Frank Abe
Resisters.com; co-editor of THE LITERATURE OF JAPANESE AMERICAN INCARCERATION
Seattle, Washington, United States
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FRANK ABE is co-editor with Floyd Cheung of a new anthology, THE LITERATURE OF JAPANESE AMERICAN INCARCERATION, coming May 14, 2024, from Penguin Classics. He is lead author of a graphic novel, WE HEREBY REFUSE: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration (Chin Music Press, 2021), and with collaborators Tamiko Nimura, Ross Ishikawa, and Matt Sasaki was named a Finalist in Creative Nonfiction for the Washington State Book Award. He won an American Book Award with Cheung and Greg Robinson as co-editor of JOHN OKADA: The Life & Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy (University of Washington Press), in which he authored the first-ever biography of Okada and traced the origins of his novel. He is currently developing a new stage adaptation of NO-NO BOY in partnership with the Seattle Rep.
Abe wrote, produced, and directed the award-winning PBS documentary Conscience and the Constitution on the largest organized resistance in the camps, and with writer Frank Chin helped organize the first-ever “Day of Remembrance” in Seattle in 1978. He was an original member of Chin’s Asian American Theater Workshop in San Francisco and studied at the American Conservatory Theater.
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Roundtable in Honor of Roger Daniels: A Tribute
This roundtable will discuss the life and legacy of pioneering historian Roger Daniels. As a leading historian in the field of Asian American history and immigration history, Daniels played an influential role in the Japanese American redress movement of the 1980s and shaped public discourse on the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans. This roundtable will feature comments from several of Daniels's former colleagues, students, and friends.
The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration: A Collective Voice, a New Canon
Building on new writing and newly discovered writing, the anthology The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration (Penguin Classics, 2024) weaves together previously unseen and little-known works with extant material to reveal the collective voice of a people who used prose and poetry, fiction and non-fiction, to contest the experience of mass exclusion and unjust imprisonment. But the incarceration was not one single event: once inside camp, the selections demonstrate how the writing continued to confront a specific succession of government edicts from loyalty registration, segregation, and military conscription to the offer of voluntary renunciation of American citizenship leading to repatriation, expatriation, and even self-deportation. Among the revelations in the anthology are the first short stories and novel excerpts translated from Tessaku, the high-quality, peer-reviewed literary magazine that we will show was founded in direct response to the government crackdown at the notorious Tule Lake Segregation Center.
As the 2024 conference program chairs remind us, “Since its inception, Asian American Studies has been particularly sensitive to histories of inclusion, marginalization, exclusion, and elision—in political life, narratives, and canons.” This panel will meditate on the marginalization, exclusion, and elision of many Japanese American voices traditionally unheard–and in some cases actively suppressed–including those marked by generational, linguistic, and political difference. Additionally, it will begin a conversation with fellow teachers and researchers about how the inclusion of these voices will change how we think, feel, and learn about this pivotal event in our field.
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