Who Is the Asianist? – The Politics of Representation in Asian Studies: (Asia Shorts)

Who Is the Asianist? reconsiders the past, present, and future of Asian Studies through the lens of positionality, questions of authority, and an analysis of race with an emphasis on Blackness in Asia. From self-reflective essays on being a Black Asianist to the Black Lives Matter movement in Papua New Guinea, Japan, and Viet Nam, scholars grapple with the global significance of race and local articulations of difference. Other contributors call for a racial analysis of the figure of the Muslim as well as a greater transregional comparison of slavery and intra-Asian dynamics that can be better understood, for instance, from a Black feminist perspective or through the work of James Baldwin. As a whole, this diversified set of essays insists that the possibilities of change within Asian Studies occurs when, and only when, it reckons with the entirety of the scholars, geographies, and histories that it comprises.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Do Black Lives Matter for Asian Studies?
Will Bridges, Nitasha Tamar Sharma,
and Marvin D. Sterling / 1

1: Who Is a South Asianist? A Conversation on Positionality
Hoda Bandeh-Ahmadi and Isabel Huacuja Alonso / 23

2: A Different Way of Seeing: Reflections of a Black Asianist
Carolyn T. Brown / 39

3: From Bhagdād to Baghpūr: Sailors and Slaves in Global Asia
Guangtian Ha / 53

4: The Asianist is Muslim: Thinking through Anti-Muslim Racism
with the Muslim Left
Soham Patel and M. Bilal Nasir / 75

5: Racial Capitalism and the National Question in the Early
People’s Republic of China
Jeremy Tai / 89

6: Science without Borders? The Contested Science of “Race Mixing”
circa World War II in Japan, East Asia, and the West
Kristin Roebuck / 109

7: Toward an Afro-Japanese and Afro-Ainu Feminist Practice:
Reading Fujimoto Kazuko and Chikappu Mieko
Felicity Stone-Richards / 125

8: Black Japanese Storytelling as Praxis: Anti-Racist Digital
Activism and Black Lives Matter in Japan
Kimberly Hassel / 139

9: From Black Brother to Black Lives Matter: Perception of
Blackness in Viet Nam
Phuong H. Nguyen and Trang Q. Nguyen / 159

10: “We Have a Lot of Names Like George Floyd”:
Papuan Lives Matter in Comparative Perspective
Chris Lundry / 183

About the Author :
Will Bridges (Edited by)
Will Bridges is Associate Professor of Japanese, Arthur Satz Professor of the Humanities, and a Core Faculty member with the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies at the University of Rochester. His first monograph, Playing in the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2020.

Nitasha Tamar Sharma (Edited by)
Nitasha Tamar Sharma is Professor of African American Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. She is author of Hawai'i is my Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific and Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and a Global Race Consciousness, both published by Duke University Press, and coeditor of Beyond Ethnicity: New Politics of Race in Hawai'i, published by the University of Hawai’I Press.

Marvin D. Sterling (Edited by)
Marvin D. Sterling is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is author of Babylon East: Performing Dancehall, Roots Reggae, and Rastafari in Japan (Duke UP 2010).

Review :
In this uniquely conceived volume, editors Will Bridges, Nitasha Tamar Sharma, and Marvin D. Sterling have assembled a cast of progressive-minded contributors whose collective aim is to decenter Asian Studies from its customary self-absorption and circumscription and propel the discipline into a broadened engagement with and advocacy for Black Studies. Through its eclectic and insightful scholarship contending that such intersectionality can only benefit the interests of all parties, no work currently matches Who Is the Asianist? as an indicator and expression of the emerging imperatives within Asian Studies for racial equity and justice. More so than any other now available, this book fully represents and reflects the expanding vision and transformed agenda of the future that Asian Studies is destined to embrace. These outstanding essays compel us to reflect on the ways in which the pernicious ‘color line’ belts the world (Du Bois), including Asia, but in ways that must be attentive to both the singularities of locality and the entanglements of our worlded conditions. This means that we must also interrogate the past and present of Asian Studies as a radicalized formation. A courageous, timely, and important intervention that should be read in and far beyond Asian Studies. This extremely timely and crucial book helps Asian Studies to finally reckon with its racial unconscious in epistemological, pedagogical, and institutional terms. It examines the racial logic in various Asian countries in relation to the global racial formation, and shows how such studies are critical for Asian Studies. A must read for all Asianists. Thus far Asian studies has often ignored issues of race and Blackness and also lacked a sustained engagement with ethnic studies and Black studies, so this book is a welcome attempt to re-address this situation and also pay attention to the growing field of Afro-Asian studies.