SHUM 6720

Japanese American Wartime Incarceration Literature in the Twenty-First Century

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2026-2027 Catalog.

This seminar engages with the wide range of perspectives and imagination in recent Japanese American literature to think through the changing possibilities and responsibilities of survivance and memory work in the twenty-first century. Our focus will be on works of poetry collections, narrative fiction, graphic novels, and creative nonfiction from selected U.S. writers who are descendants of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. The selections center around Topaz (UT), which was, from the beginning, a particularly vibrant site of cultural production, but will also engage with lesser-known sites like Gila River (AZ) and Missoula (MT). These works display an array of literary sensibility reflecting their collective cultural inheritance of memory, taking agency in providing their readers with critical consciousness about the way in which descendant lives are complicated in the twenty-first century.

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