Abstract
While art historians have highlighted the reputed freedoms afforded to African Americans—such as painters and sculptors—who traveled abroad to escape racism in the United States, little attention has been paid to vernacular photography or to places beyond a few storied locations. Made partly within the context of the American military base of Camp Gifu, an album by a woman named Darlene Littleton brings attention to the vernacular photographs of Black life in Japan under the US Occupation following World War II. The album serves as a creative practice in which Black visual production is propelled by a range of circumstances distinctly marked by alternate modes of freedom—moments loosened from the logic of race, gender, and class commonly known to the United States.
The Red Lacquer Box of Black Living
On the final page of a photo album purchased in a Brooklyn thrift store, a young Black woman appears within three of twelve small photographs carefully arranged and captioned (fig. 1). The inscribed date, “4/16/49,” and location of Gifu, Japan, mark a particular space and time in the woman's life. On this cold April day, the camera captures a walk on Inuyama Bridge, a Japanese shrine and shrine bell, and Japanese men, young and old, in a rice paddy. The woman's face is inviting, her hair coiffed in a style of curled and short bangs that amplify and frame her features. She can be identified as the album's maker, her additional presence taking the form of “me” handwritten under snapshot portraits that are scattered throughout the twenty or so album pages. The US military base of Camp Gifu temporarily served as home to the young woman between 1947 and 1949. Her initials, D. L., hover above the decorative scene of the album's cover, which resembles a red lacquer box (fig. 2). The 13 × 9 inch album houses about 150 photographs of various sizes and formats, ranging from tiny thumbnail portraits of a little over an inch square, to standard 4 × 6 inch prints. The majority are uniformly captioned with text, written in white pencil by the same hand, that conjoins the diversity of the photographs’ shapes, subjects, sizes, and formats. As opposed to commercial souvenir photographs made for mass reproduction, the album's content is for private or more small-scale personalized viewing.1
The woman's full name, Darlene Littleton, is found in cursive on a hand-addressed envelope within the interior cover. Referred to as “Miss” Littleton, she and her half-sister Virgie, who is depicted in several of the photographs, were in Japan as the young adult dependents of military personnel. Made partly within the context of a military base, this album brings attention to the vernacular photographs of an African American woman temporarily living in Asia under US occupation following World War II. Scholarship on transcultural contexts often treads carefully to avoid privileging Western perspectives. However,this essay purposefully centers on an African American, female amateur photographer in Japan.2
Numerous accounts by African American image makers and their experiences abroad in the early to mid-twentieth century testify to a newfound sense of freedom. While art historians have highlighted the reputed freedoms afforded to African Americans—such as painters and sculptors—who went, for example, to Paris to escape racism in the United States, little attention has been paid to vernacular photography or to places beyond a few storied European and Caribbean locations.3 When freedom is discussed in relation to photography and the Black body, it is commonly associated with autonomy from European colonial rule. With an interest in understanding how Asia can animate the complexities of Black living, this article considers the following: If photography can capture the aesthetics of African American life outside of the intense weight of racialized living in the United States, how might life in occupied Japan be generative of moments that visualize Black freedom?
The album serves as a creative practice in which Black visual production is propelled by a range of circumstances distinctly marked by alternate modes of freedom—moments loosened from the logic of race, gender, and class commonly known to the United States. While the historical context of the album overlaps with the US plan to spread the ideals of democracy, the album itself illuminates how Asia figures into the visual culture of Black freedom. African Americans reportedly experienced their identity in Japan very differently than in the familiar, racialized environment of the United States, where at the very least racism and discrimination, if not violent oppression, were endemic.4 A Black woman, Nan Watson, who lived in Japan during the Occupation, writes, “The expression, ‘you never had it so good,’ which is seen and heard everywhere, is not far from wrong.” She continues, “it is amazing how the color line is forgotten on this side of the ocean, although occasionally it rears its ugly head among some few individuals.”5 While such comments are inflected with experiences steeped in exoticism, class identity, and historically specific notions of race, the color line in Japan was redrawn with new configurations and boundaries of meaning and influence. Racial and national hierarchies shifted as did their correlation to class and gender. The photo album demonstrates a kind of aesthetic freedom in which Blackness signifies not through its most common Janus-faced partner, whiteness, but through Asia and the visuality that this engagement engenders. By offering insight into Littleton's life in Japan, the album complicates the common visual logic of images of Black individuals as relational to whiteness and in turn suggests a version of freedom for those viewers privy to the album's pages.
