Description

Event series: Race and Anti-Racism across the Asia-Pacific

Overt and subtle misogynoir (anti-Black misogyny) pervade sport and sport media, as women in the Black diaspora are rarely in control of sporting regulations or their media representations. One recourse racialized athletes have at their disposal, however, is active resistance. This presentation provides a textual analysis of the intolerable misogynoir aimed at tennis professional Naomi Osaka, and key moments in her media (mis)representations. Results of a study co-authored with Dr. Sabrina Razack revealed three main themes: (1) ongoing misogynoir and colorism of sport media and athlete sponsors; (2) racial, national and diaspora media (mis)representations; and (3) resistance to gendered racism through self representation. After Osaka’s historic win at the 2018 US Open, narratives of her Japanese nationality and Asian identity became the story that rendered her Blackness invisible, and enabled her to be read against her opponent Serena Williams. Osaka’s use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), including social media, disrupted racist dominant narratives, and provided counternarratives that reveal her, and other mixed-race sportswomen to be more that the sum of our parts. Osaka’s identities align with Blackness as a political and racial category and position her Japaneseness part of the Haitian jaspora (diaspora).

BIO:

Janelle Joseph is an assistant professor of critical studies of race and indigeneity in the Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education at the University of Toronto. Joseph’s research interests include anti-racism policy, physical activity access, decoloniality, and ethics.  

An elected member of the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars, Artists, & Scientists, Dr. Joseph’s book, Black Atlantic: Cricket, Canada and the Caribbean Diaspora, traces how sports create transnational social fields that connect migrants in North America, England and the Caribbean.

Dr. Joseph is the founder and director of Indigeneity, Diaspora, Equity and Anti-Racism in Sport (IDEAS) Research Lab, the first research lab in Canada dedicated to issues of race and movement cultures. IDEAS Research Lab promotes knowledge, leverages political work and develops community partnerships to create anti-racism programming in sports, dance and leadership. In 2021, IDEAS Research Lab partnered with Ontario University Athletics to conduct a study that traces experiences of racism among student athletes, coaches and administrators.

Description

Abstract:

There’s a little known story of nearly 3000 Chinese Indians who were incarcerated in a prison camp in Deoli, Rajasthan in 1962 following a border war between India and China. Families, parts of families and single men were taken across India to the west to be imprisoned for up to five years in some cases. What was their experience in the Camp like? And where are they now?

“The Deoliwallahs” explores the identity of incarcerated people. The stories of the survivors are beautiful and heart-breaking: a 13-year old girl who became the head of the family, three friends who forged their bonds amid despair and the vivid memories of the Camp that haunted a mother in her nightmares. Their story is more relevant now than ever as regional wars over territory rages on and injustice against civilians is a stark reality.

Speaker Bio:

Joy Ma grew up in India and has lived in Kolkata and New Delhi. She attended Lady Shri Ram College and graduate school at the New School. She recently published the book The Deoliwallahs: The True Story of the 1962 Chinese-Indian Incarceration. Joy was one of a handful of children born in the Deoli internment camp in Rajasthan. Her connection to the community in the US and Canada taps into the rich narratives of the group. She is co-producer of "Voices of Deoli", a film in post-production.

Description

Event series: Race & Anti-Racism across the Asia-Pacific

In recent years, many commentators have bemoaned the dissolution of the liberal capitalist world order that has been called “Pax Americana.” In this logic, the occupations of Germany and Japan have been declared triumphs that inaugurated a rules-based global order that lasted for more than seventy years. The United States has been figured as the “global good cop” that insured peace, security, and prosperity throughout the planet, so that its recent decline on the world stage and a supposed isolationist mood is now being countered by new visions calling forth another world order dependent upon the massive militarization of minor and major powers throughout the world. This panel begins with the acknowledgement that the period of Pax Americana was far from peaceful and non-violent for most of the formerly colonized, indigenous, and racialized peoples of the world. Despite national and state/provincial celebrations of inclusion, multiculturalism, and reconciliation, our three panelists with expertise across the Asia-Pacific–including on Okinawa, Hawaiʻi, and postcolonial Koreans in Japan–reflect on the limits of this discourse on Pax Americana.

Description

BOOK TALK

Minor Transpacific: Triangulating American, Japanese, and Korean Fictions (Standford University Press)

There is a tendency to think of Korean American literature—and Asian American literature writ large—as a field of study involving only two spaces, the United States and Korea, with the same being true in Asian studies of Korean Japanese (Zainichi) literature involving only Japan and Korea. This book posits that both fields have to account for three spaces: Korean American literature has to grapple with the legacy of Japanese imperialism in the United States, and Zainichi literature must account for American interventions in Japan. Comparing Korean American authors such as Younghill Kang, Chang-rae Lee, Ronyoung Kim, and Min Jin Lee with Zainichi authors such as Kaneshiro Kazuki, Yi Yang-ji, and Kim Masumi, Minor Transpacific uncovers their hidden dialogue and imperial concordances, revealing the trajectory and impact of both bodies of work. Minor Transpacific bridges the fields of Asian studies and Asian American studies to unveil new connections between Zainichi and Korean American literatures. Working in Japanese and English, David S. Roh builds a theoretical framework for articulating those moments of contact between minority literatures in a third national space and proposes a new way of conceptualizing Asian American literature.

