Inscrutable Grief: Memorializing Japanese American Internment in Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660

During World War II, the United States government interned over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry. The losses of internment were innumerable: internees had to abandon most personal possessions and leave their friends, homes, and communities, all while mainstream American culture rarely acknowledged these losses. This article explores how Japanese American cultural production helped reshape mainstream conceptions of internment loss, focusing on the immediate post-war period and Miné Okubo’s innovative graphic text, Citizen 13660, the first Japanese American memoir published post-war. Numerous scholars mention Citizen 13660’s mournful notes, but the criticism does not offer a sustained engagement with Okubo’s depictions of public grieving. Such representations expand the range of emotional expressions available to Japanese Americans in the 1940s. However, Okubo signals an awareness of how the greater American public was ill-equipped to comprehend Japanese American grief. I argue that Okubo critiques the stereotype of the “inscrutable” Asian American subject by employing her own aesthetic of inscrutability through her rhetoric and images. If there is no outlet through which Japanese Americans can process or even speak the injuries and losses brought upon them, grief is a forbidden emotion, unreadable in the dominant modes of the time. This text interrogates such denials, working beyond the compulsory restraints of Japanese American self-representations by juxtaposing the supposed lack of interiority with external shows of emotion. The collapsing of categories throughout Okubo’s text thus disrupts representational paradigms of Japanese American experience, opening the door for new representational and reception possibilities.

Inscrutable Grief: Memorializing Japanese American Internment in Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660

During World War II, the United States government interned over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry. The losses of internment were innumerable: internees had to abandon most personal possessions and leave their friends, homes, and communities, all while mainstream American culture rarely acknowledged these losses. This article explores how Japanese American cultural production helped reshape mainstream conceptions of internment loss, focusing on the immediate post-war period and Miné Okubo’s innovative graphic text, Citizen 13660, the first Japanese American memoir published post-war. Numerous scholars mention Citizen 13660’s mournful notes, but the criticism does not offer a sustained engagement with Okubo’s depictions of public grieving. Such representations expand the range of emotional expressions available to Japanese Americans in the 1940s. However, Okubo signals an awareness of how the greater American public was ill-equipped to comprehend Japanese American grief. I argue that Okubo critiques the stereotype of the “inscrutable” Asian American subject by employing her own aesthetic of inscrutability through her rhetoric and images. If there is no outlet through which Japanese Americans can process or even speak the injuries and losses brought upon them, grief is a forbidden emotion, unreadable in the dominant modes of the time. This text interrogates such denials, working beyond the compulsory restraints of Japanese American self-representations by juxtaposing the supposed lack of interiority with external shows of emotion. The collapsing of categories throughout Okubo’s text thus disrupts representational paradigms of Japanese American experience, opening the door for new representational and reception possibilities.

Hidden Networks of Loss: Multi-Ethnic Media and Mourning in Twentieth Century American Literature

Mourning may be generally thought of as a private matter, but it is also a set of socially regulated practices designed to determine which lives are considered socially valuable and relevant. These normative modes of mourning often dismiss the losses and griefs of certain groups. In such scenarios, how do those affected communities mourn and represent their losses? How do marginalized peoples incorporate their losses into public discourse, and how can such losses be understood as publicly grievable? As Judith Butler has demonstrated, grievability has immense political importance: to be grievable is to be acknowledged as living, while being ungrievable denies a person his or her humanity. This dissertation explores these questions via spaces of confinement – internment camps, prisons, and reservations – as they encapsulate the way dominant discourse literally brackets and marginalizes certain groups. Indeed, mainstream networks of information dissemination (like mass media) often do not imagine these communities or their grief, and if they do, it is often sensationalized. The dual pressure of confinement – restrictions regarding circulation and exclusion from normative structures of public grief – then creates a representational bind for authors. But by changing the discursive forms of mourning, writers can reach and appeal to different audiences. This project draws from literary and media sources, charting the public networks that transmitted recordings of loss and shape mourning practices from the 1930s to the 1990s, a period of increased literary publication from marginalized subjects. I use this archive to demonstrate how breaking mourning out of traditional genres – like elegy, eulogy, and epitaph – allows grief to infiltrate dominant discourse, teaching its audiences how to read loss. In other words, genre, and its accompanying expectations, creates alternative ways of expressing (and interpreting) loss that can expand the bounds of what is grievable. By crafting a history of grievable life in American literature, I show how contemporary meditations on loss are rooted in a long-standing cultural discourse and how this history can help us better understand present political protests – and further social justice aims

