Diasporic Counterpoint: Africans, Asians and the Americas
A Conference Sponsored by the Center for African American History
and the Program in Asian American Studies
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208 U.S.A.
Participant Profiles
Conveners
Darlene Clark Hine
Director of the Center for African American History
Board of Trustees Professor of African American Studies and Professor of History
Northwestern University
Darlene Clark Hine is co-editor, with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and Leon Litwack The Harvard Guide to African-American History (2001). She is co-author, with Stanley Harrold and William Hine, of an African-American history textbook, The African-American Odyssey, Volumes I & II (2000), second edition of Volumes I & II (2002); co-author with Kathleen Thompson, of A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America (1998). She is co-editor, with Earnestine Jenkins, of A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men's History and Masculinity, Volume I (1999) Volume II (2001); and, with Jacqueline McLeod, Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora (1999). She is author of Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History (1994); Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890-1950 (1989); and Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas (1979). She has recently published a new edition of Black Victory (2003). Hine is also a co-editor, with D. Barry Gaspar, of More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (1996); "We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible": A Reader in Black Women's History (1995), with Linda Reed and Wilma King; and the award winning, two-volume set, Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (1993), with Elsa Barkley Brown and Rosayln Terborg-Penn. She is also editor of The State of Afro-American History, Past, Present, and Future (1986).
Ji-Yeon Yuh
Director of the Program in Asian American Studies
Associate Professor of History
Northwestern University
Ji-Yeon Yuh, Associate Professor of History and Director, Asian American Studies Program (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1999) specializes in Asian American history and Asian diasporas. She is the author of Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America (New York University Press, 2002). A history of Korean women who immigrated to the United States as the wives of U.S. soldiers, this work examines the dynamics of race, culture, gender and nationalism from the perspective of Korean military brides. With a fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, she recently spent a year in China and Japan researching ethnic Korean communities for a comparative study of the Korean diaspora in China, Japan and the United States. This study examines policies toward minority ethnic groups and their impact on the development of community and identity, as well as the ways in which experiences of Koreans in the diaspora are connected and divided by the history of the Korean peninsula in the twentieth century. As such, the study examines issues of imperialism, gender, history and memory, race and racialization, and the uses and misuses of ideology. She has also done research on refugees from North Korea, on socialist Koreans in China and Japan in the immediate post-WWII period, and on the Korean reunification movement in the United States. She is a co-founder of the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea (www.asck.org), an organization devoted to educating policy makers and the public, and serves as their Media Liaison and National Spokesperson.
Opening Plenary
Gary Y. Okihiro
Professor of International and Public Affairs
Columbia University
Gary Y. Okihiro is a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University, where he was the founding director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race.
His research interests are Asian American studies and southern Africa. He is the author of nine books in U.S. and African history, six of which have won prizes, most recently of The Columbia Guide to Asian American History (Columbia University Press, 2001) and Common Ground: Reimagining American History (Princeton University Press, 2001). Others include A Social History of the Bakwena and Peoples of the Kalahari of Southern Africa, 19th Century (Edwin Mellen Press, 2000), Storied Lives: Japanese American Students and World War II (University of Washington Press, 1999), Whispered Silences: Japanese Americans and World War II (University of Washington Press, 1996), and Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (University of Washington Press, 1994). Professor Okihiro received a PhD in African history from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1976. He is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Studies Association, and is a past President of the Association for Asian American Studies.
Closing Plenary
Rhoda Reddock
Head and Professor, Centre for Gender and Development Studies
University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago
Rhoda Reddock is full professor and head of the Centre for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine campus. She is a former lecturer in sociology at the UWI St. Augustine and associate lecturer in the Women and Development programme at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. She is an activist in the Caribbean Women's movement and founding member of the Caribbean Association or Feminist Research and Action.
