Yuichiro Onishi presents "Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th Century Black America, Japan and Okinawa." This is the third lecture in the Black Studies and American Studies at the Crossroads series and will be held on Monday, November 26th at 3:30pm in room 105 Scott Hall.
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Yuichiro Onishi will discuss his forthcoming book Transpacific Antiracism. The book introduces the dynamic process out of which diverse constituents of social movements in Black America, Japan, and Okinawa formed Afro-Asian solidarities against white supremacy in the twentieth century. It argues that in the context of forging Afro-Asian solidarities, race emerged as a political category of struggle with a distinct moral quality and vitality.
This book explores the work of Black intellectual-activists of the first half of the twentieth century, including Hubert Harrison and W. E. B. Du Bois, that took a pro-Japan stance to articulate the connection between local and global dimensions of antiracism. Turning to two places rarely seen as a part of the Black experience, Japan and Okinawa, the book also presents the accounts of a group of Japanese scholars shaping the Black studies movement in post-surrender Japan and multiracial coalition-building in U.S.-occupied Okinawa during the height of the Vietnam War which brought together local activists, peace activists, and antiracist and antiwar GIs. Together these cases of Afro-Asian solidarity make known political discourses and projects that reworked the concept of race to become a wellspring of aspiration for a new society.
Yuichiro Onishi is assistant professor of African American and African Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He is the author of Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th-Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa, forthcoming from NYU Press in July 2013. In addition, his American Quarterly essay titled "Occupied Okinawa on the Edge" will be published in December 2012. His essays have appeared in XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics, Journal of African American History, and Extending the Diaspora (University of Illinois Press, 2009).
Click here to view full lecture series schedule: Black Studies and American Studies at the Crossroads series.