Visual search performance in infants associates with later ASD diagnosis

An enhanced ability to detect visual targets amongst distractors, known as visual search (VS), has often been documented in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Yet, it is unclear when this behaviour emerges in development and if it is specific to ASD. We followed up infants at high and low familial risk for ASD to investigate how early VS abilities links to later ASD diagnosis, the potential underlying mechanisms of this association and the specificity of superior VS to ASD. Clinical diagnosis of ASD as well as dimensional measures of ASD, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and anxiety symptoms were ascertained at 3 years. At 9 and 15 months, but not at age 2 years, high-risk children who later met clinical criteria for ASD (HR-ASD) had better VS performance than those without later diagnosis and low-risk controls. Although HR-ASD children were also more attentive to the task at 9 months, this did not explain search performance. Superior VS specifically predicted 3 year-old ASD but not ADHD or anxiety symptoms. Our results demonstrate that atypical perception and core ASD symptoms of social interaction and communication are closely and selectively associated during early development, and suggest causal links between perceptual and social features of ASD

Measuring neural excitation and inhibition in autism: different approaches, different findings and different interpretations.

The balance of neural excitation and inhibition (E/I balance) is often hypothesised to be altered in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). One widely held view is that excitation levels are elevated relative to inhibition in ASD. Understanding whether, and how, E/I balance may be altered in ASD is important given the recent interest in trialling pharmacological interventions for ASD which target inhibitory neurotransmitter function. Here we provide a critical review of evidence for E/I balance in ASD. We conclude that data from a number of domains provides support for alteration in excitation and inhibitory neurotransmission in ASD, but when considered collectively, the available literature provide little evidence to support claims for either a net increase in excitation or a net increase in inhibition. Strengths and limitations of available techniques are considered, and directions for future research discussed

The effects of group relaxation training sessions utilizing the turtle technique upon the observed overactive behavior in preschool children

The general purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of using relaxation training utilizing the Turtle Technique as developed by Schneider and Robin (1975) to teach preschool children to control their overactive behaviors. The specific purpose was to determine whether hyperactive children who participated in the relaxation training group would evidence fewer overactive behaviors than hyperactive children who did not. Another purpose was to determine older hyperactive preschool children would evidence fewer observed overactive behaviors following the treatment sessions than younger hyperactive preschool children.The 41 preschool subjects who participated in the study ranged from three to six years of age. They were initially identified as hyperactive by ratings on the Classroom Teacher's Behavior Check List or BCL (Safer, 1976), which was completed by each child's classroom teacher. The subject children were observed in their intact classes which were randomly assigned to either relaxation training (experimental: N=21) or storytelling (control: N=20) groups. All research conditions were administered by the classroom teachers. The subjects in the relaxation treatment group received at least thirty of forty 10-minute relaxation training sessions in daily sessions for eight weeks. Stories were read to the control group for at least thirty of forty 10-minute sessions in daily sessions for eight weeks. All subjects were observed by trained observers two times daily for a period of five days prior to treatment and two times daily for a period of five days after treatment had been terminated. A time-sample observation system was used to observe the following behaviors: out of chair, modified out of chair, motor behavior (not in seat), motor behavior (in seat), disturbing others directly and aggression, inappropriate vocalizations, inappropriate noise and movements directed toward the body.Multivariate analysis of covariance was used to analyze the research data with the pre-observations treated as the covariates and the post-observations treated as the criteria. The alpha level was set at .05 for any test of statistical significance.No significant differences were found between preschool groups receiving relaxation training to reduce their observed overactive behaviors and a control group, which listened to stories and engaged in active participation in the stories. The results did indicate, however, that although there was not a significant interaction between age and treatment, there was a significant difference for age in both the treatment and control groups. Younger hyperactive preschool children exhibited more motor behavior out of seat and inappropriate vocalizations than older hyperactive preschool children.Thesis (D. Ed.

