Miné Okubo's Citizen 13660 is an autobiographical graphic novel about the Japanese concentration camp during the Second World War. From the perspective of an evacuee and Japanese American, Citizen 13660 rewrites Japanese American identity, which confronts the rhetoric of “enemy race” and the frontier myth that normalized the camp. The graphic novel reveals how deeply the War Relocation Authority (WRA) engaged in the spatial and social exclusion of the minority groups and, by doing so, negatively affected their racial identities. Shedding light on Lefebvre’s theory of the spatiality of power, which emphasizes that spatial order reflects the society’s hegemonic power and shapes the dwellers’ identity, this paper will analyze how the state power deindividualized and criminalized people of Japanese ancestry as a homogenous crowd of “enemy race” through spatial control. This paper will also investigate how Citizen 13660 creatively visualizes, reenacts and re-examine the WRA’s spatial politics with its spatial elements (the shape of panels or the arrangements of gutters, panels, lines, and objects), borrowing McCloud’s analysis of the spatiality of the graphic novel. With unique arrangements of spatial elements in Citizen 13660, Okubo asserts the necessity to dismantle the biologically essentialist concept of race, re-individualize people of Japanese ancestry, and challenge the legitimacy of the camp.
1. Introduction
2. Photograph Exhibition and Prison-like Panel and Line Arrangement: “To See What Designed Not to be Seen”
3. Spatial Reconstruction of the Identity: Partition and Restoration of Individuality
4. Conclusion
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