Please join us for MUSE 2021's mid-week keynote speaker, Dr. Mika Kennedy.

Mika Kennedy is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Kalamazoo College. Her current academic book project examines narratives of Japanese American incarceration, and the ways these narratives are in conversation with questions about the environment, the seductions of the “frontier,” and Native sovereignty. She is also the co-curator of 'Exiled to Motown', a grassroots exhibit of Japanese American community in Detroit, which has an upcoming exhibition at the Detroit Historical Museum in July 2021.

Keynote Presentation Abstract: (Title: Turn to Earth: Looking for a Man Named Komako in Bad Day at Black Rock)
We live in a universe of things: How do we continue to find new value in them, even after they lose their blockbuster luster, or their original provocations are no longer new? If the act of interpretation is an act of finding use in something, this talk is about finding re-use by turning to earth--by taking the landscape of a text as vital and actively meaning-making. In its examination of Bad Day at Black Rock, it asks what a 1955 Hollywood Western actually has to say about the Japanese American body it buried, sight unseen; what the black rocks of Black Rock have borne witness to; and what that it all means for the eco-imperial state.