Filmmaker Rea Tajiri (Temple University) and comparative ethnic studies scholar Vince Schleitwiler (University of Washington) consider the challenges of critical storytelling and speculative history.

The discussion examines their individual and collective work in documentary film, public art, and hybrid scholarship, including Tajiri’s latest film, Wisdom Gone Wild, which explores the creative, time-traveling reflections on her life by Tajiri’s mother, Rose—previously seen in Tajiri’s landmark work on Japanese American incarceration, History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige. Inspired by the unruly wisdom of Rose’s critical remixing of past and identity, Tajiri and Schleitwiler discuss their own work on the visual archives of intersecting histories of race, migration, confinement, and empire.

Rea Tajiri is a filmmaker and visual artist who was born in Chicago, Illinois. She earned her BFA and MFA degree from the California Institute of the Arts in post-studio art. Her ground-breaking, award-winning film, digital video and installation work, has been supported by numerous grants, fellowships and artistic residencies, has been exhibited widely in museums, on television and in international film festivals.

Vince Schleitwiler teaches comparative ethnic studies at the University of Washington. He is the author of Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific (NYU Press), and critical essays in African American Review, Film Quarterly, Black Agenda Report, The Margins, and elsewhere. He has collaborated on public art and humanities projects for the Smithsonian APA Center, the Washington Trust for Historical Preservation, the Center for Art and Thought, and others. A fourth-generation Japanese American, he is a descendant of incarcerees at Salinas, Santa Anita, and Poston.

Register to attend the event.

This event is part of the Migrations Summer Institute.