Who Is the Asianist? The Politics of Representation in Asian Studies

Who Is the Asianist? The Politics of Representation in Asian Studies, edited by Will Bridges, Natasha Tamar Sharma, and Marvin D. Sterling, 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 West Papua, 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.

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CONTENTS

About the Editors and Contributors

Introduction: Do Black Lives Matter for Asian Studies? by Will Bridges, Nitasha Tamar Sharma, and Marvin D. Sterling

1. Who Is a South Asianist? A Conversation on Positionality by Hoda Bandeh-Ahmadi and Isabel Huacuja Alonso

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

3. From Bhagdād to Baghpūr: Sailors and Slaves in Global Asia by Guangtian Ha

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

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

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

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

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

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

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