Karen Tei Yamashita (b. 1951 in Oakland, CA; lives and works in Santa Cruz, CA) is an award-winning author and professor of literature, creative writing, and ethnic studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. Yamashita’s books span genres and subject matters ranging from a postmodern, transnational noir to a speculative nonfiction piece in dialogue with a family archive. If the writer has allegiance to a higher cause, it is to history and the preservation of its complexity that is carried through memory.
Yamashita’s contribution to the 58th Carnegie International draws a connection to her novel I Hotel (2010), an expansive exploration of late 1960s and 1970s Asian American activism in and around the San Francisco building of the same name. The I Hotel served as a major site of grassroots organizing and an anti-eviction campaign supporting Chinese and Filipino residents against the Financial District’s encroachment. Based on a decade of interviews and archival research, the book surveys the local lives and events that became a movement in dialogue with global struggles. In order to develop a structure for the book, Yamashita created paper maquette boxes to spatialize the many dimensions of emergent political consciousness. Each box is dedicated to one year between 1968 and 1977. On the sides of each box, Yamashita plotted a year, a stylistic approach, a local site, a geohistorical event, and characters of her own creation. Reminiscent of children’s wooden alphabet blocks or an Asian food takeout container, these reproductions of the writer’s boxes function as a key to the book and vessels that both hold and circulate this little-known history.
