“We Who Are Enemy”: Incarceration Redress in the Paintings of Roger Shimomura

Abstract

This article establishes historically specific connections between American artist Roger Shimomura’s paintings about Japanese American Incarceration and Incarceration Redress from roughly 1978 to 2003. Deploying a kind of history painting in the Minidoka series before turning to personal narrative in Diary and the juxtaposition of contrasting visual tropes in Stereotypes and Admonitions, Shimomura’s varying approaches reflect connections to timely emphases on raising awareness, sharing testimony, and preventing reoccurrences associated with significant moments in the detainment’s afterlife. Throughout these shifts in focus, Shimomura’s use of visual stereotype increasingly frames incarceration within its broader social meaning, rather than through its historical progression or its personal resonances. I show how Shimomura’s work comes to connect incarceration to its enduring social consequences, making it but one of many recent, racially motivated transgressions that provide greater lessons about the perpetuation of naturalized prejudice in the United States and its material effects.