Lecture: Memories of the World War II Mass Incarceration and Japanese American Redress Activism

Event Description: This talk analyzes the movement to obtain redress for the mass removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Multiple generations of Japanese Americans participated in three campaigns that culminated in the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 providing an official apology and individual payments of $20,000 to surviving former incarcerees. This movement reflected the impact of multiracial activism in the 1960s and 70s, pilgrimages to former camp sites, commemorations, and political campaigns to educate the public about the wartime injustice. It examines the role of Japanese American researchers, grassroots activists, and leaders in a class action lawsuit and legislative lobbying efforts. It also explores the legacy of this movement and the ways Japanese Americans continue to invoke the history of the mass incarceration to support other groups seeking redress.

Speaker Bio: Alice Yang is chair of the History Department at the University of California at Santa Cruz and co-directs the Center for the Study of Pacific War Memories. She is also the oral history co-director of the Okinawan Memories Initiative. Between 2010 and 2020, she served as provost of Stevenson College at UCSC. Her publications include Historical Memories of the Japanese American Internment and the Struggle for Redress, Major Problems in Asian American History (co-editor), and What Did the Internment of Japanese Americans Mean? (editor). She has served as a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American History and an advisory board member for the exhibit Then They Came for Me: Japanese American Incarceration during World War II and the Demise of Civil Liberties. Her research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Luce Foundation, and the California Civil Liberties Public Education Fund.

2023 Environmental Justice Conference: Building an Intersectional Environmental Movement

Our class, Power, Justice, and the Environment, is hosting a leftist conference on the 5C campuses featuring speakers from ACT-LA, workshops focused on the various intersections of the environmental/climate justice movement, a climate tour of Scripps, and a closing dinner!

We hope to facilitate a leftist community event that can be replicated and expanded for years to come. We understand that environmental justice and the fight against climate change has tremendous impacts on our collective struggle for liberation. Taking seriously that all of our collective struggles depend on dismantling the oppressive systems of domination that uphold and discipline environmental injustice, this conference is a start for a stronger intra-clorg community. We hope to foster connections that move beyond this one-day conference and bolster the work of each organization.

This all-day conference will run from 10:30-5 and will end with a closing dinner at the Grove House and a rockin leftist party to celebrate the work we have all done and learned throughout the day from 9pm to midnight. To reserve spots for dinner (free!) contact [email protected]

In solidarity,

Power, Justice, and the Environment

Storyteller’s Festival 2023

Join us for the second annual, Storyteller’s Poetry, Music, Arts, and Film Festival on Thursday, April 13^th from 12:00pm-6:30pm. This event showcases student creations while supporting local artists, and will host live music performances, a spoken word event, a writing workshop, a film screening with Q&A, food trucks, and more! This festival is in collaboration with the Writing Center, Black People in the Inland Empire, the Community Engagement Center, Media Arts for Social Justice, the Campus Life Committee, the William James Association, Pitzer College Black Student Union and the Native Indigenous Student Union and is free and open to the public.

Festival Vendor Registration Link

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeFmnsDr73Mvr4Ap-5e87Nha-1Kx9AyZEFpSQF78p0zETm3LQ/viewform

FESTIVAL SCHEDULE:

12:00-5:00PM Food Trucks on the Mounds, Local Arts Vendors in McConnel Living Room

12:00PM @ McConnel Apron – DJ John West will open the festival

12:30PM – Creative Writing Workshop hosted by Stephanie Liu-Rojas – McConnell Atrium

1:00PM @McConnell Apron – Live Music of White White Buffalo & Wanbli Ohitika Win – Native American artists and activists Dani Doll and Juliana Brown Eyes will perform new music from the She’s an Eagle in Flight Tour 2023.

2:00PM @McConnell Apron – Spoken Word Set hosted by Pitzer College Black Student Union

FILM SCREENING – Registration Link

https://forms.gle/QWzqjvk6CPseRtcE8

2:30PM @Benson Auditorium – Art & Krimes by Krimes – award winning documentary about an artist who labors over a number of years on a secret masterpiece, and through this act of daily creative process finds a way to survive incarceration

4:00PM @Benson Auditorium – Encore screening of Art & Krimes

5:45PM @Benson Auditorium – Conversation & Q&A with Asia Johnson hosted by Sadie Scott. Asia Johnson is a writer, storyteller, and filmmaker who has worked with several organizations in the criminal justice reform space, including The Bail Project, cut50, Shakespeare in Prison, Prison Creative Arts Program, Hamtramck Free School, and the Michigan Prison Doula Initiative. Asia is a 2019 Right of Return Fellow, 2019 Room Project Fellow, 2021 Brennan Center for Justice Fellow, 2022 Art for Justice grantee, and a 2022 Highland Leader. Her Chapbook, An Exorcism, was released in 2018 and her directorial debut, Out of Place, was released in 2022

Stephen and Sandra Glass Annual Humanities Lecture

Mettle, Metal, and Medal, or Autotheorizing Contemporary Classical Scholarship

“Mettle, Metal, and Medal”, Dr. Eccleston reflects on the racialized and gendered stakes of thinking about and with the ancient Greek (and Roman) classics today. Suzan-Lori Parks’ 2015 drama, Father Comes Home from the Wars, is often marketed as an adaptation of Homer’s epic poem, Odyssey. Parks has repeatedly rejected this mantle. Using this rejection as a provocation, Dr. Eccleston explains how the play’s interest in the meaning and values that adhere to materials like metal and flesh responds to the politics of Homer’s Odyssey and, no less interestingly, to the fault lines of contemporary ancient Greek and Roman studies.

Dr. Eccleston’s written work often interrogates the relationship between materials, identity, and the politics of embodied difference under and in response to large-scale sociopolitical change. Her research crosses and interrogates disciplinary boundaries between Classics and English, American Studies, Black Studies, and Comparative Literature. Dr. Eccleston co-founded Eos, the scholarly society dedicated to Africana receptions of Ancient Greek and Roman culture; she also co-founded the international conference series Racing the Classics with Dan-el Padilla. She is currently coediting a special issue of Transactions of the American Philological Association, entitled Race and Racism: Beyond the Spectacular, with Patrice Rankine. Dr. Eccleston is currently completing her first book, Epic Events (Yale University Press, under contract). Epic Events delves into a heterogeneous archive of contemporary texts (i.e. speeches, films, statues, public art pieces, museums, novels, poetry, and articles) that engage ancient Greek and Roman material to explain the politics of time in the US. Especially interested in works produced by minoritized artists, the project strikes new ground by demonstrating the necessity of comparative racialization for Classical reception studies and connecting the temporalities of recent national crises to possible disciplinary future(s).

She holds many honors including but not limited to: a Rhodes Scholarship, the National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize in Ancient Studies, and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.