Afrasian Carceralities: Japanese and North African Internment under the French Empire

Benjamin Hiramatsu-Ireland, Texas Christian University

A critically unexplored point of commonality in Gen. Charles de Gaulle’s administration was the forced deportation and internment of Japanese settlers and North Africans Jews in 1941. This comparative paper first examines a historically underrepresented episode in Asian and French History in which de Gaulle’s Free-French Empire ordered the internment of over a thousand Japanese emigrants throughout the French South Pacific territories in 1941. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, French authorities deported nearly all Japanese emigrants from the Free-French territory New Caledonia to various internment camps in Australia. This paper considers the French Empire’s denaturalization and carceral policies vis-à-vis the Japanese in New Caledonia, situating the case of the Japanese in the French Pacific in relation to carceral and sociolegal policies operating simultaneously in French Algeria. As Aomar Boum and Sarah Abrevaya Stein have demonstrated, “Vichy’s anti-Semitic laws [in North Africa] replicated in many details Nazi anti-Semitic legislation, connecting in documentable ways France’s colonies to the Holocaust” (The Holocaust and North Africa, 48). It is not the intention of this paper to intimate parallels between France’s colony of New Caledonia—site of an internment and carceral space for Japanese emigrants—with European Holocaust victims, North African Muslim internees, and Japanese settlers. Rather, this paper orients a history of Japanese emigration and internment in the French Pacific and Australia around what I call transcolonial carceralities—a notion of overlapping and often uneven colonial policies pertaining to incarceration spanning multiple empires. In so doing, this paper illuminates how multifarious colonial policies pertaining to the carceral state reinforce parallels between diasporic and ideological movements across empires. Exploring Free-French colonial policy in New Caledonia, placed in contiguity with French Empire policies in Vichy North Africa with ties to the Holocaust, allow for Indigenous and pan-Asian comparisons within a framework of settler-colonialism.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 21. Framed by larger trends: Residential migration patterns