Beyond Black and White: The Intersection of Race and Racism in Asian and Asian-American Studies

Join the REDI Task Force for the next event in the "Critical Conversations: Race and Global Affairs" series featuring a conversation about how race and racism effects Asian and Asian-American studies.

This event will examine how race has historically been an important organizing principle in understanding Asia, with critical reflections on how racism has permeated research and teaching on Asia. The panelists will engage in a dialogue between ethnic studies and area studies to learn insights from Asian American studies in enriching Asian studies. 
 

About the Speakers

Gi-Wook Shin is the director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center; the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea; the founding director of the Korea Program; a senior fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; and a professor of sociology, all at Stanford University. As a historical-comparative and political sociologist, his research has concentrated on social movements, nationalism, development, and international relations.

Gordon Chang is Olive Palmer Professor of Humanities, Professor of History, and the founding director of Stanford's Asian American Studies Program. He is the former director of the Center of East Asian Studies. He is interested in several different areas of history, including the historical connections between race and ethnicity in America, on the one hand, and foreign relations, on the other, and trans-Pacific relations in their diplomatic as well as their cultural and social dimensions. He has written and continues to publish in the areas of U.S. diplomacy, America-China relations, the Chinese diaspora, Asian American history, and global history. His most recent books have examined the history of Chinese railroad workers in America in the 19th century.

Sharika Thiranagama is Associate Professor of Anthropology and President of the American Institude of Sri Lankan Studies. Her research explores the intersection of political mobilization and domestic life. Her work focuses on highly fraught contexts of violence, inequality, and intense political mobilization, attempting to understand (rather than romanticize) patterns of sociality and how people actually live together, often in highly fractious and unequal ways, and, to situate these processes in specific historical formations of “privates” and “publics” in South Asia.

Eiichiro Azuma is Associate Professor of History and Asian American Studies at University of Pennsylvania.  He is author of award-winning Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (Oxford 2005), and coeditor, with Gordon Chang, of Yuji Ichioka, Before Internment: Essays in Prewar Japanese American History (Stanford 2006) and, with David Yoo, of the Oxford Handbook of Asian American History (Oxford 2016).  The first two books have been translated into Japanese.  His latest monograph, In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire (California, 2019), received the 2020 John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History from the American Historical Association.  Azuma served as the director of Penn’s Asian American Studies Program from 2013 through 2018. 

There will be time for a Q&A. This event will be recorded and uploaded to the REDI website. 

Register here: https://stanford.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJclc--sqjkuHdcf85To1OhVqW1if…