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.
In May 2025, the Korea-Israel Bible Institute, one of the oldest Christian Zionist groups in South Korea, inaugurated the Holocaust Museum in Paju, a border city next to North Korea. The city is marked by Korea’s collective trauma from Japanese colonialism, the Korean War, and the division of North and South Korea. This paper investigates the significance of Paju in Korean Christian Zionist political theology and practices. The paper will argue how the Holocaust Museum of Korea serves to localize Christian Zionism in the divided country and disseminate its theo-political visions for the future, reflecting a complex interplay of religious, political, and spatial narratives with historical remembrance.
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.