A former chair of Research Committee-32 of the International Sociological Association (1994-1998), she has numerous publications including Women, Labour and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago: A History, Zed Books, 1994 which was named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book for 1995 ; Caribbean Sociology: Introductory Readings, Ian Randle Publishers, 2001 and Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities, The UWI Press, Kingston, 2004. Dr. Reddock has developed and taught courses in industrial sociology, sociology of development, women's studies, masculinity studies, gender and development and feminist theory, gender, race and class. Her research interests include women's history, Caribbean feminist thought, masculinity studies and gender, ethnicity and identity.
Panelists
Vivek Bald
Ph.D. Candidate
Program in American Studies
New York University
Vivek Bald is a documentary filmmaker and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the program in American Studies at New York University. His dissertation project, which he is also producing as a film, documents the little-known history of South Asian Muslim maritime workers who jumped ship from British vessels in U.S. port cities from the 1890s-1940s, and focuses particularly on a group men from the region which is now Bangladesh who settled in Harlem in the 1920s and 30s and intermarried within the Puerto Rican and African American communities there. His previous film work has focused on more recent histories of the South Asian diaspora: Taxi-vala/Auto-biography (1994) explores the lives, struggles and political activism of South Asian immigrant taxi drivers in New York City and Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music (2003) looks at South Asian youth, music and politics in 1970s-90s Britain.
Darren Lee Brown
Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies
Michigan State University
Darren Lee Brown is a graduate of San Francisco State University's Asian American Studies program and currently is pursuing a PhD in American Studies at Michigan State University. He has written existensively on representations of Asians/Asian Americans in American popular music and curated "The Heathen Chinee" exhibition for the Chinese Historical Society of America in 2003. Currently, he is investigating Afro-Asian alliances in reggae music.
Sylvia Chan-Malik
Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies
University of California at Berkeley
Sylvia Chan-Malik is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Her dissertation, From Bikinis to Burqas: Race-ing the Cultures of America’s Orientalisms, 1979-2006, explores how various discourses of American orientalism have been shaped on the nation’s racialized cultural terrains since the dawn of the Reagan era. She is also a cultural critic and freelance journalist, and has written for publications such as Alternet, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, The East Bay Express, and Vibe Magazine.
Adrian Gaskins
Ph.D. candidate in American Studies
University of Minnesota
Adrian Gaskins teaches in the Department of History at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio and is a research consultant at the Institute for Freedom Studies at Northern Kentucky University. His interests in the histories of racialization, comparative diasporas, colonialism, and the globalization of popular culture have led him to conduct research across the United States and in Asia, and is currently working on a manuscript project on African American travelers at the turn of the twentieth century. His writings have appeared most recently in the journals The Public Historian and Mark Twain Studies.
Aisha Khan
Associate Professor of Anthropology
New York University
Aisha Khan is a cultural anthropologist in the Anthropology Department at New York University. Her research interests include Asian and African diasporas, Atlantic studies, postcolonial societies, social inequality, and the construction of identities (particularly racial, ethnic, and religious). She has conducted ethnographic research among the Garifuna (Black Carib) in Honduras and among South Asians in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. She is the author of numerous articles as well as Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South Asians in Trinidad (2004), and co-editor of Ethnographies, Histories, and Power (forthcoming) and Women Anthropologists: Biographical Sketches (1989).
Jean J. Kim
Assistant Professor, Department of History
Affiliated with the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Program
Dartmouth College
Jean J. Kim teaches courses in Asian and Pacific American Studies and U.S. history.
Her research interests are in medicine, race, and migration. Her current project, a book based on her dissertation, “Empire at the Crossroads of Modernity,” examines the development of healthcare institutions on Hawai'i's sugar plantations during the territorial period. By attending to local, national, and international influences on the corporate and state management of bodies and difference, she hopes to contribute to new ways of understanding Hawaiian and U.S. History, as well as race relations, immigration, indigeneity, and imperial nationalisms. Her next project focuses on racial intelligence testing and its practical application in the organization of local and national communities.
