Harney Lecture Series: Understanding Race Beyond the Transatlantic Paradigm

Description

Is “Race” a modern Western construction? This talk aims to introduce a new understanding of race beyond the transatlantic paradigm. While transatlantic racialization often entailed encounters of peoples with pronouncedly different physical features, in parts of Continental Europe and Asia racialization initially took place mostly between groups who had no or nearly no identifiable phenotypical distinctions. I present what I call the three dimensions of “race”—“race”, “Race”, and “race as a Resistance”— to provide a more encompassing, global understanding of race. I present examples of each dimension of race and discuss how the three interconnect, coalescing to produce and reinforce an overarching idea of “Race.”

About the Speaker

Yasuko Takezawa Yasuko Takezawa is Professor at the Intercultural Research Institute, Kansai Gaidai University, and Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, Kyoto University. She is currently the Paul I. Terasaki Endowed Chair of the International Institute of University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her fields of interest are Anthropology, Sociology, and American Studies. 

Professor Takezawa has been leading a series of large international collaborative research projects over the past two decades. As visiting professor, she has taught at various universities outside of Japan as well, including MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Heidelberg University, and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is a member of Science Council of Japan (SCJ), the representative organization of Japanese scientist community. She has published two monographs, a dozen of edited or co-edited volumes in Japanese as well as several journal special issues.

Her publications in English include:

Breaking the Silence: Redress and Japanese American Ethnicity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.
Race and Migration in the Transpacific (co-edited with Akio Tanabe). London: Routledge, 2023.
Transpacific Japanese American Studies: Dialogues on Race and Racializations (co-edited with Gary Okihiro). Honolulu: U of Hawai’i Press, 2016.
Racial Representations in Asia (ed. ). Kyoto/ Melbourne: Kyoto University Press/ Trans Pacific Press, 2011.
Visibilities and Invisibilities of Race and Racism (co-edited with Faye V. Harrison and Akio Tanabe). London: Routledge, in press.

Sponsors: the Harney Program in Ethnic, Immigration, and Pluralism Studies, the Asian Institute, and the Centre for the Study of Global Japan.