Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Political Science
First Advisor
Wood, Elisabeth
Abstract
How do the politics of participation in memorialization processes vary across different forms of memory sites, and what do these processes reveal about participants’ understandings of state violence? Drawing on ethnographic and archival methods to study processes to memorialize victims of two cases of state violence in the U.S., I show that memorialization has political implications for the communities involved. First, I analyze the politics of participation of the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial (BIJAEM), a permanent, site-specific memorial to the first victims of forced removal and exclusion of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. Second, I analyze Hostile Terrain 94 (HT 94), a multi-sited, temporary, and decentralized participatory installation that honors the 3,400 bodies of migrants that have been found in the Arizona-Sonora Desert. In addition to comparison across form and space, these cases allow for a comparison between temporal factors: BIJAEM is an example of the memorialization of a past, temporally bound event, whereas HT 94 represents a contemporary and ongoing episode of state violence. I find that the community of Bainbridge Island has advanced a narrative of Japanese American incarceration that is premised on it being “an American Story,” one that is specific to the older generation of victims and descendants. During the planning of a memorial site on the island, the older generation’s narrative took precedence over the younger generation’s preference to “reach back” and reclaim Japanese heritage. Additionally, Bainbridge Island’s narrative about itself and the genesis of the memorial stands separate from the rest of the Japanese American community on the West Coast, fostering an “island-like” collective memory. Further, by analyzing existing oral histories with participant observation, I find that this “American story” narrative developed as a result of anti-Japanese sentiment following the attack on Pearl Harbor and intra-group tensions within the concentration camps. I also find that the decentralized form of HT 94 allows for host institutions and organizations to evoke local, context-specific solidarities through their co-programming and curatorial choices. Through sustained participant observation in the HT 94 installation at the University of Washington I found that many individual participants developed “moral solidarities” with the dead despite the pandemic-induced private nature of their participation. Additionally, public reflections on the memorialization process suggest that in-group and out-group solidarities can be reinforced by whether and how the participant identifies with the victims. Through these substantive findings, I show that the ethnographic study of memorialization processes and memory sites can reveal how the consequences of state violence are managed by state and non-state actors and how communities respond to these episodes of violence.
Recommended Citation
Galloway, Morgan Faye, ""Topographies of Memory": Understanding State Violence Through Memorialization Practices" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 885.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/885