Candice Lowe
Assistant Professor in Cultural Anthropology and participating faculty member in Africana Studies and International Studies
Vassar College
Candice M. Lowe is an Assistant Professor in Cultural Anthropology and she is a participating faculty member in Africana Studies and International Studies at Vassar College. Ms. Lowe teaches courses on race, African diasporic identities, and coastal southwest Indian Ocean societies, with an emphasis on political economy. Although Ms. Lowe has conducted research on nationalism in post Soviet Central Asia, her current research focus is on cultural citizenship and diasporic identification in contemporary Mauritius. She was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute and is a former Fulbright scholar.
Pedro Machado
Assistant Professor/Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow, Global History, John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master's Program in Humanities and Social Thought
New York University
Pedro Machado specializes in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Indian Ocean economic, social and cultural networks; South Asian merchant diasporas; slavery, the slave trade, and forms of servitude and unfree labor in the Indian Ocean; and the dynamics of consumption and demand in India and East Africa. Dr. Machado received his B.A. from the University of Cape Town (1993), his M.A. from the University of New Hampshire (1997), and his Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (2004). As well as serving as Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (London), Dr. Machado has taught comparative African and Asian history, development of an international and globalized economy, and global history. He recently published an article in the edited collection, The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London, 2003).
Daryl J. Maeda
Assistant Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies
University of Colorado at Boulder
Daryl J. Maeda is conducting research and revising his book, Asian American Cultural Formation, which examines Asian American identities and cultural productions from the 1930s to the 1970s. In particular, it explores how Asian Americans have negotiated racial identities in relation to blackness and whiteness. He is the author of "Black Panthers, Red Guards, and Chinamen: Constructing Asian American Identity through Performing Blackness, 1969-1972" published in American Quarterly. He is also writing an introduction to the Asian American movement for a documentary collection on the 1960s to be published by Prentice Hall. He is author of the forthcoming book Asian American Cultural Formation: Performing Race and Identity in Twentieth Century America. Critical American Studies Series, University of Minnesota Press (expected 2007).
Jamie Monson
Associate Professor of History
Carleton College
Jamie Monson is Associate Professor of History at Carleton College, where she teaches African History. She has been researching the social history of the TAZARA railway project in Tanzania for the last ten years and has just completed a book manuscript, "Freedom Railway to Ordinary Train: How a Chinese Project Worked in Africa." She has published articles on TAZARA in several journals including the Boston Review and Africa. In addition to her work on TAZARA, Dr. Monson has also just completed a 5-year collaborative research project on the Maji Maji War in Tanzania (1905-07) and has co-edited a volume, "The Maji Maji War as Local History and National Legacy. " Her current research project is a transnational labor history of the TAZARA railway that locates the project in the histories of decolonization and globalization.
Lori Pierce
Assistant Profess of American Studies
DePaul University
Lori Pierce is the author of “Japanese and Korean Migrations: Buddhist and Christian Communities in America, 1885-1945” with Paul Spickard, and David Yoo forthcoming in a book on Religion and Immigration from the SSRC Working Group on Religion, Immigration and Civic Life. She also serves on the advisory committee for the Asian American Studies minor and teaches one of the core introductory courses on Asian American history. She also teaches courses on American Ethnic History, Race and American Buddhisms, and Racial Formation in Territorial Hawai'i. Her current project is “Race and Tourism” – monograph for University of Hawai'i Press in a series on Race in Hawai'i which focuses on the historical antecedents for 20th century tourism by examining the history of interactions between Hawaiians, White and Asian settlers in the Kingdom of Hawai'i.
Tamara Roberts
Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies
Northwestern University
Tamara Roberts is a doctoral candidate in Performance Studies at Northwestern. Her dissertation project examines Afro-Asian music-making in relation to global political economy and popular representation. Tamara has presented on this and other topics at conferences such as Society for Ethnomusicology, American Studies Association, Society for American Music, and Performance Studies International, and has had an essay on this topic published in the ebook Interculturalism: Exploring Critical Issues.Additionally, Tamara works in Chicago and New York City as a composer, sound designer, and performance artist.
