PROGRAM

Marking Asian American Pacific Islander month at Roosevelt House, please join us, together with the Hunter College Asian American Studies Program, for a discussion of the new Penguin Classics anthology, The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration. The event will feature the volume’s coeditors Frank Abe and Floyd Cheung in conversation with Hunter College professor of education, and the granddaughter of incarcerated Japanese Americans, Cathlin Goulding.

An “essential volume,” according to The New Yorker, this anthology recovers, and reframes, the literature produced by those affected by the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II— based solely upon the race they shared with a wartime enemy. In a decision even FDR’s great admirers have condemned as one of the most indefensible of his presidency, the Roosevelt administration expelled resident aliens as well as U.S. citizens from their homes, imprisoning 125,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry in camps—without due process.

From the extensive collection of essays, memoirs, letters, fiction, and poetry in the anthology emerges a shared story of the struggle to retain personal integrity in the face of increasing dehumanization. The contributors span incarcerees, their children born in or soon after the camps, and their descendants who reflect on the long-term consequences of mass incarceration for themselves and the nation.

Many of the voices in the book are those of protest. Some are those of accommodation. All are authentic. Together, they form an epic narrative with a singular vision of America’s past—one with disturbing resonances with the American present.

As citizens are once again incarcerated without due process, under the same Alien Enemies Act used during WWII, please join us for this important historical—and yet urgent—discussion.

Frank Abe is the lead author of the graphic novel We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration and a finalist in creative nonfiction for the Washington State Book Award. He wrote, produced, and directed the award-winning PBS documentary Conscience and the Constitution, on the largest organized camp resistance, and, with writer Frank Chin, helped create the first Day of Remembrance in Seattle in 1978.

Floyd Cheung is a professor of English Language and Literature and American Studies at Smith College. Coeditor and contributor to Recovered Legacies: Authority and Identity in Early Asian American Literature, he has worked on the recovery of writings by H.T. Tsiang, Sadakichi Hartmann, Kathleen Tamagawa, Munio Makuuchi, and others.

Cathlin Goulding is a Hunter College professor of education and curriculum specialist who has created and consulted on educational materials for the WNET Group, Sesame Workshop, Smithsonian Institute, and the New York City Department of Education. Her research focuses on place-based learning, public pedagogy, and the teaching of historical violence. In 2019, she co-founded the YURI Education Project—to bring more Asian American stories to PK-12 students.