The Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department presents:

Letters to Memory
featuring a reading by Karen Tei Yamashita with remarks by Alice Yang and Christine Hong

Letters to Memory is an excursion through the Japanese mass incarceration during World War II using archival materials from the Yamashita family as well as a series of epistolary conversations with composite characters representing a range of academic specialties. Historians, anthropologists, classicists—their disciplines, and Yamashita’s engagement with them, are a way for her to explore various aspects of the mass incarceration and to expand its meaning beyond her family, and our borders, to ideas of debt, forgiveness, civil rights, orientalism, and community.

About the Author: Karen Tei Yamashita is a Professor of Literature and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Yamashita is the author of Letters to Memory, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, Circle K Cycles, I Hotel, and Anime Wong, all published by Coffee House Press. I Hotel was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award and awarded the California Book Award, the American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award, and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award. She has been a US Artists Ford Foundation Fellow and co-holder of the University of California Presidential Chair for Feminist & Critical Race & Ethnic Studies.

March 12, 2018
5-:00-7:30pm
Feminist Studies Library
Humanities 1, Room 316