Voices Beyond the Grave: Japanese Internment in the French Pacific

Voices Beyond the Grave uncovers critically understudied histories of Japanese internment and labor diasporas in the French Pacific.After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, French colonial authorities, following Charles de Gaulle’s orders, detained over a thousand Japanese civilians residing across French-Pacific island territories and deported them to Australian internment camps.France’s logics of colonial racial capitalism maintained far-reaching impacts on wartime Japanese emigrant communities in the francophone territories of Tahiti, New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), and New Caledonia.In this book, New Caledonia, a strategic outpost in de Gaulle’s Free French empire and a U.S. stronghold during World War II, is a focal point for exploring the complex structures of power and resistance that arose from settler colonialism, Native dispossession, and the mass incarceration of Japanese civilians. Through rare letters from Japanese internees and interviews with their descendants, this book u