Guest-blogger Greg Robinson

I'm pleased to introduce Greg Robinson, Associate Professor of History at l'Université du Québec À Montréal, as a guest-blogger.  Greg is, among other noteworthy things, one of the leading scholars on the removal and incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry in the Americas during the Second World War.  I say "the Americas" because one of Greg's most important contributions (particularly in his recent book "A Tragedy of Democracy") has been to push our understanding of the wartime treatment of people of Japanese ancestry across both the northern and southern borders of the United States.  Greg's first solo book, "By Order of the President," is a careful and nuanced study of the development of the incarceration policy in the Roosevelt administration and of Roosevelt's own attitudes toward Japanese Americans and their removal and detention.

Back in 2004, Greg and I undertook the somewhat quixotic task of publicly critiquing and rebutting Michelle Malkin's partisan revisionism in her book "In Defense of Internment," which purported to justify the forced removal and detention of Japanese Americans in service of her anti-Muslim domestic agenda.  That was the high point of my blogging career, and it was a joy to share it with Greg.  (And yes, I know what you're thinking:  my blogging career has all been downhill from there.)

Welcome, Greg.

Comments

[Maggie Chon, Seattle University School of Law]

Greg's newest book, A Tragedy of Democracy, breaks new ground by detailing events affecting 22,000 Japanese Canadians in British Columbia, the imposition of martial law until 1944 in Hawai’i, which affected the entire island population, including over 100,000 of Japanese ancestry, the expulsion of about 5,000 Mexican Japanese from the coastal regions, and the internment of about 2,300 Japanese Latin Americans, mostly from Peru, in camps in Crystal City, Texas. Groups other than west coast Americans comprise substantial underemphasized narratives in the existing literature – versions of willed forgetting, as Robinson has termed it in our forthcoming work together . . . the Race, Rights and Reparation revision.

Greg's series on Regan v. King here in the The Faculty Lounge is a critically important reminder that we should willfully remember, if at all possible.