Censorship and the Work of Art (Where They Barbed the Fourth Corner Open
Censorship and the Work of Art (Where They Barbed the Fourth Corner Open
As interned communities were barred from normative channels of communication and self-representation, this chapter argues that the life of paper facilitated distinctive forms of both individual and collective being, in the latters’ essential dialectic. Chapter Four analyzes how this dialectic operates through the letter’s dialogical form in ways that necessarily exceed dominant Anglophonic literary assumptions and processes. With attention to how interned communities thus turned to aesthetic practices to exist through and beyond the terms of “population management,” this chapter places the life of paper broadly within pre-existing Japanese aesthetic traditions and corresponding onto-epistemologies of presence, absence, and the work of art. Close readings of letters focus on how they communicate affect to produce alternate forms of knowledge and truth-value under historical constraint: ultimately creating an archive of material for the re-assertion of social bonds, sutured through difference and across generations.
Keywords: Censorship, Internment Camps, Haiku, Aesthetics, Affect, Reproductive Labor
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