Isamu Noguchi’s Handcrafted Citizenship

Abstract This chapter positions the World War II Japanese American incarceration as clear outgrowth of Jim Crow logics that had encompassed Japanese Americans on the West Coast and examines the artistic output of the incarceration as not only modernist in form and influence; Japanese Americans also responded to this stark challenge to shifting notions of modern citizenship rights with a conception of handcrafted citizenship, piecing together fragments of cultural narratives to create an acceptable wartime image. Such a purpose unites the recognized modernist sculptor Isamu Noguchi with the amateur artists of the camps. In particular, his unpublished essay “I Become A Nisei” and two wartime sculptures, My Arizona and My Pacific, struggle to establish a place for himself and other Japanese Americans at time when their citizenship and rights were threatened.