Japanese American History: NOT for Sale?

Estelle Ishigo. “Disloyal” Japanese-Americans leave Heart Mountain for Tule Lake Segregation Center, California at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, September 21, 1943.  Oil on canvas, 20″ x 24.”  From the collection of Allen Hendershott Eaton to be auctioned this Friday.

Estelle Ishigo.  Japanese-American internees swimming in the irrigation canals at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, September 1943. Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 in.  Part of the Collection of Allen Hendershott Eaton to be auctioned this Friday.

Japanese American History: NOT for Sale – Facebook Page

Change.org Petition:

Petitioning David Rago Partner + Co-Director, 20th/21st C. Design Dept., Rago Auction House

Stop the April 17 Auction, Lots 1232-1255

This Friday, April 17, Rago Arts will auction off 450 historical crafts and artifacts made by Japanese Americans confined in 10 WWII concentration camps.

These items were given — not sold — to the original collector, Allen Eaton, because he wanted to display them in an exhibition that would help tell the story of the  incarceration of 120,000 innocent people, more than half of them children.  It is a betrayal of those imprisoned people who thought their gifts would be used to educate, not be sold to the highest bidder in a national auction, pitting families against museums against private collectors.  

Eaton opposed the incarceration and this sale goes against his intent for a public exhibition that received official support.

Please sign this petition to ask Rago Arts to remove Lots 1232-1255 and our cultural patrimony from the auction block. These items were not meant to be viewed in the privacy of a collector’s home and that a price tag should not be put on our cultural property. 

Satsuki Ina, Ph.D.

Petition Update:  Auction House Rejects Good Faith Discussions

They offered to give me things to the point of embarrassment, but not to sell them…

— Allen H. Eaton, 1952

Auction takes place Friday April 17

Help stop the Rago auction of Nikkei heritage property: Pull Lots 1232 – 1255
Rago Auction FB page
@RagoAuctions
‪#‎StopRago‬

Sign the Petition

MEDIA COVERAGE

The New York Times

International Examiner

KGO ABC7 News

CBS Sacramento

Sacramento Bee

Artnet

Rafu Shimpo

Artforum

One of twelve Sumi watercolor on paper views of Tule Lake War Relocation Center, California, ca. 1942 to be auctioned this Friday.  Unsigned, possibly by George T. Tamura

 

In This Week’s Retro-Racial News: Noose, N*****s, Lynching

Among this week’s news headlines:

CBS News: Duke finds person responsible for hanging noose on campus, April 2, 2015

WashPost: University of South Carolina student suspended after racist photo goes viral, April 5, 2015

Guardian: Maile Hampton’s ‘lynching’ charge: an unsettling tactic to punish activism? April 5, 2015

Retro-racial not Post-racial:  a noose on campus, a USC student caught snapchatting the N-word, and a 20-year old African American activist charged with felony lynching?

How is the person who hung the noose “taking responsibility,” as the CNN headline reads, by remaining nameless and faceless?

How do the official university rhetoric of intolerance of racial intolerance and quick explusions of overtly racist individual students and fraternities work together to disavow the anti-blackness that pervades American universities on a much deeper and more systematic structural level? (This includes the UC system (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), where black student enrollment in 2010 was 3.6% at the undergraduate level and 2.7% at the graduate level).

How do laws supposedly originally conceived of to protect blacks from racist white vigilante violence get re-purposed to persecute Maile Hampton, a black activist at a protest against police killing black people?

How do we, as Common urges, “forget about the past as much as we can and let’s move from where we are now,” or simply “adapt,” as actor Isiah Washington suggests, when the specters of the past remain very much present, for example, in the expressions of young (white [and honorary white]) people and in the structural dehumanization of young blacks?

How does an approach of disavowal/respectability/accommodation bring where “we are now” that much closer to the racism that is constantly being disavowed?

What is truly at stake in this ongoing disavowal?