Abstract

Enfolding Silence is a rare gem for exploring the aesthetic dimensions of epistemology and meaning-making through the arts in the context of historic communal injury. Author Brett Esaki invites his audience to consider how Japanese Americans have developed various art forms to cope with, resist, and transform traumatic experiences of racism, including the mass, unlawful internment of nearly 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II. By examining an extended ethnographic case study, educators and students can reflect on how a community teaches aesthetically across generations, as one generation traumatized by racism teaches what matters culturally, aesthetically, and spiritually to the next. Esaki is...