Settler-Military Camps: Internment and Prisoner of War Camps across the Pacific Islands during World War II

Abstract

This paper analyzes the US internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans, Indigenous peoples, and prisoners of war across Hawai‘i, the Marshall Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands during World War II. Decentering the focus on Japanese American internment as a domestic project of racialized exclusion, it analyzes internment as embedded in a transnational project of US settler militarism. Internment and prisoner of war camps utilized varying logics of racialized military detention, Indigenous displacement, and liberal governance in order to rationalize the evacuation and internment of Asian and Indigenous peoples from lands that the US military wished to use as bases, battlegrounds, and bomb testing areas.