Access to different experiences of subjectivity contributes to a new sense of being in the world as a Black person, one that “imagines and enacts an aesthetics of black life outside of the intense weight of racism.”6 But this novel enactment is often loaded. While a release from the immense magnitude of racism toward Black individuals in the United States can be one way to describe the Black experience in Japan, this departure from the Black-white binary also creates a new and at times damaging racial configuration—one that is displaced primarily onto those Japanese individuals who populate the working class of the Occupation era. Within Littleton's album, for example, a photograph of “Magie” and “the maid” depicts a tall Black woman standing with arms akimbo next to a petite Japanese woman who remains unknown and thereby pigeonholed in her capacity as a servant (fig. 3). The disparity in their height mimics the power dynamic between the local maid and an American female homemaker, an employee/employer relationship evident in Littleton's and other examples of Black women's albums made contemporaneously in Japan. For example, in Jerlene Smith's album made in occupied Japan, there are photographs of her walking around Tokyo with her son and maid, Nobuko.7 Elsewhere in Littleton's album, a man carries a huge block of ice over his shoulder in a photograph with the caption “‘Joe Jap’ Former Japanese (Major) officer now ice man” [sic] on the reverse (figs. 4a, 4b). Still later, a tiny studio portrait of a regal, well-dressed Japanese man bears the infantilizing description “House boy,” an alias that echoes the term “house slave” commonly given to African American males of lowly status (fig. 5).
An improved quality of life for Blacks during this time was in part enabled through the forced subservient status of the Japanese during the occupation of their country. Members of the local Gifu population, who previously had been employed in higher-status roles, often worked as servants for officers and their families. The need for money and the commodities officers could provide drove a labor economy in which Japanese hired help completed domestic duties including making beds, cooking meals, laundry, and cleaning. Following a soldier's visit to the firing range, hired hands also cleaned personal weapons.8 In the case of the examples in Littleton's album, whether these captioned photographs elicited empathy or gleeful pleasure in each Japanese individual's fall from grace is uncertain. Nor should the possibility of both truths existing simultaneously be excluded. Indeed, photography can function simultaneously as a tool of subjugation and an outlet for representing freedom.9 What remains clear is that this version of freedom is contingent upon another's subjection, a contradiction that sullies the utopian ideal of freedom and serves as a reminder that often freedom operates more as a fleeting and contingent gesture rather than a concretized, universal truth. As this article will show, the camera captures these fugitive and complex moments while offering viewers insight into photography and Black life in Japan.
In Gifu, Japan
Attempts to learn more about Littleton led to genealogical insights, but additional information about her time in Japan remains incomplete and the search is ongoing.10 We know that she was born in 1927 to Genevieve Littleton, her mother, in Fort Riley, Kansas, a place steeped in army history. Jesse Littleton was her father. Within ten years, Littleton was living in a household in Junction Geary, Kansas with her maternal grandparents, Harvey C. Sullinger and Effie Sullinger, and additional family members including her half-sister Virginia, two years her junior, born at Fort Riley and presumably featured in the album as Virgie. It is believed that Harvey served in the Tenth Cavalry, also known as the Buffalo Soldiers, which would confirm Littleton's familial link to the military. After returning to the United States from Japan in 1949, Littleton lived in Oregon with her father, Jesse Littleton; his new wife, Bernice; and other family members, including Virginia. Despite all this information, there are no army rosters available, and it is unconfirmable if Joseph Murray, Littleton's stepfather and Virgie's father, enlisted in WWII or occupation service.
