We Other Americans: A Biopolitical Analysis of Japanese-American Internment

This thesis represents an attempt to offer a biopolitical interpretation of Japanese-American Internment. The method of this paper is largely genealogical in that it attempts to demonstrate the origins of the biopolitical attitudes and assumptions that produced the internment programs and trace their development throughout the program. First coined by Foucault in the 1970s, biopolitics is a mode of power that targets humans as a biological species to the end of regularizing a population. In the biopolitical mode, racism takes on a different meaning. Rather than being a simple contempt between races, Foucault argued, it takes the form of a biological conflict. This conflict entails a murderous attempt to regularize the population through the destruction of an ?? inferior??? race. This paper argues that this relationship was established between white Americans and Japanese Americans in the years leading up to 1941. Though the internment camps did not produce any kind of direct murder on a mass scale, as would be predicted by a biopolitical conflict, they engaged in indirect murder by stripping Japanese Americans of their juridical personhood, a concept evaluated through the work of Hannah Arendt. Though generalized biopolitical forces had called for them, the camps themselves engaged in disciplinary and individualized forms of power aimed at reforming the political subjectivity of internees. With the failure of this disciplinary program, the generalized biopolitical drive prevailed and sanctioned the social death of Japanese Americans through their dispersal across the United States.