Jessica LeGare, “The Captured Imagination: Unsettling Boundaries of Confinement within Memoirs of Wartime Detention”
Among the memoirs authored by former prisoners of war, ŌOKA Shōhei’s Taken Captive (Furyoki, 1948; trans. 1996) stands as an acclaimed contribution to the collection of works on postwar memory and military detention. MIYANAGA Tsugio’s Captivity in Okinawa (Okinawa furyoki, 1949) trailed Ōoka’s publication by just one year, but it faced a markedly cooler reception and justifiable criticism for the limited representations of Okinawa and its residents. Even as Ōoka’s illustration of imprisonment has been particularly lauded for showing the unexpected human connections and sympathies that arise during and after hostile warfare, we can find Miyanaga reaching for a similar end, as he portrays the disquieting nature of separations—between nations, geographical communities, etc.—used to govern the essential roles of “soldiers,” “civilians,” “compatriots,” and “enemies” within spaces of military engagement. In a comparative reading of these works, I examine Miyanaga and Ōoka’s meditations on captivity, enslavement, and sequestered bodies, themes that are foregrounded through both writers’ recurring self-descriptions as “slaves.” As they narrate their captivity, these authors touch on enslavement in general terms, but more notably, their explicit allusions to American slavery are what complicate the implications of the confinement they feel, whether under the authority of the Japanese military, the U.S. military, or both. This metaphor of the “slave” enables these stories to move along several trajectories, at times confounding the expected boundaries that separate captors from captives, or otherwise complicating the assumed connections that unite compatriots. Taken together, Miyanaga and Ōoka disclose a shared and persistent unease within the realm of writing about imprisonment, explicating and responding as they do to the systems of power and classification that bind them along with others across disparate historical and cultural contexts.
About the Speaker
Jessica LeGare is a PhD candidate researching modern Japanese literature in the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. She is currently working on her dissertation which explores the conditions and effects of literary and journalistic censorship in occupied Japan and Okinawa. Through examining the divergent spaces of publishing and proscription across these areas she hopes to account for the collaborations between writers and censors in the production of sanctioned literature on Okinawa, from within and beyond the island.