Based on frequent references and the envelope adhered within the album, the Twenty-fourth Infantry regiment figured centrally in Littleton's time in Japan (for example, see fig. 6). Stationed in Gifu from February 1947 until it was redeployed to Korea in 1950, the primarily Black regiment shared Camp Gifu with eight other Black, and several white, units.11 Assignments in Okinawa and Iejima preceded the regiment's arrival.12 Although the camp was the Regiment's home base, it temporarily traveled elsewhere during its time in Gifu, as was common for most units involved in militarization, a much broader US objective that involved occupations, bases, and military advisory groups in securing foreign countries as surrogates of US capitalism and power.13
The major mission of the Occupation was to expound the values of equality and freedom while democratizing the defeated nation. The irony of segregated units working day in and day out under the umbrella terms of this lofty aim begins to put into relief what life was like at the camp. Duties included searching for abandoned Japanese weapons, patrolling the area around Gifu, serving as security during civil disturbances, and providing relief aid, for example, when an earthquake struck Fukui.14 The manageable demands of the assignments facilitated a relatively appealing quality of life, allowing Black soldiers to pursue their own leisurely interests. For example, enlisted personnel and their families could take advantage of the camp's swimming pool, a frequently segregated and racially charged place in the United States.15 In addition, they had access to an American Red Cross club house outfitted with a photography darkroom, library, craft shop, lounge, and a “little theater.”16
Black women on military bases commonly served as military nurses, or, like Littleton, were family members of enlisted men, in relations such as spouses, mothers, daughters, or sisters. Littleton's kin lived as one of over a hundred families in the Gifu base housing area by August 1947, a number that increased to more than 250 families by the following year.17 Other women worked as civilian contractors with the US Army in support roles, such as stenographers, secretaries, and administrators. One Black woman enlisted stateside served as an X-ray developer after completing extensive training at a US-based photography school (fig. 7).18 The camera documents Private Wills in her lab coat nobly taking on the sole responsibility of image making on behalf of her country.
If Littleton, in her early twenties, took on any formalized labor during her time in Gifu is uncertain based on the album's pages. Instead, the album features photographs of Japanese and Black friends tagged with nicknames, buildings found on base and those from other military bases, and tourist stops in Japan, such as Kyoto. There are depictions of waterfalls and images of the military mail planes; leisure photographs of pie-eating contests, hundred-yard dashes, and pool time; and photographs of shrines and silk farms, Japanese brides, and tea ceremonies. A few snapshots from visits to Hawaii and Seattle weave travel to the United States into Littleton's life while living in Japan. There is a wide selection of subject matter within the pages of the album. However, Gifu, Japan, and life at the camp dominate the album's pages (fig. 8).
The history of Blacks and Japan is long and complex, with various points of significance.19 Examples from Japan include nineteenth-century occurrences of Black visual representation in the form of stereotypical minstrelsy, to contemporaneous political support of and admiration for Black intelligentsia. Those from the African diaspora include the early twentieth-century Harlem Renaissance–era leaders W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey praising various Asian countries for their resistance to colonialism and Western imperialism. Cultural channels opened an expanded world about Blackness for Japanese audiences through the form of music and novels, in addition to the media coverage of the early fight for civil rights.20 Such examples skew heavily toward informing how perceptions of Blackness were accessed and shaped as opposed to quotidian one-on-one engagements.
In contrast, Black soldiers and women like Littleton had one historically specific experience in common: extensive and in-person interactions with Japanese individuals. Black individuals had traveled to Japan but nothing comparable in numbers to this period in time when African American soldiers were stationed there en masse at camps like the one in Gifu. No longer a mythologized or removed understanding of the other, this kind of in-person encounter between the two demographics in the postwar Occupation was an anomaly in the history of US engagement with Japan. This album, then, represents a departure from aspects of what scholar Bill Mullen has termed Afro-Orientalism. Writing about Du Bois, Mullen describes Afro-Orientalism in terms of the geographic, cultural, and physical distance that serves as a limiting factor to liberatory possibilities. He explains, that “Afro-Orientalism may best be understood as the complex effort to undo a form of white supremacy—Orientalism—which Du Bois understood threatened black Americans as well as Asians, while fostering a colored unity that, owing to geographical, cultural, and physical distance, was difficult to achieve in practice.”21 As opposed to progress impeded by distance, the sustained encounters of postwar Japan offer an opportunity, at least in theory, for a rich Asian/Black engagement to take place on a day-to-day basis. While Littleton's focus was most likely not as august as Du Bois's, it is worth highlighting how her experience is animated by a central element that Du Bois was missing; he never spent time living in Asia. In contrast, the album becomes a window into everyday, sustained Black living within Japan—a project of arguably hefty first-person intercultural insight, even in light of numerous photographs that conform to touristic tropes of what Japan represents to Americans.
