American and Indigenous Studies, Asian Studies, Global and International Studies, History, Human Rights, Japanese, Politics, and Written Arts Presents

The Mass Renunciations of US Citizenship at Tule Lake

During World War II, the US government incarcerated more than 125,000 persons of Japanese ancestry. One of that history’s most buried and most misunderstood stories is that of Tule Lake, a maximum-security segregation center for people the government deemed “disloyal.” Today, descendants and others are uncovering what happened at Tule Lake, when prisoners said “no” to the government, organized pro-Japan groups, and ultimately renounced their US citizenship. Join writer Akemi Johnson as she tells her family’s story and shares her process of researching and writing a narrative nonfiction book on Tule Lake.

Akemi Johnson is the author of Night in the American Village: Women in the Shadow of the U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa, which was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. A former Fulbright scholar, she has also written for The New York Times, The Nation, NPR’s Code Switch, The Washington Post, and other publications. Akemi earned an MFA in fiction writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an AB in East Asian Studies from Brown University.

Zoom link: https://bard.zoom.us/j/86811328972?pwd=QsIRtd1FoQ8avRYAtvKRWIxDuxRDa5.1

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For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

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