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Bancroft Roundtable

The Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Oral History Project at the Oral History Center

May 18, 2023 | Noon | Zoom
Presented by Roger Eardley-Pryor, Shanna Farrell, and Amanda Tewes, oral historians, the Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

For the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Oral History Project, the Oral History Center recorded nearly 100 hours of interviews with 23 descendants of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. The project examines intergenerational trauma stemming from incarceration at Manzanar, in California, and Topaz, in Utah; the impact of various types of healing; and how narratives change across generations. The center’s oral historians took a life history approach, starting at the beginning of subjects’ lives and working toward the present, personalizing their family histories of incarceration. These oral histories were recorded on video and transcribed to text. Once finalized and approved by the narrators, the interviews will be archived at The Bancroft Library and made publicly available through the UC Berkeley Library’s Digital Collections website. After completing the interviews, narrators had the opportunity to attend two group healing circles with a psychologist, allowing participants to reflect on the interview experience and connect with one another. This project is part of the Oral History Center’s ongoing Community and Identity Collection, one the largest digitally accessible public archives of community-based oral histories.

May 18, 2023 12:00 PM in Pacific Time (US and Canada)