Referred to by one Black soldier as “Our Little World,” various accounts of Camp Gifu include mention of the comfort and conveniences the base provided to Black individuals. For example, a sense of contentment is imbued in one photograph depicting a group of Black military men in front of a Christmas tree, each with a glass in their hand (fig. 9). Above the portrait handwritten in white is “The Xmas Carolers ’48.” Although the group of characters is tightly arranged and positioned in front of a small Christmas tree, there is no cohesion when it comes to looking toward the camera lens and smiling in unison. One man has his mouth ajar as though he is in the middle of song, a few subjects look toward the camera with glasses raised and grins that range from childish to debonair. While one man takes a swig for the picture taker, another is busy pouring his drink and misses the camera's gaze altogether. There is nothing visually exceptional at all about this holiday photograph of spirited friends. Indeed, the historical anomaly of an unprecedented number of Blacks dwelling in Japan comes into view through the mundane and everyday happenings of living. In this case, Black living in Japan is visualized in the arrangement of photographs by Littleton's intentional crafting by enlisting one photograph, here, and writing a few words of text, there.
Many aspects of this album do not align with the usual components of the typical family and friends-as-adopted-family album, a cherished collection of images that often parrots and performs popular depictions of functional domestic and leisurely life.22 This album is instead born of war and all its attendant tragedies. Of note are depictions of burning barracks and uniformed Black men climbing into military planes. It also has much in common with a tourist album: the inlaid mosaic depicting two long-necked birds standing by a stream and a bamboo tree on its lacquer cover speaks to a longer history of Japonisme and bric-a-brac appealing to foreign tastes and tourist shoppers. Consequently, space exists here for conceptualizing a different kind of album, one that does not follow conventions of memorialization because these are not siloed familial, war, or touristic visualizations. It becomes, simply, Littleton's album.
Among the most interesting aspects of the album is the absence of a popular trope that persistently connects Japan to the Black experience following WWII. So much of Black women's history is marked by the effects of unequal access to a respectable quality of life. In this case, the omission of the dominant story of Japan and Blackness generatively makes space to highlight Littleton's own example of Black living in Japan. Littleton's album eludes the common narrative relegated to this encounter, one that often focuses on the sexual prowess and domestic concerns of African American GI men in relation to Japanese women. For example, in reflecting on her own father's wartime experiences abroad, the scholar Deborah Willis begins to look at album images from Black soldiers’ point of view. She is led to contemplate, “how Black men traveled, how they could have sexual or romantic relationships, how they suddenly had the freedom to have an interracial relationship without fear of being lynched.”23 Other examples overlook the threat of violence and frame such relationships as newsworthy.
Take, for example, the cover of the November 12, 1953, issue of Jet magazine, a weekly digest publication covering African American happenings in politics, entertainment, sports, and social events (fig. 10). The provocative question “Do Japanese Women Make Better Wives?” floats above a tightly cropped photograph of a young Black man and his Japanese female partner who look directly at the camera.24 His sturdy, collared shirt conjures the uniform he wore during his time as a military soldier in Japan, while the transparent details of her lace shirt capture aspects of her femininity. Intimacy is reinforced by the closeness of their positioning and their similarly manicured hair. The photograph seems to answer the rhetorical question framing their very existence with a resoundingly assertive “Yes!”
