Brown Bag Biography: Gail Okawa

February 11, 12:00pm - 1:15pm
Mānoa Campus, Zoom Add to Calendar

This session will focus on the research narrative that undergirds the speaker's recently published book Remembering Our Grandfathers' Exile--how a biography project expanded into a collective biography due to personal, political, and social circumstances over almost two decades. Gail Okawa is interested in the links between language/literacy, culture, and race in relation to history, social justice, and education. Since 2002 when she was a visiting scholar at the Smithsonian Institution, she has been exploring the experiences of Japanese immigrants from Hawai‘i, including her maternal grandfather, who were imprisoned during World War II in internment camps on the U.S. mainland. Her project expanded to include the visits of sons in Nisei military units to their interned fathers and stories of internees’ sons who were killed in action, as well as to record memories of the Santa Fe Internment Camp among the city’s present-day residents.


Event Sponsor
Center for Biographical Research, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Zoë E. Sprott, (808) 956-3774, gabiog@hawaii.edu, http://blog.hawaii.edu/cbrhawaii/

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