UCLA Center for the Study of Women

Japanese American cultural productions, particularly Rea Tajiri’s History and Memory and Janice Tanaka’s Whose Going to Pay for These Donuts Anyway?, are documentary films that offer a particular feminist analytical lens of seeing loss, moments of violent erasure, and trauma that produce possibilities of remembering and forgetting outside the confines of liberalism and cultural nationalism. Using this same lens, I argue in this presentation the impossibility of reconstructing or recuperating a faithful sense of the past and how this feminist analytic and in particular women’s narratives are helpful to re-think oral history.