Japanese Immigration to Brazil
Japanese Brazilians are the largest ethnic Japanese community outside Japan. What factors gave rise to this community? How did it expand over time? In this course we will study the modern Japanese diaspora from a Brazilian perspective. The first families from Japan arrived in Brazil in 1908. Why did these families leave their country? Which work did Japanese immigrants do? How did they negotiate their Japanese cultural identities within the Latin American context? To what extent have they contributed to the Brazilian culture? In order to answer these and other questions, students will examine and discuss a set of critical/creative sources that include essay, film, testimony, painting, advertisement, poetry, and literary fiction. In the last segment of the course, we will consider a social-economic counterpoint: the context in which Brazilians of Japanese ethnicity followed the reverse path of their grandparents and massively immigrated to Japan during the 1990s. 3 hrs sem.