Connie Y. Chiang. Nature behind Barbed Wire

Nature behind Barbed Wire is an important monograph that attempts to create an environmental history of Japanese American incarceration during World War II. Connie Y. Chiang argues the confinement of 120,000 internees is an environmental story as much as a social, legal, or political one. Focusing exclusively on Gila River, Manzanar, Minidoka, and Topaz, Chiang details the influence of the environment on Japanese Americans. Camp-wide and individual agricultural projects where internees grew food for consumption by fellow internees are among the examples employed to illustrate how the experiences of Japanese Americans became “inextricably linked to the environment.” The author further argues that interacting with the materiality of the landscape also helped detainees “challenge, reconfigure, and even dismantle the constraints placed upon them” (11). These are both worthy main points of the monograph, with the latter being especially ambitious. Chiang casts her methodological net widely, relying on evidence gathered from memoirs; national, local, and camp newspapers; and previously recorded oral histories. She consults the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study, the U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the Department of the Interior, community archives, and university special collections. Together these sources are intertwined to create a narrative filled with rich descriptions and provocative insights. For example, in “Desert Agriculture,” she argues the WRA wanted to develop farms to keep costs low, but poor soil, resistance from local governments, equipment shortages, and too few workers prevented success. Agricultural efforts were rhetorically represented as a “noble endeavor that aided the war effort and displayed loyalty” (8). Gila River and Tule Lake were the biggest producers, shipping 7 and 5.3 million pounds of food, respectively, to other camps in 1944 (97). Chiang’s thorough methodological grounding is on display here, followed by analysis in which she posits that public relations were helped when surrounding communities “learned that Japanese Americans were helping to produce food” (97). These efforts were presented to the public as “detainees help[ing] to support the camps’ very existence . . . Indeed, as detainees cultivated the land, they perpetuated their own confinement” (98). Such a statement requires deeper theoretical critique so that internees are not portrayed as being complicit in their own oppression.

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