Selected Readings on the Japanese American Experience: A monthly reading and discussion group focus ing on topics in history\, culture\, and the humanities. The group typical ly meets first Thursdays at 7 pm and is led by guest scholars. Pick up a c opy of each month's book from the front desk. Click here to go to the website for the Brigham City Library's Humanities Book Group.
\nNot Yo' Butterfly by Nobuko Miyamoto
\nScholar: Leah L aGrone\, PhD\, WSU
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Book Description:
\nNot Yo' Butterfly is the intimate and unflinching life story of Nobuko Miyamoto--artist\, activist\, and mother. Beginning with the harrowing early years of her life as a Japanese American child na vigating a fearful west coast during World War II\, Miyamoto leads readers into the landscapes that defined the experiences of twentieth-century Ame rica and also foregrounds the struggles of people of color who reclaimed t heir histories\, identities\, and power through activism and art. Miyamoto vividly describes her early life in the racialized atmosphere of Hollywoo d musicals and then her turn toward activism as an Asian American troubado ur with the release of A Grain of Sand--considered to be the first Asian A merican folk album. Her story intersects with Yuri Kochiyama and Grace Lee Boggs\, influential in both Asian and Black liberation movements. She tel ls how her experience of motherhood with an Afro-Asian son\, as well as a marriage that intertwined Black and Japanese families and communities\, pl aced her at the nexus of the 1992 Rodney King riots--and how she used art to create interracial solidarity and conciliation. Through it all\, Miyamo to has embraced her identity as an Asian American woman to create an antir acist body of work and a blueprint for empathy and praxis through communit y art. Her sometimes barbed\, oft-provocative\, and always steadfast story is now told.
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