A little over a year ago, I started thinking about the connections between the Holocaust and Jim Crow. I did this, partly, because I planned to do a study travel trip to Poland where students and I would explore these connections, notably meeting and working with Polish students who were studying Southern literature. However, that trip did not materialize, due to a myriad of factors. I … Read More Education and Confronting the Past
In the previous post, I started looking at Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the ways that he focuses on individuals, not on the high ranking officials, who both perpetrated and survived the Holocaust. Along with this, Spiegelman highlights the ways that memory, especially as it relates to a traumatic event such as the Holocaust, is slippery in so many ways. I always think about George … Read More The Quotidian in Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”: Part II
+ comics, dispacement, graphic novels, japanese american internment, kiku hughes, supreme court, world war ii
In my Multicultural American Literature course this semester, I am teaching Kiku Hughes’ Displacement alongside John Okada’s No-No Boy and George Takei’s They Called Us Enemy. Each of these texts focuses on the incarceration of thousands of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II, and each of these focuses on the intergenerational trauma of incarceration. The generational effects of trauma run through multiple … Read More Conversation with Kiku Hughes
+ comics, Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White, graphic memoir, graphic novels, holocaust, japanese american internment, maus, no-no boy, of love and dust, they called us enemy, world war ii
Over the past few years, I have taught numerous multicultural American literature courses, at various levels from sophomore to graduate. This semester, the texts center around the question, “Who is American?” Unlike previous semesters, I have read or taught these texts before, so none are really new to me. However, the overarching theme and the focus of the texts has provided me with ways … Read More Multicultural American Literature Syllabus 2022
+ comics, earl warren, franklin roosevelt, george takei, graphic memoir, harmony becker, japanese american internment, justin eisinger, they called us enemy, world war ii
Guilt and the acknowledgment of wrongdoing constitute one’s feeling of shame. It arises when someone recognizes their culpability in an event or events and feel regret and sadness at their part in the action. On a recent episode of This American Life, Mohamadou Slahi, a man incarcerated at Guantanamo for years before his release, speaks with some of the individuals who interrogated and tortured … Read More The Unproportional Distribution of Shame: Part I
Interminable Rambling 