Cloaked in a discourse concerned with the compatibility and benefits of certain romantic relationships, the stakes of this intercultural dynamic are completely different in content and tone from what viewers find in Littleton's album. In fact, there exists no clear evidence of Japanese/African American romance. The only image explicitly referencing partnership is captioned “Michiko Ochiai (dressmaker) Wedding Picture,” a wedding party photograph of Japanese individuals formally dressed and seated on tatami mats, along with other photographs featuring Black servicemen in uniform embracing Black women while slow dancing. Indeed, in comparison to examples of Black men exercising their sexuality, no common visual analogue appears to exist within photo albums for Littleton and other Black women in Japan. While young sexualized Japanese women on the arms of Black and white servicemen and also “the spectacle of black women's performing bodies” become part of the visual lexicon of militarization, representations of parallel female corporeal pleasures are hidden or at least less discernible.25
Might the studio portraits within the album of handsome young men such as Seaman McGuirt or another nicknamed “Shortyson” represent romantic interests, endearing friendships, or simply individuals just passing through Littleton's time in Japan? So too does the portrait of an attractive Japanese woman captioned Tommy (Tomae) deserve the same set of inquiries, which open the possibility of a queer longing (fig. 11). Unlike the question asked on Jet magazine's cover, the answers will remain irresolute. However, in light of the photographs’ ambiguity, textual examples describing one Black woman named Margie send a clearer message, albeit one of disparagement on the part of Littleton. Underneath a flap and scribbled on the verso of Margie's portrait, the pejorative captions “cunt” and “tramp” hint at another kind of freedom that required concealment. Littleton felt inclined to hide these comments denoting Margie's objectionable sexual nature. Yet it is no surprise that Black woman had sexual lives in Japan even if the visualization of such encounters fails to appear or overtly register within the album's pages. While functioning outside of the normative construction of the African American/Japanese dynamic during the Occupation, African American women within Japan, as scholar Yasuhiro Okada argues, “defined, asserted and performed alternative racial identities, gender roles, and class positions” within the space of being both occupier and Black. In Watson's own words, “In America we are just women, over here we each are very definite individuals,” a statement that similarly infers a kind of personhood outside of the standardized and expected norms of gender and race.26 Indeed, Littleton's photo album offers a sense of freedom for one specific individual, an amateur Black female photographer.
Littleton as Amateur Photographer
By the 1940s, cameras had become accessible to and popular among the US masses, as the more professional studio setting for capturing portraits and memorable occasions among family, friends, and lovers had declined. Books such as the Amateur Photographer's Handbook, published in 1948, during Litteton's time in Gifu, explained the technicalities and expounded upon the joys and possibilities that those with a little patience and interest could achieve either as self-taught, point-and-shoot photographers or hobbyists committed to trying their hand at darkroom development. Littleton made her album within this burgeoning moment in photography's history. She becomes not only a mere taker of photographs but the curator of the album through her selected, arranged, and annotated images, most of which—it can be assumed—she took with her own camera as an amateur photographer.27
Yet the common application of the word amateur to describe a person's gratifying hobby may not effortlessly resonate with Littleton and her project. Art historians Julia Bryan-Wilson and Benjamin Piekut have reflected on amateurism as a creative practice driven by a range of circumstances, which may, for example, include crisis. Along these lines, it may be useful to equate Littleton's role as an amateur photographer to her sense of self-preservation in postwar Japan as a Black woman on a patriarchal military base.28 The term amateur is useful in that it spotlights Littleton's own inclinations, putting the focus on her as producer and bringing to the fore her intentional choices.29 In comparison, the more common use of the word vernacular amplifies photography—the photograph itself—as a culturally defined visual mode of representation made by a nonprofessional. Such a distinction becomes evident when considering the seldom used and awkward term “vernacular photographer.” Describing Littleton as an amateur spotlights the centrality of her own impulses and preferences within the album's visuality. To center Littleton and the complexity of her experience in Japan is to disrupt amateur photography's constant association with a neutralized state of leisure and reframe its importance to one of aesthetic freedom, albeit a freedom afforded in the aftermath of a hostile conflict among nations.
