SPACE AVAILABLE: AAS 372 (Japanese American Incarceration) WITH OPTIONAL WRITING LINK TO ENGL 298A (Writing in the Social Sciences and Freedom Struggles)
Plenty of space is currently available in this lecture class on Japanese American incarceration, as well as in an optional, newly linked writing course on incarceration, abolition, refugees, and freedom struggles. Sign up for one or both!
Asian American Studies 372—“Japanese American Incarceration: Remembering an Unfinished History”
During WWII, over 120,000 Japanese Americans were rounded up and incarcerated in US concentration camps. The majority were natural-born citizens, while the rest—immigrants racially barred from naturalization—had settled in the US many decades earlier. By scholarly consensus, the incarceration was not justifiable on legal, ethical, or military grounds, and the federal government formally acknowledged and apologized for this injustice in the 1980s.
Nonetheless, the memory of Japanese American incarceration remains a site of struggle in the present, because of what it means for national history and Japanese American collective identity, and because of its implications for current struggles over immigrants’ rights, Islamophobia, and mass incarceration. In this course, we’ll survey this history, and explore the terms of political struggle and cultural memory that animate contemporary debates.
I&S, DIV CREDIT; OPTIONAL LINKED WRITING COURSE FOR C OR W CREDIT: ENGL 298A
TTh 10:30-12:20 MEB 238 Instructor: Vince Schleitwiler
English 298, “Writing in the Social Sciences and Freedom Struggles,” addresses how writing in the social sciences can both reinforce systemic inequality and challenge it. The course will focus on two major writing/composition projects. The first project will examine the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and their subsequent struggles for redress, reparations, and more broadly an end to racist detention and confinement. The second sequence of the course will open up onto broader struggles for abolition, particularly in relation to the concept of the refugee, both external (fleeing from one country to another) and internal (displaced within a country). We will interrogate whether the lens of “refugee” is useful for thinking about the disproportionate incarceration of Indigenous and Black people.
THIS IS AN "UNLINKED" WRITING COURSE FOR C OR W CREDIT. FOR QUESTIONS CONTACT: IWPENGL@UW.EDU
TTh 02:00-03:20 AND 008 Instructor: Carrie Matthews