Read more
Who Is the Asianist? reconsiders the past, present, and future of Asian studies through the lens of positionality and an analysis of race with an emphasis on Blackness in Asia. This book insists that change within Asian studies will occur only when it reckons with the entirety of the scholars, geographies, and histories that it comprises.
List of contents
Introduction: Do Black Lives Matter for Asian Studies?
Will Bridges, Nitasha Tamar Sharma,
and Marvin D. Sterling / 1
1: Who Is a South Asianist? A Conversation on Positionality
Hoda Bandeh-Ahmadi and Isabel Huacuja Alonso / 23
2: A Different Way of Seeing: Reflections of a Black Asianist
Carolyn T. Brown / 39
3: From Bhagdād to Baghpūr: Sailors and Slaves in Global Asia
Guangtian Ha / 53
4: The Asianist is Muslim: Thinking through Anti-Muslim Racism
with the Muslim Left
Soham Patel and M. Bilal Nasir / 75
5: Racial Capitalism and the National Question in the Early
People’s Republic of China
Jeremy Tai / 89
6: Science without Borders? The Contested Science of “Race Mixing”
circa World War II in Japan, East Asia, and the West
Kristin Roebuck / 109
7: Toward an Afro-Japanese and Afro-Ainu Feminist Practice:
Reading Fujimoto Kazuko and Chikappu Mieko
Felicity Stone-Richards / 125
8: Black Japanese Storytelling as Praxis: Anti-Racist Digital
Activism and Black Lives Matter in Japan
Kimberly Hassel / 139
9: From Black Brother to Black Lives Matter: Perception of
Blackness in Viet Nam
Phuong H. Nguyen and Trang Q. Nguyen / 159
10: “We Have a Lot of Names Like George Floyd”:
Papuan Lives Matter in Comparative Perspective
Chris Lundry / 183
About the author
Will Bridges (Edited by)
Will Bridges is Associate Professor of Japanese, Arthur Satz Professor of the Humanities, and a Core Faculty member with the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies at the University of Rochester. His first monograph, Playing in the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2020.
Nitasha Tamar Sharma (Edited by)
Nitasha Tamar Sharma is Professor of African American Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. She is author of Hawai'i is my Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific and Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global Race Consciousness, both published by Duke University Press, and coeditor of Beyond Ethnicity: New Politics of Race in Hawai'i, published by the University of Hawai’I Press.
Marvin D. Sterling (Edited by)
Marvin D. Sterling is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is author of Babylon East: Performing Dancehall, Roots Reggae, and Rastafari in Japan (Duke UP 2010).
Summary
Who Is the Asianist? reconsiders the past, present, and future of Asian Studies through the lens of positionality, questions of authority, and an analysis of race with an emphasis on Blackness in Asia. From self-reflective essays on being a Black Asianist to the Black Lives Matter movement in West Papua, Japan, and Viet Nam, scholars grapple with the global significance of race and local articulations of difference. Other contributors call for a racial analysis of the figure of the Muslim as well as a greater transregional comparison of slavery and intra-Asian dynamics that can be better understood, for instance, from a Black feminist perspective or through the work of James Baldwin. As a whole, this diversified set of essays insists that the possibilities of change within Asian Studies occurs when, and only when, it reckons with the entirety of the scholars, geographies, and histories that it comprises.