The characteristics of Littleton's photo album amplifies the possibilities of innovation. Describing the pages of another Black military photo album documenting events in Vietnam, scholar Leigh Raiford contemplates the ability of photographic images to form “a crescendo in the cacophonous sequence.”30 In parallel ways, art historian Mary Trent articulates the distinct viewing experience offered by albums. She insists, “In the realm of visual culture, there are few objects that can compete with a family album in terms of the temporal length of its durational creativity.”31 As opposed to a singular portrait or photographic image, the album allows for an extended representation of time beyond what one photograph depicts. The opportunity for aesthetic invention exceeds the duration of one moment captured on film.32 An album offers insight into how its creator wanted each photograph to make meaning—curated through its inclusion and arrangement within the pages.
It represents a kind of storytelling, at moments meticulously executed and at others unsystematically composed, that visually illustrates a version of freedom, one that may dovetail with the kind, for example, that the scholar Jennifer Bajorek had in mind when writing about freedom and photography. In addressing problems and shortcomings in interpreting Malian studio portraits as evocations of freedom from colonial rule, Bajorek writes, “Although I share . . . a desire to explore photography's powers of invention and inclusion as well as disenfranchisement and exclusion, I am more reluctant to accept their insistence on powers of bodily reconfiguration.”33 Here Bajorek questions the power of a subject's pose within a portrait intended to convey freedom. She insists on talking about freedom and the possibilities of photography to represent freedom as more than ascribing agency to a Black body that could be posed and visualized. In its existence as a sustained and extended visual expression, Littleton's album becomes a means to locating freedom not necessarily in what the photographs capture but in the act of creating the album, in and of itself, in the wake of war.
Sites of Crossing
In 2019 I found this album for sale at a popular thrift store in Brooklyn, New York, while looking for treasures. Given my experience of living in Tsuchiura, Japan, as an African American woman of Littleton's age, it immediately caught my attention.34 Part of the appeal of thrifting is the glee built into a shopper's ability to find something special, unusual, or rare among materials fated as discard. The language around thrifting is in stark contrast to the more hallowed and standardized terms used to describe an archive, a depository that could just as easily have been this album's final place of care. While the practices of archiving have been thoroughly theorized, thrifting—the popular channel through which many vernacular photographs circulate—is rarely considered.35 Terms such as gently used, below market value, negotiable, flea, and garage illustrate an economy of words beyond the margins of objects that are sanctioned as valuable and worthy for collecting by traditional institutions. The album's fate outside the archive speaks volumes to how the very terms through which the album has been trafficked becomes but another outlet for considering the complexities and transient nature of Black freedom.
To thrift is to effortlessly shift from holding an object of trash to seizing an item of invaluable measure. It is a type of crossing that is echoed in other aspects of Littleton's album and its related contexts. Littleton's album takes us from Brooklyn to Japan, from 2019 to 1949. The disorienting experience of venturing into another geographic world, or what Watson might describe as “this side of the ocean,” is visually rendered within Sergeant Steven Rent's album from a similar time period and military context. Pasted into Rent's album is a colorful and decorated certificate, “The Domain of the Golden Dragon,” an unofficial award given by the navy and coast guard to crew members who cross the international date line, at which point the calendar changes to the following day (fig. 12). The certificate uses kitschy imagery to evoke a level of otherworldliness, boundary crossing, and adventure. By physically and geographically entering the “silent mysteries of the Far East,” the othering of one's very understanding of the world and one's place within it enters the realm of new possibilities. This kind of reconstitution can be used as a simile to describe Black living in Japan during the US Occupation.
One page in the album mimics this smooth but jarring sense of place-crossing (fig. 13). Two photographs of Littleton's half-sister Virgie diagonally bookend one page of eight photographs. She looks pensively toward the camera in one and jovially smiles, indicating her awareness of being photographed, in the other. In both images, Virgie appears in front of a traditional Japanese storefront, implying that the camera has captured her visage in succession. The photographs arranged between the two of Virgie depict scenes from Kyoto, Hawaii, and Nagoya, thereby traversing geographic and temporal registers. The ease with which we can seamlessly view images of both the United States and Japan, and easily overlook the impact of such movement, is evoked in the kind of crossing the photographs of Virgie embody through their arrangement. It is with sentiments of global transitions, differing subjectivities, and depictions of Black joy that the complexities of freedom come into view. The legacy of the Gifu album highlights how smaller, everyday actions animate new manifestations of freedom when undertakings as simple as organizing a photo album in Japan become sites for redrawing the lines of Black living.
