“No Japs allowed”;: Negation and naming as subject‐constituting strategies reflected in contemporary stories of Japanese American internment

This essay offers a perspective on how discourse reflects underlying systems of meanings that structure definitions of self and society and hence, on how rhetoric frames or delimits possibilities for human self‐understanding. In specific this study investigates discursive strategies and modes of address that delimit self‐definitions, as reflected in Japanese American World War II internment narratives. Analysis of representative stories, derived from the 1981 Los Angeles field hearings conducted by the U. S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, revealed two intertwined discursive strategies: negation and naming.