David S. Roh is Professor of English at the University of Utah, where he specializes in Asian American literature and Digital Humanities.  He is the author of Minor Transpacific (Stanford University Press, 2021), Illegal Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), and coeditor of Techno-Orientalism (Rutgers University Press, 2015). His work has appeared in Law & Literature, Journal of Narrative Theory, MELUS, Verge, and Digital Humanities Quarterly.  He is currently at work on Techno-Orientalism, Vol. II.

Organized by the Centre for the Study of Korea and co-sponsored by the Department of English, Dr. David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies, Department of East Asian Studies, the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, the Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Toronto.

Description

The event will feature the following two presentations:

Transpacific Subjectivities: Okinawan Nisei in Hawaii and Militarization of the Pacific

By Asako Masubuchi

Abstract:

This paper examines the transpacific life course of Thomas Taro Higa to explore the shifting identities of Okinawan nisei in Hawaii during and after World War II. By doing so, this paper reveals how the indeterminate status of Okinawa under the U.S. military occupation shaped the distinctive consciousness and identities of the Okinawan diaspora in Hawaii.

Higa was a so-called “kibei nisei,” born in Hawaii to Okinawan parents and returned to Hawaii after receiving his education in Okinawa and working briefly in Osaka and Tokyo. During World War II, Higa served with the all-Nisei 100th Infantry Battalion. Immediately after the war, Higa organized the Okinawa Relief Movement to send relief goods to war-devastated Okinawa. In many ways, Higa was at the nexus of Japanese Americans who were trying to restore their status as American citizens and Okinawan immigrants who were building up their ethnic identity through the act of saving their homeland Okinawa. Through examining Higa’s life experiences within the context of the Cold War, occupation of Okinawa, and postwar Japanese Americans’ efforts for citizenship, this paper aims to rethink postwar Okinawa from a transpacific perspective.

Dr. Asako Masubuchi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Policy Studies at Doshisha University, Kyoto. She holds a Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the questions of militarism, racism, and biopolitics in U.S.-occupied Okinawa. Her works include “Stamping Out the ‘Nation-Ruining Disease’: Anti-Tuberculosis Campaign in US-Occupied Okinawa” (Social History of Medicine, Vol. 34, Issue 4, November 2021).   

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Nation and Nationality as a White "Possessions" in Japan and the United States

By Michael Roellinghoff

Abstract:

In this paper, I discuss early 20th century Japanese critiques of Asian exclusion laws in Anglophone settler colonies. Intellectuals such as Mori Ōgai, Nagai Ryūtarō, and Ōkuma Shigenobu understood Asian exclusionism and European imperialism in Asia as constituting a single "white peril” which threatened all of Asia. At a time when Japan’s “Great Power” status seemed to signify Euro-American recognition of the Japanese Empire as an equal partner, Asian exclusionism marked the tangible limits of Japan’s acceptance into the international community. Arguing that this reflected a larger dynamic — well understood by Westernizing Meiji reformers — according to which Euro-Americans claimed sovereignty, civilization, and the nation-state formation itself as exclusively white "possessions," I analyze “white peril” critiques together with attempts by Japanese immigrants in the United States to "pass" as (the supposedly "Caucasian") Ainu in order to bypass exclusion laws and naturalize as US citizens.

Dr. Michael Roellinghoff (he/him) is a historian specializing in Indigeneity, colonialism, and race in modern Japan. He is currently an Associate at the University of Toronto Asian Institute and a Research Fellow at the University of Alberta.

Description

Abstract:

Many have referred to an unfolding "Asian Century." Yet, the place of historical difference, sometimes the problem of “race,” in the making of Asia, with Japan as a key example, has not acquired consideration commensurate with its implication. Matters African American as in the historical vision of W. E. B. Du Bois, namely his sense of a modern global “problem of the color line” may be of assistance. Asia, to take Japan as a complex example, was for Du Bois an utterly persuasive historical example; yet, two continuing twin privileges—the idea of the utterly singular exemplar of the human, or natality, and the persistent retention of the idea of sovereignty as also rooted in a singular exemplar (e.g. the monarch, the ethnic group, the party)—together articulate the fundamental contemporary conundrum of modern collective inhabitation. A strong sense of the African American example and the conception that lead to Du Bois’s acute recognition of this problematic before its cataclysmic eruption during the Second World War and ongoing aftermath may be useful for a world-wide community of and thinkers and practitioners within the present recrudescence that has reimagined Asia, including Japan, on a global scale.

Speaker Bio:

Nahum Dimitri Chandler serves as a professor in the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. His teaching and research are in the fields of African American studies, literature, philosophy, and modern intellectual history. He is the author of X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought (2014), as well as the editor of W. E. B. Du Bois, The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Essential Early Essays (2015), both from Fordham University Press. An enlarged edition of his 2013 book Toward an African Future – Of the Limit of World was issued in July 2021 by SUNY Press. His study “Beyond This Narrow Now:” Or, Delimitations, of W. E. B. Du Bois was released in February 2022 by Duke University Press. Also, forthcoming in the May of 2023 from Duke Press is Annotations: On the Early Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois. He is Associate Editor of the journal CR: The New Centennial Review; as well, he has served since its founding on the editorial team of The A-Line: A Journal of Progressive Thought.