Notes
For an example of an Occupied Japan album filled with commercial souvenir photographs, see the Russell A. Bernier album, ca. 1950, plates 65–82, Walther Collection, New York, as well as the discussion of them in Campt et al., Imagining Everyday Life, 346–47.
Mills, Glazer, and Goerlitz, East–West Interchanges in American Art, 10. Also see Uehara-Carter, “Nappy Routes and Tangled Tales,” for a nuanced consideration of the strengths and pitfalls of different research models.
For example, see Leininger-Miller, New Negro Artists in Paris.
See Rock, “Japan Intrigued Jersey Girl.” In the words of one African American enlisted man, “In [Japan], we live like human beings, without suffering from prejudice and segregation.” Lacour, “Laxity in the Navy,” 56.
See Jerlene Smith, Photograph Album, 1948–1984, MC 1124, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Although the Westernized name “Noboco” is found in the album, I have chosen to employ the more likely Japanese version of “Nobuko.”
In writing about a parallel contradiction evoked within the pages of a photo album of African Americans stationed in Vietnam, Raiford writes, “we witness how photography functions equally as a tool of domination and a practice of survival.” Raiford, “Soldiers and Black Beauty Queens,” 227.
Many thanks to Midori Yanagihara, freelance researcher on WWII, military history, and Japan, for finding this preliminary genealogical information about Darlene Littleton and her family members. Other efforts include corresponding with various archivists at the Veterans History Project of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and The US National Archives and Records Administration. In addition, New York City College of Technology, CUNY Emerging Scholar research assistant Mahnoor Sheik conducted helpful searches.
Okada, “Race, Masculinity, and Military Occupation,” 11. In English, Iejima is referred to as Le Shima.
However, the segregation of military base pools took place, on occasion, in Japan. For a letter of complaint about Black service men not being allowed to swim, see Maynard Miller, photograph album of occupied Japan, box 1, Davis M. Rubenstein Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Duke University Libraries.
Bowers, Hammond, and MacGarrigle, Black Soldier White Army, 50. Note that I changed “photographic laboratory” to the more current term “photography darkroom.”
“African American Private Hannah Wills developing an x-ray film in the x-ray laboratory at Post Hospital, Camp Breckinridge,” Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library. New York Public Library Digital Collections, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-fa13-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.
See the section “A Brief Overview of Afro-Japanese Cultural Exchange” in Bridges and Cornyetz, “Introduction: Work It,” 4–14. For scholarship specifically on visual representations, see Fabricand-Person, “Images of American Racial Stereotypes.”
For one example, see a history of the Black anthem “Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing” translation into Japanese: Redmond, “Extending Diaspora.” Also see the 1958 novella “Prize Stock” in Ōe, Teach Us.
For examples of sexualized photographs of Japanese women in wartime albums, see photographs captioned as “prostitutes” in Steven Rent, photograph album, box 1, Davis M. Rubenstein Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Duke University Libraries, and “whores” in Miller, photograph album, 1946. See Black and white soldiers with their Japanese girlfriends in Miller, photograph album, 1946. For more information on Black men with Japanese women, see Hahn, “Morals Are Different in Japan.” See Raiford's discussion of the Miss Black America in Vietnam and depicted in Paul LaVaillais's Album (1970–1971). Raiford, “Soldiers and Black Beauty Queens,” 227.
Elevating amateur photographers to the status of curator is an approach inspired by the scholarship of bell hooks. For example, see hooks, “In Our Glory,” 50.
Mercer uses the term “aesthetic invention” to define the vernacular as “a heterogenous site of aesthetic invention.” Mercer, Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, 9.
As various Black feminist theorists have insisted, the autobiographical and anecdotal can be effectively used to develop scholarship. For example, see Fleetwood, “Posing in Prison.”
For example, see Sekula, “Body and the Archive”; Smith, Photography on the Color Line.
