USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture and the Japanese American National Museum present “Interlinking Past and Present: A Conversation and Reading about Race, Religion, and American Belonging” on Saturday, April 2 at 5pm. Link in bio to RSVP!
Join Duncan Ryuken Williams, co-curator of the exhibition Sutra and Bible: Faith and the Japanese American World War II Incarceration, who will be in conversation with Sherman A Jackson (USC King Faisal Chair of Islamic Thought and Culture and author of Islam and the Blackamerican) and Russell M. Jeung (Professor of Asian American Studies at SF State University and Co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate) about the links between the wartime Japanese American experience with other forms of religious and racial animus and exclusion in the United States.
This discussion will be followed by a Japanese renga (linked-verse-poetry)-style prayer of interconnected readings including excerpts from Dharma talks or Christian sermons delivered during the wartime removal or incarceration as well as letters, diaries, and poems written in the camps.