On Location:Exploring America-Performing the Past: Black History and Collective Memory in Charleston

We will begin our exploration with a brief introduction / visits to relevant sites in St. Louis, before traveling to former prisons in two locales: first, Rohwer Japanese American Relocation Center in McGeehee, Arkansas; and second, Manzanar Internment Camp in California. Along the way, we will visit many other places--marked and unmarked, official and unofficial, visible and invisible--associated with Japanese American immigration, identity, and the incarceration experience, including several in San Francisco. We will seek out sites of community resistance, resilience, memory, and memorialization, from revered institutions (e.g. the Japanese American National Museum, National Japanese American Historical Society, and the UC-Berkeley / Bancroft Library) to grass-roots-sponsored initiatives as well as sites and popular heritage / tourist destinations (e.g. Angel Island, Japantown, former Tanforan Assembly Center). Students will pursue collaborative site-based investigations of the cultural landscape, making frequent reference to local experts and guest speakers, archival, ethnographic, and visual evidence, and the elements of the built environment. This work will also be informed by methods / readings drawn from diverse disciplines, including social history, archaeology, geography / landscape studies, architectural history, design, cultural / ethnic studies, and others; as well as from by the stories of survivors and work of memory activists, psycho-social studies of the traumatic effects of incarceration; and arts-based efforts to uncover these suppressed histories. We will also give consideration to the political climates and context of the broader phenomenon of collective forgetting--during both the periods in question, and in our own time.
Course Attributes: EN H; AS HUM

On Location:Exploring America-Performing the Past: Black History and Collective Memory in Charleston

AMERICAN CULTURE STUDIES 579

Section 01

Section 11