| Abstract | What does the congressional discourse concerning US redress for the internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans during the Second World War reveal about the politics of governmental redress in relation to nation-building and national war memories? Examining US congressional debates on the Japanese American redress bill passed in 1988, this article argues that the narratives of Japanese American internment as an exceptional national tragedy and its redress as an ‘act of greatness for a great nation’ functioned to rescript memories of the incarceration into an inspirational narration of national redemption and an exemplar of American-style justice, in order to recuperate a particular moral, multicultural brand of American exceptionalism at the end of the Cold War.
|