Pitch discrimination and melodic memory in children with autism

Objective: The current research indicates that those with autism have an excellent memory for pitch. Persons with autism have better pitch discrimination and memory for individual notes. The purpose of this study was extend this research in school aged children, comparing pitch discrimination and melodic memory of children with autism to that of typically developing children.Method: Twenty-five children with autism between the ages of 8-12 and 25 typically developing children within the same age range participated in the study. Children completed pitch discrimination tasks in two differing contexts. In one context, children were asked to indicate whether two pitches were the same or different when the two pitches were either the same or one note of the pair had been altered so that it was 25, 35, or 45-cents sharp or flat. In the other context, children were asked to discriminate whether two melodies were the same or different when the leading tone of each melody was either the same or had been altered so that it was 25, 35, or 45-cents sharp or flat. In addition, children were also asked to recall melodies one week after they were paired with pictures during a familiarization task. All the tasks in the study were formatted on computer.Results: Children with autism outperformed typically developing children in both pitch discrimination contexts. Children with autism were superior to typically developing children when remembering melodies one week after they had been paired with animal pictures.Conclusion: Children with autism demonstrated better pitch discrimination and melodic memory than typically developing children. These abilities may be genetic, as the majority of the participants in the study had limited music training. Alternatively, these abilities could be reflective of a different developmental process in the auditory modality of children with autism whereby developmental differences in auditory perceptions may be adaptive in some musical contexts.Objectif: Les recherches actuelles démontrent que les personnes autistiques discernent mieux la hauteur des sons et ont une meilleure mémoire des sons individuels. La présente étude vise à étendre la recherche aux enfants d'âge scolaire en comparant, chez les enfants autistiques par rapport aux enfants qui se développent normalement, le discernement de la hauteur des sons et la mémoire mélodique.Méthodologie: Vingt-cinq enfants autistiques ainsi que 25 enfants ayant un développement normal, tous âgés de 8 à 12 ans, ont participé à l'étude. Placés dans deux contextes différents, les enfants ont effectué des tâches faisant appel à leur capacité de discerner la hauteur des sons. Dans le premier contexte, les enfants devaient indiquer si deux sons étaient semblables ou différents lorsque les deux sons étaient les mêmes ou lorsque l'un d'eux avait été modifié pour être plus aigu ou plus bas de 25, 35, ou 45-cents. Dans l'autre contexte, les enfants devaient dire si deux sons mélodies étaient les memes ou si elles étaient différentes lorsque chacune des melodies étaient la mêmes ou si elles étaient différentes lorsque la sensible de chacune des melodies étaient soit la même, soit qu'elle avait été modifiée pour être plus aigue ou plus basse de 25, 35, ou 45-cents. En outre, les enfants devaient aussi se remémorer des mélodies qui, la semaine précédente, avaient été associées à des images d'animaux au cours d'une tâche de familiarsation. Toutes les tâches accomplies par les enfants au cours de l'étude ont été effectuées sur ordinateur.Résultats: Les enfants autistiques ont mieux réussis que les enfants ayant un développement normal et, cela, dans les deux contextes de discernment de la hauteur des sons. Ils ont aussi été supérieurs lorsqu'il a fallu se remémorer des melodies une semaine après qu'elles eurent été associés à des images d'animaux.Conclusions: Les enfants autistiques ont démontré que leur jugement de la hauteur des sons et et leur mémoire mélodique étaient meilleurs que ceux des enfants ayant un développement normal. Ces habiletés pourraient être innées étant donné que la majorité des participants á l'étude avaient une formation musicale limitée. Par ailleurs, ces habiletés pourraient être le signe d'un processus développemental different des attributs auditifs des enfants autistiques, ces différences développementales des perceptions auditives pouvent comporter une capacité d'adaptation à certains contextes musicaux