| This dissertation explores the significance of the pilgrimage practice to the former sites of Japanese American internment at Manzanar and Tule Lake, California for the current theological inquiry concerned with bringing Asian American voices to the wider conversation and the emerging field of Asian Americans and religion. From collective amnesia to anamnesis, these postcolonial pilgrimages as ritual containers or liturgies on the move, provide a way of inhabiting the shadowed ground of historical injury and reconnecting to collective memory. This process reclaims Manzanar and Tule Lake as sites of suffering and hope that expresses a spiritual political practice of dangerous memory towards restorative justice and solidarity, of restoring relationship across intergenerational and intercultural difference and brokenness through compassion. This provides a space for an ongoing process of doing a narrative liberative theology. The participants, at various levels, engage in a memorative practice concerned with healing, witness and transformation. Through the interfaith ceremonies to remember and honor the dead and the past, it also reclaims an interreligiosity characteristic of the Japanese American community that brings together Buddhist, Christian and Shinto elements, a religiously inclusive paradigm that is hospitable to other religions. It is also an instance of dialogue and interface in the process of reconciliation. This contributes towards the emergence of new interpretive theological scaffolding.; The pilgrimages are journeys on the margins and in-betweenness that allow us to think on the boundaries with memory and imagination. The interdisciplinary approach is a methodology of convergence, that is, where disciplines converge in a shared concern for change due to the nature of the difficult historical memory of internment. The challenge is not to simply reinforce oppressive power relations by reiteration, explanation or description but to reveal clearly the causal links in order to reach for another history. With an emphasis on collective memory, I bring together the disciplines of contextual/liberation theologies, pilgrimage studies and ethnic studies with a focus on race and religion, in order to work in tandem to re-discover the worlds of meaning embedded in the Japanese American intercultural faith journey on the pilgrimages. |
