Join Dr. Jane Komori for the talk "Images of Camp Work: Japanese Canadian Mass Incarceration, Lumber, and Labor Politics.”
"This talk analyzes the photographs that the speaker’s grandfather took of lumber work in a Japanese Canadian World War II internment camp. Because interned people were prohibited from bringing cameras into the camps, the clandestine images constitute a rare archive of Japanese Canadian experiences in the camp. What’s more, these images of the work that Japanese Canadians carried out for the lumber industry give a richly textured sense of labor during the internment. The talk contextualizes the photographs within the broader historical and political context of race, class, exclusion, and worker struggles for justice in western Canada’s lumber industry, where environments were transformed through interracial labor forces that, through their conflicts and solidarities, contested the expansion of capitalist and settler colonial development in the region. The talk deals with histories of labor, race, capitalism, extractive industries, environmental change, incarceration, and visual archives."
