Michael Bourdaghs
Michael Bourdaghs
Robert S. Ingersoll Professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations and the College
University of Chicago
Research Project
Re-Staging the Lakeview Japanese American Neighborhood
Project Team:
2021 – 2023
Key Question
What can we learn from oral histories of Japanese Americans who came to Chicago after their release from wartime camps?
Project Summary
| A Visiting Fellowship will enable Japanese novelist Yu Miri to develop an archive of oral histories and a theatrical performance based on interviews with local Japanese Americans on their memories of the community that sprung up in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood after World War II. |
This project will bring Yu Miri, one of Japan’s most distinguished novelists and playwrights, to campus as a Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow. During this stay she will work with local faculty to develop an archive of oral history interviews she will conduct with members of the local Japanese American community on their memories of daily life in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood, which along with Hyde Park became a magnet for thousands of new Japanese American residents after their release from wartime concentration camps. That archive will in turn form the basis for a new theatrical performance piece that we hope to bring to a local stage at the conclusion of the project. Yu, herself born and raised in Japan’s Zainichi (ethnically Korean) immigrant community, brings a transnational perspective to this collaborative attempt to create a new vehicle for remembering a now largely dispersed local neighborhood community. This project grows out of Yu’s activism in Japan following the 3/11 tsunami and nuclear disasters: Yu moved to the Fukushima area and conducted hundreds of interviews with displaced residents about memories of their lost hometowns. She used these stories to craft a performance piece in which her interview subjects appeared together with actors portraying them in an experimental theatrical ritual of remembrance; the piece has been staged to acclaim in both Fukushima and Tokyo, including a documentary aired nationally on the NHK network.
Research Team
Chelsea Foxwell
Chelsea Foxwell
Associate Professor of Art History, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College
University of Chicago
Thomas Lamarre
Thomas Lamarre
Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the College
University of Chicago
Hoyt Long
Hoyt Long
Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Japanese Literature and Digital Studies
University of Chicago
Yu Miri
Yu Miri
Independent Scholar, Novelist, and Playwright
Mee-Ju Ro
Ryan Yokota
Ryan Yokota
Adjunct Faculty, Critical Ethnic Studies, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
DePaul University
Project Narrative
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