The focus of the talk—"Prison Buddha"—is a small wood statue of the buddha Amida carved in 1943 by Kiino Morio, during his imprisonment in the Manzanar concentration camp. I've been thinking about Kiino's statue in terms of "carceral aesthetics" and marking time through visual and verbal representation, to borrow from Nicole Fleetwood, as well as Japanese diaspora Pure Land Buddhist faith, within what Duncan Williams and others have termed "Camp Buddhism." But the particular materials of Kiino's statue led me to wonder how we might converge these (rather expected) topics with Manzanar and Owens Valley's human and more-than-human modern histories of dispossession, forced relocation, migration, and resistance. These histories begin with the Native American Nüümü people (Owens Valley Paiute) and the theft of their homeland Payahuunadü, the “land of flowing water,” first by the settler colonial state and Euro-American immigrants in the nineteenth century, and then following the city of Los Angeles’ mass buy-up of private land and water rights for construction of the infamous Los Angeles Aqueduct. I'm trying to follow the routes of these human and more-than-human histories of relocation, both from and to Manzanar and the Owens Valley, their particular conjuncture in Kiino's statue, and historical and ongoing response to colonial and racist injustice.

Greg Levine is Professor Emeritus of the Department of History of Art, UC Berkeley. His current book projects are A Tree & A Buddha: Imagining Arboreal Humanities and Buddha Heads: Fragments and Landscapes. His previous books are Long Strange Journey: On Modern Zen, Zen Art, and Other Predicaments (2017) and Daitokuji: The Visual Cultures of a Zen Monastery (2005)