Description
Book SynopsisPresents an examination of the life and work of Mine Okubo (1912-2001), a Nisei artist, writer, and social activist who repeatedly defied conventional role expectations for women and for Japanese Americans over her seventy-year career.
Trade Review"Whereas the social and historical value of this [Citizen 13660] body of work is well established, the critical re-readings gathered in Mine Okubo: Following Her Own Road aim to interrogate and to expand the ways in which Citizen 13660 has come to be understood more than sixty years after its postwar publication…. Whether a reader agrees wholly or in part with the particulars of the seven central essays, what remains incontestable is the value of such projects in eliciting new and sometimes provocative thoughts on the small but steadily growing body of discourse on Asian American art and visual culture."
* Journal of American Ethnic History *
"It's hard not to like Mine Okubo as we come to know her though this first book-length study of her life and work: feisty, eccentric, and deeply committed to her art. A slim, beautifully produced volume, Mine Okubo: Following Her Own Road is both a tribute to the artist, who died in 2001, and an important step in remedying the dearth of scholarship on her work . . . . this collection offers less the 'definitive version' of her life and work, and more an incitement to re-view it in new ways that throw its power and charm into relief."
* Rain Taxi *
"Robinson and Creef have produced a fine and wonderful tribute to the life and work of Mine Okubo. . . . There is something for everyone in this remarkably compact but dense volume. . . . The editors have produced a very 'smart' and beautiful retrospective of her life, giving us a sense of Okubo's rightful place in Japanese American history, as well as the larger canvas of American history."
* Nichi Bei Times *
Table of ContentsPreface / Greg Robinson and Elena Tajima Creef
Color Plates
Following Her Own Road: The Achievement of Mine Okubo / Elena Tajima Creef
Part I: An Artistic and Literary Portfolio
A Selection of Drawings and Paintings / Mine Okubo
1. Riverside / Mine Okubo and Fay Chiang
2. An Artist's Credo: A Personal Statement / Mine Okubo
3. An Evacuee's Hopes - and Memories / Mine Okubo
4. Statement Before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Citizens / Mine Okubo
5. Letters from Mine Okubo to Isamu Noguchi
6. Letters from Mine 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. Mine Okubo's War: Citizen 13660's Attack on Government Propaganda / Heather Fryer
9. To Keep a Record of Life: Mine Okubo's Autographic Manga and Wartime History / Kimberley L. Phillips
10. Mine Okubo's Citizen 13660 and Her Trek Artwork: Space, Movement, Image, Text, and Their Sites of Production / Lynne Horiuchi
11. Mine Okubo's Illustrations for Trek Magazine: Sites of Resistance / Laura Card
12. Paradoxes of Citizenship: Re-Viewing the Japanese American Internment in Mine Okubo's Citizen 13660 / Stella Oh
13. Birth of a Citizen: Mine 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 Mine Okubo / Greg Robinson
17. A Memory of Genius / Shirley Geok-lin Lim
A Partial Chronology of Mine Okubo's Life and Work
Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Illustration Credits
Index
