This account of the two World War II incarceration camps in Arkansas starts with a queer eye on an unlikely figure: Earl Finch, a patriotic white southern philanthropist with peculiar affinities. Finch's altruism toward Jerome and Rohwer camp internees cannot be disaffiliated from his homoerotic interest in the Nisei soldiers training nearby in the racially segregated 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Nor can it be read as gay identity, which Finch disavowed, or, as FBI surveillance would have had it, subversive perversion. Rather, Howard uses Finch's generosities and his queer dissembling as a model for his own argument that a “persistently skewed perspective” (3) on Japanese American wartime internment yields new insights. Combining feminist, critical race, and queer theoretical approaches, the author weaves a social history of those affected by these two underevaluated camps together with broader changes in imperial nationalism, racialized hierarchies, sexual normalcy and deviancy, and the disciplining of gender.

Howard first explores the genealogy of Japanese American concentration camps through prior hostility toward peoples understood to be Asian, US imperial expansion and the deferral of Hawaiian statehood, the rise of Jim Crow segregation, and the southern/western sectional alliance by the 1930s based on a shared hostility toward nonwhites. Far from being an aberrant exception to American democracy, the author argues, internment was imbedded within it.

In the camps, old ways found new means. Howard is strongest in his close readings of gendered, racialized, and sexualized power in the daily lives of Jerome and Rohwer residents. As efficiency and standardization measures, the government centralized and collectivized residence, land use, and cooperative enterprises. Yet this had the distinctly un-American effect of leveling class and gender hierarchies in life and labor and bringing rural, urban, and colonial Japanese Americans into growing affinity. On the other hand, government-sanctioned (and censored) competitive sports, electoral politics, and the press favored Nisei, Japanese Americans with US birth citizenship, over Issei, first-generation immigrant elders. As other scholars have noted, this created new social hierarchies that privileged those most aligned with Americanization efforts. When authorities realized that their design also produced new degrees of autonomy and opportunity for Nisei women, they instituted religious, pedagogical, recreational, and labor systems that emphasized Christian, white, patriarchal heteronormative imperatives. Particularly illuminating are chapters on Christianization campaigns and the state-sanctioned courtship of segregated dances.

Japanese American confrontation with the southern black–white color line provides Howard's most striking telling of normalization and its limits. Camp residents and segregated-unit soldiers were confused by formal segregation and the unwritten rules of black exclusion. Nisei soldiers sometimes interceded on behalf of elderly African American women mistreated by whites on buses, for example, only to be told that they should think of themselves as white and utilize “white” rather than “colored” facilities. This extended “whiteness as the category worthy of emulation and aspiration” to a group who were explicitly segregated and incarcerated on the basis of their race, while posing blackness “as the inviolable category of abjection” (134). White supremacy allowed Japanese American favor in the racial order over African Americans, but reasserted itself whenever required to trump Japanese American civil liberties, choice of courtship or marital partners, or options for postwar resettlement.

Exceeding US intent were possibilities for innovative livability at the interstices. At Jerome and Rohwer, males capitalized upon gender-segregated bachelor housing, youth activities, and clubs for homosociability that could also facilitate queer sex in the camps' “unusual places” (115). Howard links the ambiguity of such relations with the ambivalence with which some answered the infamous loyalty section on the government's internee questionnaire. Both acts reflected the precariousness of supposedly hegemonic discourses of heteronormativity and liberal nationalism and how necessary ambiguity was as a practical means of negotiation for many people. Still, as Howard shows, the costs of exposing the limits of such discourses fell hard upon those people caught in their contradictions. Some found themselves resettled in isolation from other Japanese Americans in “normal American” (read white-predominant) communities, while others, facing the desperation of yet another forced dislocation, chose suicide, family breakup, or transnational journeys over adherence to US mandates. The traumas of internment and its fallout would be felt for generations. Even Earl Finch, who moved to Hawaii after the war to expand his entrepreneurial–philanthropic–erotic Japanese–American relations, found himself abandoned by the Japanese “adopted sons” with whom he hoped to create alternative domesticity as a self-styled gentle patriarch in the American empire.

This book tells an innovative story about internment. Beyond this, it compels readers to recognize how contingent our most intimate embraces of allegiance, identity, and relationality are on larger forces that exceed our capacities – or the designs of nations and empires – to harness them. For this reason, Howard insists that we resist sentimentality toward big ideals or a sense of superiority we might derive from our perceived proximity to them. He calls for us to chart an alternate course forward, cognizant of the accumulated harm done on behalf of those ideals and adamant in exploration of the perverse possibilities for life that just might redeem us.