Narrative

I am an African Americanist trained as an historian of modern America. I write the history of the African American-led unfinished struggle for democracy in the twentieth century called the Black freedom movement that intersects with places rarely seen as centers of the African American experience, namely Japan and Okinawa. Thus, the historical narrative I present is decidedly not a single-nation focus. It foregrounds transnational connections that thinkers and activists on both sides of the Pacific enmeshed in social movements made in their efforts to construct the argument against the theory and practice of white supremacy. My first book TRANSPACIFIC ANTIRACISM (NYU Press, 2013) makes a conversation-changing intervention by arguing that in the context of forging Afro-Asian solidarity in Black America, Japan, and Okinawa in the twentieth century, race emerged as a political category of struggle with a distinct moral quality and vitality. In other words, it had nothing to do with skin color but everything to do with the politics of identification. Utilizing writings on race and democracy written in Japanese and English, I analyze the evidence of Afro-Asian solidarity found in intellectual and political activities on both sides of the Pacific. My second book project ROBERT F. WILLIAMS AND THE JAPANESE unearths an untold story of race and resistance in Japan between 1970 and 1975. I pursue the following two lines of inquiry: (1) how one group of progressive Japanese intellectuals managed to enlist moral and political support from thousands of concerned Japanese citizens through a petition campaign in the early 1970s and buyoed the legal defense campaign for the African American civil rights leader Robert F. Williams (1925-1996) in the United States and (2) why this cause of Black freedom resonated within the Japanese public sphere. While not as well known as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, Williams was nonetheless their contemporary. His militant struggle against Jim Crow racial order, first in North Carolina and later from Cuba and China as an exiled leader, became a touchstone for activists worldwide throughout the Civil Rights and Black Power periods.