Transpacific Archives and Public Memory: Histories of Japanese American Wartime Incarceration

This talk reflects on the Out of the Desert project (http://outofthedesert.yale.edu). Out of the Desert interprets World War II Japanese American internment history for a broad public audience (http://outofthedesert.yale.edu). Supported by a US National Park Service Japanese American Confinements Sites grant, the Out of the Desert digital project is an outgrowth of a multi-year, collaborative effort to present this history to a public audience. What are the stakes and challenges to interpreting histories of incarceration via digital methods? What are some of the ethical and methodological challenges of recovering these histories? What are the possibilities and potential perils for curation, digital archives, and public memory as they intersect with Asian American Studies?

Courtney Sato is an interdisciplinary scholar of twentieth-century US intellectual and cultural history, Asian American Studies, and critical race and gender studies. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University and is currently a Global American Studies postdoctoral fellow at the Charles Warren Center for American History at Harvard University. Her book manuscript, Crossroads of the Pacific: Pan-Asianism, Anticolonialism, and Internationalism, 1917-1939, traces how intellectuals in the United States and Asia articulated radical and liberal visions for the “Asia Pacific” between the two world wars. Courtney currently serves as the Co-Principal Investigator and Project Director for the Out of the Desert initiative at Yale University. Supported by a US National Park Service Japanese American Confinements Sites grant, the Out of the Desert digital project interprets World War II Japanese American incarceration history for a broad public audience (http://outofthedesert.yale.edu