The Great Unknown ─ Japanese American Sketches

In The Great Unknown, award-winning historian and journalist Greg Robinson offers a fascinating and compulsively readable collection of biographical portraits of extraordinary but unheralded figures in Japanese American history: men and women who made remarkable contributions in the arts, literature, law, sports, and other fields. Recovering and celebrating the stories of noteworthy Issei and Nisei and of their supporters, TheGreat Unknown provides powerful evidence of the diverse experiences and substantial cultural, political, and intellectual contributions ofNikkei throughout the country and over multiple decades.
 
What is more, The Great Unknown reshapes our understanding of the Asian American experience. By focusing attention on exceptional figures who deviated from social norms, Robinson refutes stereotypes of ethnic Japanese and other Asians as conformist or colorless. The collection also highlights a set of recurring themes absent from conventional histories—including the lives of Japanese Americans outside the West Coast, the role of women in shaping community life, encounters between Japanese American and African American communities during the struggle for civil rights, and the evolving status of queer community members.
 

Greg Robinson is professor of history at Universite du Quebec a Montreal. He is the author or editor of several notable books on Japanese Americans, includingA Tragedy of Democracy, which was awarded the History book prize of the Association for Asian American Studies, andAfter Camp, winner of the Caroline Bancroft History Prize in Western US History. He writes a regular column, “The Great Unknown and the Unknown Great,” forNichi Bei Weekly and is Forward section editor for the Journal of Transnational American Studies.