films it describes and analyses, Ishizuka and Zimmermann’s book also seems to be something of an historical artefact. For a book published in 2008, there is surprisingly little discussion of the impact of digital and web-based technology, and the ways in which such forms have – at least partially – lent a degree of ubiquity to the home movie and amateur film form. Nevertheless, this anthology does suggest the limitations and problems of this ubiquity, and the value of looking at home movies – at least initially – as distinct and endlessly varied artefacts. Partly through the variety of perspectives it offers (though most of those put forward exist within a particular, and laudable, ideological framework that favours the work and imagery of the otherwise underrepresented or dispossessed), Mining the Home Movie also suggests the possibilities for further analysis of the home movie and amateur film that exist within a range of other geographic, national and localised contexts. It also points to the potential for discovering and mining the image repertoire of periods in film history that otherwise might seem barren and underpopulated. In this context, it provides a useful model to rethink something like Australian film history. The 1940s through to the 1960s is a very lean era of Australian feature film production, the archival record of this period dominated by government, institutional and industrial documentaries. Nevertheless, various archives and state libraries around Australia have been very active in terms of collecting home movie and amateur film materials from this era. Of course, what is collected only represents a minute percentage of what was actually produced, but it does suggest an alternative vision – or, at least, a denser history – of Australian film production across this era. Some of this material has been utilised by contemporary documentary and television, and within the more experimental and critical practice of found footage cinema, but in general it remains an untapped and relatively undocumented resource and set of possibilities. It is precisely the kind of “mine” that Ishizuka and Zimmermann’s book attempts to excavate. For this and the raising of many other possibilities, Mining the Home Movie is an invaluable contribution to the study of amateur film.
Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, edited by Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2008.
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Endnotes
Zimmermann’s book Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1995) is the key work in this area.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adrian DanksAdrian Danks is Director of Higher Degree Research in the School of Media and Communication, RMIT University. He is also co-curator of the Melbourne Cinémathèque and was an editor of Senses of Cinema from 2000 to 2014. He has published hundreds of articles on various aspects of cinema and is the editor of A Companion to Robert Altman (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015).
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