While cultural memories are in “permanent evolution,” they are also “vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation.” Collective memories, in turn, prey on the vulnerabilities of cultural and autobiographical memories and in their place construct “a memory without a past that ceaselessly reinvents tradition, linking the history of its ancestors to the undifferentiated time of heroes, origins, and myth.” However, when the false, but always flattering, history is disrupted within a given population cultural conflict ensues hence the need of homogenous collective memories. ![]() Indeed, Grainge asserts that popular films and the collective memories they construct are the result of “a technology able to picture and embody the temporality of the past, cinema has become central to the mediation of memory in modern cultural life.” In this way, collective memories are representations, which according to Edward Said, reveal “a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony.” Cultural memories, on the other hand, are “the knowledge required to survive, which is passed on from generation to generation” thereby binding members of that culture together through centuries and even millennia. ![]() Instead, collective memories, according to Coser, reach “the social actor only through written records and other types of records, such as photography,” or even more inexorably, via popular film. Pierre Nora, in his groundbreaking work “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” writes, “Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition.” While Roediger and DeSoto argue that everyone “has some sort of collective memory for any important social group to which we belong,” these are not memories born out of experience. Just as the harsh wind-blown climate has altered the morphology of the land, in a similar fashion, the continual flow of images, ideas, and narratives through radio, television and film perpetually reshapes the collective memories-or, popular historical memories-of a people and how that group imagines their past, present, and future. ![]() While all other signs of a Japanese American internment camp had vanished, the trees, a sort of last vestige of a cultural memory, remained. The palms, which appear much too large to be supported by the sandy, inhospitable soil from which they grow, seem alien to the landscape that surrounds. The camera frame comes into focus on a date palm grove of some dozen trees that tower preternaturally over the native grasses and shrubs that sparsely cover the arid land outside Poston, Arizona. In an early scene, Tajiri, with a handheld camera, pans the desert landscape looking for signs of the injustices that took place on this land nearly a half century prior. Tajiri, whose grandparents and parents were subjected to internment, revisits the site where her family was forcibly removed from society, stripped of all of their property and, effectively, written out of history. The internment of innocent Japanese Americans is the subject of independent filmmaker Rea Tajiri’s History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (1991). As noted by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians in 1983, and reported by Judith Miller, the incarceration of Japanese American men, women and children was on false pretenses resulting in a “grave injustice” due, according to the commission, to “racial prejudice, war hysteria and failure of political leadership.” As a result of the order, “newborn babies, young children, the elderly, the infirm, children from orphanages, and even children adopted by Caucasian parents were not exempt from removal.” While “the justification for the evacuation was to thwart espionage and sabotage,” not a single “person of Japanese ancestry living in the United States was ever convicted of any serious act of espionage or sabotage during the war.” Disturbingly, “anyone with 1/16th or more Japanese blood was included” in removal, echoing a previous and notoriously racist Supreme Court decision where the “one drop rule” was codified into law. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 resulting in the incarceration of 122,000 Japanese Americans. ![]() On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D.
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