Miné Okubo

Following Her Own Road

Edited by Greg Robinson and Elena Tajima Creef

• $26.95 paperback (9780295987743) Add to Cart
• hardcover not available

• Published: 2008
• Subject Listing: Asian American Studies, American Art
• Bibliographic information: 224 pp., 48 illus., 8 in color, 7 x 10 in.
• Contents

"To me life and art are one and the same, for the key lies in one's knowledge of people and life. In art one is trying to express it in the simplest imaginative way, as in the art of past civilizations, for beauty and truth are the only two things which live timeless and ageless." - Miné Okubo

This is the first book-length critical examination of the life and work of Miné Okubo (1912-2001), a pioneering Nisei artist, writer, and social activist who repeatedly defied conventional role expectations for women and for Japanese Americans over her seventy-year career. Okubo's landmark Citizen 13660 (first published in 1946) is the first and arguably best-known autobiographical narrative of the wartime Japanese American relocation and confinement experience.

Born in Riverside, California, Okubo was incarcerated by the U.S. government during World War II, first at the Tanforan Assembly Center in California and later at the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah. There she taught art and directed the production of a literary and art magazine. While in camp, Okubo documented her confinement experience by making hundreds of paintings and pen-and-ink sketches. These provided the material for Citizen 13660. Word of her talent spread to Fortune magazine, which hired her as an illustrator. Under the magazine's auspices, she was able to leave the camp and relocate to New York City, where she pursued her art over the next half century.

This lovely and inviting book, lavishly illustrated with both color and halftone images, many of which have never before been reproduced, introduces readers to Okubo's oeuvre through a selection of her paintings, drawings, illustrations, and writings from different periods of her life. In addition, it contains tributes and essays on Okubo's career and legacy by specialists in the fields of art history, education, women's studies, literature, American political history, and ethnic studies, essays that illuminate the importance of her contributions to American arts and letters.

Miné Okubo expands the sparse critical literature on Asian American women, as well as that on the Asian American experience in the eastern United States. It also serves as an excellent companion to Citizen 13660, providing critical tools and background to place Okubo's work in its historical and literary contexts.

Greg Robinson is associate professor of history at the Université du Quebéc a Montréal. Elena Tajima Creef is associate professor of women's studies at Wellesley College. Other contributors are Laura Card, Fay Chiang, Vivian Fumiko Chin, Heather Fryer, Masumi Hayashi, Sohei Hohri, Lynne Horiuchi, Clemens Kalischer, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, James Masao Mitsui, Stella Oh, Kimberley L. Phillips, and Irene Poon.

Preface / Greg Robinson and Elena Tajima Creef

Color Plates

Following Her Own Road: The Achievement of Miné Okubo / Elena Tajima Creef


Part I: An Artistic and Literary Portfolio

A Selection of Drawings and Paintings / Miné Okubo

1. Riverside / Miné Okubo and Fay Chiang

2. An Artist's Credo: A Personal Statement / Miné Okubo

3. An Evacuee's Hopes - and Memories / Miné Okubo

4. Statement Before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Citizens / Miné Okubo

5. Letters from Miné Okubo to Isamu Noguchi

6. Letters from Miné Okubo to Dr. Roy W. Leeper

Part II: Scholarly Essays

7. Gestures of Noncompliance: Resisting, Inventing, and Enduring in Citizen 13660 / Vivian Fumiko Chin

8. Miné Okubo's War: Citizen 13660's Attack on Government Propaganda / Heather Fryer

9. To Keep a Record of Life: Miné Okubo's Autographic Manga and Wartime History / Kimberley L. Phillips

10. Miné Okubo's Citizen 13660 and Her Trek Artwork: Space, Movement, Image, Text, and Their Sites of Production / Lynne Horiuchi

11. Miné Okubo's Illustrations for Trek Magazine: Sites of Resistance / Laura Card

12. Paradoxes of Citizenship: Re-Viewing the Japanese American Internment in Miné Okubo's Citizen 13660 / Stella Oh

13. Birth of a Citizen: Miné Okubo and the Politics of Symbolism / Greg Robinson

Part III: Reminiscences and Tributes

14. Holding Center: Tanforan Race Track, Spring 1942 / James Masao Matsui

15. A Remembering / Sohei Hohri

16. A Tribute to Miné Okubo / Greg Robinson

17. A Memory of Genius / Shirley Geok-lin Lim

A Partial Chronology of Miné Okubo's Life and Work

Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Illustration Credits
Index