Border-thinking Through Wartime Incarceration Environments

Location: Zoom Webinar

*Note: This talk will be available only via webinar and will not be held in person.

Lynne Horiuchi, Architectural Historian 

Anoma Pieris, Professor of Architecture, Melbourne School of Design

Anoma Pieris and Lynne Horiuchi will talk about their new book, The Architecture of Confinement: Incarceration Camps and the Pacific War. The design and location of prisoner of war camps in Singapore and Australia and of concentration camps for Japanese American civilians in the U.S. such as the one at Manzanar tested cultural boundaries and prompted resistance by incarcerated soldiers and civilians alike. 

This talk is  part of a year-long program of performances, exhibitions, and talks that use Angel Island as an observatory from which to view landscapes of migration, incarceration and resistance. The Angel Island Immigration Station has sometimes been called “the Ellis Island of the West.”  But Angel Island was an ambivalent gateway, a place of incarceration and exclusion for migrants as well as an entry for half a million newcomers from 80 countries, mostly from Asia. A Year on Angel Island is organized by Future Histories Lab and Berkeley Arts and Design. 

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of Architecture.

Sign up to hear about future lectures, performances and exhibitions in A Year on Angel Island here.

Lynne Horiuchi is an architectural historian whose work is cross-disciplinary, examining concepts of imprisonment, race, space, mobility, everyday racism, and civil justice. She is co-author of The Architecture of Confinement: Incarceration Camps and the Pacific War and is currently writing a book on the production of the prison camps built for Japanese Americans, Dislocations and Relocations: Building Prison Cities for Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II (University of Washington Press, forthcoming). With Tanu Sankalia, she co-edited Urban Reinventions: San Francisco’s Treasure Island. Horiuchi serves on the board of the Society of Architectural Historians and is co-chair of the Minority Scholars Affiliate group and active in the Asian American and Diasporic Architectural History Affiliate and the Race and Architecture affiliate groups. She received her Ph.D. in Modern Architecture and Urbanism from the University of California at Santa Barbara. 

Anoma Pieris is a professor of Architecture at the Melbourne School of Design. She is the co-author of The Architecture of Confinement: Incarceration Camps of the Pacific War; and author of Architecture and Nationalism in Sri Lanka: the Trouser under the Cloth; Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes: a Penal History of Singapore’s Plural Society; Sovereignty, Space and Civil War in Sri Lanka and Architecture on the Borderline: Boundary Politics and Built Space. She is author of Indigenous Museums and Cultural Centers: An Illustrated International Survey; and co-author with Janet McGaw of Assembling the Centre: Architecture for Indigenous Cultures. Australia and Beyond and lead author of the co-authored publication Indigenous Place: Contemporary Buildings, Landmarks and Places of Significance in Southeast Australia and Beyond. She holds a BSc from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, an MArch and SMArchS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a PhD from UC Berkeley and an MPhil in geography from the University of Melbourne.

The event will be live-streamed via Zoom webinar. To attend, register for the webinar here.

Video of this talk will be posted about one week after the event.