DRAMA IN THE DELTA: Digitally Reenacting Civil Rights Performances at Arkansas' Wartime Camps for Japanese Americans

FAIN: HD-51169-10

Regents of the University of California, San Diego (La Jolla, CA 92093-0013)
Emily Roxworthy (Project Director: March 2010 to March 2012)

A scholarly, historic simulation meant for public audiences exploring the racial dynamics of a wartime internment camp in the Arkansas Delta.

DRAMA IN THE DELTA consists of an interactive 3D model of key historic sites from the World War II Arkansas Delta, cast with diverse user-avatars that digitally simulate the systems of racial segregation that governed home-front life when black-white Jim Crow laws intersected with the policies of two local internment camps for Americans of Japanese descent. Rohwer and Jerome each imprisoned a peak wartime population of 8,500; unknown to most scholars, these were the only War Relocation Authority (WRA) camps in the American South and the only to house Hawaiians of Japanese descent. The wartime internment in general has not entered most Americans' consciousness. By reenacting cross-cultural activities from the year 1944, our historically accurate video role-playing game (video-RPG) will present an interactive, immersive medium to engage public interest in the dramatic encounters that took place when Japanese-American segregation occurred in the context of black-white segregation.