Event

Friends of History, Portland State University History and Portland State University Center for Japanese Studies present: "Two Faces of Wartime Confinement: Racism and Blind Spots in Japanese American History."

A consensus has emerged in the memory of Japanese American WW2 confinement that centers on the powerful significance of racism for this group experience. Kurashige explores this consensus. How and why did it develop? What perspectives does it leave out, and at what cost? More than a social justice vehicle, the racism narrative enacts a politics of memory with theoretical and ethical implications that are not well understood. This talk addresses these and other blind spots to shed new light on Japanese American history.

Lon Kurashige is professor of History and Spatial Sciences at the University of Southern California. He is author of Two Faces of Exclusion: The Untold History of Anti-Asian Racism in the United States (2016) and Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival, 1934-1990 (2002), winner of the History Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. He is editor of Pacific America: Histories of Trans-oceanic Crossings (2018) and co-editor of “Conversations in Transpacific History,” a special edition of Pacific Historical Review (2014). Kurashige is co-editor of the textbook Major Problems in Asian American History, 2nd ed. (2017) and a founding author for the college-level textbook Global Americans: A History of the United States (2017). He teaches courses at the undergrad and grad levels on US history, American immigration and ethnicity, Asian American history, transpacific history, quantitative history, and California and the West.