These case studies argue that monuments and memorial forms are not static commemorations but dynamic sites of interpretation. Bringing together case studies from South Korea, the United States, and Canada, this session explores how memory is embedded not only in archives but also in land, architecture, and religious structures and how the afterlives of suffering are mediated.
In the first paper, the Holocaust Museum established by Korean Christian Zionists localizes a global narrative of trauma within a geopolitically divided landscape. The second paper examines mid-twentieth-century New Jersey, and how racialized futures were materially produced and subsequently obscured through the shuttering of a black Episcopal church to finance a white one. The final paper examines the religious dimensions of the internment of Japanese Canadians, and how Japanese Buddhist spaces serve as a locus for negotiating memory, loss, and renewal.
The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea exemplifies the ongoing Korean War and the persistent political division of the peninsula. In May 2025, the Korea Israel Bible Institute (KIBI), a Christian Zionist organization based in South Korea, inaugurated the Holocaust Museum in Paju, a city adjacent to the DMZ. This paper critically examines how Korean Christian Zionists embed Holocaust remembrance within their political theology to foster a sense of identification with Israel. It examines how both the physical landscape of Paju and its symbolic significance influence their political fantasies regarding Korea’s future, which are profoundly linked with their theological and political aspirations concerning Israel. Employing critical spatial analysis, the paper explores the politics of spatiality among Korean Christian Zionists, focusing on how tangible and imagined spaces shape their theological and political narratives and how their eschatological visions develop a unique geographical imagination within one of the world’s most heavily militarized zones.
Traces of memory remain in and on the land but often require skilled interpreters. Interpreting archives, land, and buildings together allows for memorial interpreters to piece more robust memories together from the traces that remain on the land from its uses. This paper examines a case study from the construction of a Levittown in New Jersey in the late 1950s to elucidate these two claims. I use archival evidence of the Levitt Corporation’s land donation to the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey and of the diocese’s subsequent forced liquidation of a Black parish to fund the construction of a new White parish in the Levittown to sketch the contours of the imagined future of the Episcopal Church in New Jersey at that time. Careful interpretation made it possible to reconstruct the memory of racially exclusive fantasies despite attempts to relegate these memories in archival oblivion.
This paper will examine the religious dimensions of the internment of Japanese Canadians (1942-1949). By drawing on archival materials, The Landscapes of Injustice Project, and contemporary temple discourse, I will also argue that the destruction of Buddhist temples and other spaces and objects during the internment was intended to erase not just the Japanese community but their spiritual foundations in Canada. As such, I contend that the sanmon gate is a place where memories of injustice, the present, and the future are negotiated. I argue that Steveston Buddhist Temple's newly built sanmon gate functions as a nostalgic reconstruction of Japanese Buddhist—specifically Jōdo Shinshū—space in Steveston, a return to land that was once taken by the state, and as a launch pad for future-oriented projects at Steveston Buddhist Temple. This paper allows us to start building an understanding of Japanese Canadian religious space during the internment, now, and in the future.