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu
Associate Professor, Department of History
Ohio State University
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu is an associate professor of History at Ohio State University. She received her Ph.D. in 1998 from Stanford University. Her fields of specialization include U.S. History, Women's History, and Asian American History. She is the author of Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity (California, 2005), a biography of Dr. Margaret Jessie Chung. She is currently working on another book tentatively entitled Radicals on the Road: Third World Internationalism and American Orientalism during the Viet Nam Era," a study of how the international travels of American antiwar activists shaped their political sensibilities and agendas.
Cadence Wynter
Professor of History
Columbia College
Cadence Wynter is a professor of History received her doctorate in History from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She taught in high schools and colleges and worked as a college education counselor in England before moving to the United States. Dr. Wynter joined the Liberal Education Department at Columbia College in 1996 where she teaches courses in Caribbean, African American, and Latin American history. Her areas of research and scholarship span the African Diaspora in the Americas and Europe and focus on migration studies, labor history, oral history, and women's studies. Her book, To Get Ahead: African Caribbean Girls and Women in England's Education System, 1950-1980is forthcoming, and Hidden Histories: Jamaican Migration to Cuba, 1885-1930is in progress.
Discussants:
Carolyn Chen
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Northwestern University
Carolyn Chen, Assistant Professor of Sociology, (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2001) is currently working on the project, "Getting Saved in America," which compares Taiwanese immigrants who have converted to evangelical Protestantism, those who have converted to active membership in a Buddhist temple, and those who do not seek any active religious affiliation. Extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the evangelical and Buddhist congregations and in work and family settings, along with formal interviews, enables her to analyze how religions provide the institutional and symbolic resources for the constructions of new selves and new communities for immigrants in the U.S.
John Cheng
Lecturer in the Asian American Studies Program
Northwestern University
John Cheng is a lecturer in the Asian American Studies Program. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include popular culture, race and ethnic studies including Asian American Studies, cultural studies and critical theory, and the history of science. His book, Imagining Science: Science Fiction and the Culture of Popular Science, is forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Nitasha Tamar Sharma
Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Asian American Studies
Northwestern University
Nitasha Tamar Sharma, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Asian American Studies (Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2004) is trained formally as an anthropologist, but does interdisciplinary work centering on the experiences of second generation South Asian Americans with a focus on race, ethnicity, and youth culture. Her ethnographic study of South Asian American hip hop artists analyzes how they use black popular culture to create and express alliances with Blacks as people of color. Dr. Sharma's publications include, "Down by Law: the effects and Responses of Copyright Restrictions on Sampling in Rap" (Journal of Political and Legal Anthropology, May 1998), and "Rotten Coconuts and Other Strange Fruit: A Slice of Hip Hop from the West Coast" (South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection, November 2001). Her book on desi hip hop is due out from Duke University Press. During the summer of 2005, Professor Sharma conducted preliminary fieldwork in Trinidad on douglas — people of African and Indian descent — in order to expand her focus on Indian/Black relations beyond the U.S. and to develop her interest in mixed race studies. Professor Sharma teaches classes on race, difference, and popular culture, including "Hapa Issues: Mixed Race Asian Americans," "Cracking the Color Lines: Black and Asian Relations in the U.S." and classes on Asian American film and hip hop culture.
Butch Ware
Assistant Professor, Department of History
Northwestern University
Butch Ware (PhD University of Pennsylvania, 2004) specializes in West African history. His research interests include Islam, popular religious culture, and race. His dissertation, “Knowledge, Faith, and Power: A History of Qur’anic schooling in 20th Century Senegal,” interrogates the role of Islamic education in shaping Muslim identities, and examines the ways in which Qur'anic schools have articulated with Sufi orders, Muslim reformers, and the state in the recent past. He is currently revising his dissertation for publication, and beginning work on a study of the history of racial and religious identity in Senegal and Mauritania, a history which exploded into a series of bloody international riots in 1989. He also has a strong interest in exploring the interwoven histories of continental and Diaspora Africans in his teaching and research.
Home|Schedule|Participant Profiles|Travel and Lodging
Symposium Registration|CAAH |Asian American Studies
WCAS Home|Northwestern HomeCLI Home|MMLC Home
Calendar: Plan-it-Purple|Sites A-Z|Search
 |
