Beyond Black and White: The Intersection of Asian American and African American Experiences
In contrast to many other programs and departments across the country, the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities stands out for housing several scholars who focus on a unique area of research: “Afro-Asia.” This intersection studies historical, cultural, and political relationships between Asian/Asian American and African/African American communities and has been used as a site and methodology to understand global interconnections.
When looking at the United States’ history and diversity of its people, studying one community in isolation from others is both difficult and incomplete. Kale Fajardo, director of the University’s Asian American Studies Program, emphasizes that understanding relationships between groups is key when exploring matters of race and how people are racialized, classed, gendered, and/or sexualized.
“I think to do Asian American studies, one also has to have a background in Black studies or African diaspora studies, because these fields are so important and foundational. My colleagues and I have spent many years studying and respecting these fields.”
Breaking the Binary
Although we live in a multi-racial society, race relations in the United States are still mostly thought of in the White-Black binary. Fajardo says it’s important to remember that Asians are also a part of the history of the country and have made contributions.
“Doing Asian-Afro studies kind of disrupts that [binary]. Blackness isn't always in relation to Whiteness, though that is a pretty prominent dynamic. Asian-ness can also be understood in relation to Indigeneity and Latinidad, but our program is strong in how some of our faculty address Asian-African intersections,” remarks Fajardo.
Karen Ho, professor of anthropology and interim chair in the Department of African American & African Studies, explains the precarious racial positioning of Asian Americans in the United States: “Specifically, because Asian American communities are often bolstered by being constructed as ‘not Black’ in an anti-Black world while simultaneously positioned as ‘not White and not fully American,’ Asian America is significantly shaped by forces of exclusion and suspicion.”
She notes how the “model minority” label for Asian Americans has been used as a smokescreen for some to not appear racist while implicitly rebuking African Americans as “not-so-model.”
Because the Asian American studies field is rooted in anti-racist, anti-war, and anti-imperialist theory and practice, scholars and students try to think about the commonalities of Asian Americans with Black and Brown communities.
“How can Black studies challenge different things in Asian American studies, but also hopefully vice versa?” says Farajdo, pointing to how different ethnic field studies can come together to approach complex issues of the nation.
The Fusion of Fields
As one of the many programs included in the coalition of departments that make up the Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender & Sexuality Studies (RIDGS), the Asian American Studies Program fosters a lot of collaborative interdisciplinary work.
This interdisciplinary approach enables issues to be examined using a 360-degree approach and allows a scholar to think across time and space.
“One methodology, one discipline gives you something, but I think it's more interesting to have multiple perspectives and methods and objects,” says Fajardo.
The U’s ethnic studies faculty members have used this valuable “fusion of fields” mindset to produce insightful and novel work.
Elliott Powell
Associate Professor
Department of American Studies
Powell explores both historical and contemporary Black and South Asian collaborations in popular American music and examines them across genres like jazz, funk, R&B, and hip hop.
Powell’s book, Sounds from the Other Side: Afro-South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music, dives deep into this topic, examining issues of race as expressed through music.
“Because I focus on collaborations, my research is an attempt to shine a light on African American and Asian American solidarity. I’m interested in tracing how African Americans and Asian Americans form bonds with one another through music, and what such coalition-building looks and sounds like. In essence, I explore the world-making possibilities of these cross-cultural music-making endeavors,” says Powell.
Yuichiro Onishi
Associate Professor
Department of African American & African Studies
Yuichiro Onishi is interested in creating a forum to talk about rare connections, such as the Afro-Japanese one, and at the same time learning how to craft a language of struggle.
One such example is the link between W.E.B. Du Bois, the prominent African American intellectual and activist, and occupied Okinawa.
What of this connection? Soon after atomic bombs were detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. occupation of Japan began, lasting until 1952. However, Okinawa did not follow the same path as mainland Japan when the occupation ended. Separated from mainland Japan, Okinawa entered a whole new arrangement, deeply shaped and controlled by U.S. military presence—a situation that birthed the state of affairs called “occupied Okinawa.” Even after Okinawa was returned to Japan in 1972, militarization remains a fact of life.
Du Bois knew nothing about Okinawa, once colonized by imperialist Japan, much less what happened to this southernmost region of Japan after the Pacific War ended in 1945. Yet he repeatedly spoke out against this agenda of global colonization in “the islands of the sea” (as he once put it) and the pursuit of profit, natural resources, and war power that the United States justified in the name of achieving democracy and peace.
“For Du Bois, the 1951–1952 conjuncture raised an old and new question. There was nothing 'post' about the postwar, nor was it merely a case of the transwar [that is to say, the period spanning before, during, and after the war],” says Onishi.
“I am trying to see how deep I can go with this study in correspondence—Du Bois and occupied Okinawa—in service of deoccupation, because the basic structure of garrisoning is not only intact but also expanding today in places such as Henoko in occupied Okinawa and the world over.”
Melanie Abeygunawardana
Assistant Professor
Department of American Studies
Abeygunawardana’s work concerns the legal and cultural discourse surrounding the racial ideology of colorblindness, which states that race doesn’t and shouldn’t matter.
She argues that colorblindness has been sustained over the past century by pitting Black and Asian communities, as well as ideas of Blackness and Asianness, against each other. Her work highlights US-based Black and Asian authors who use emotion and feeling to reveal the racism that lies at the heart of colorblindness.
“Through my work, I aim to critique the idea that Black and Asian communities are forever at odds with each other. I ask: where did that discourse come from, and who stands to benefit from it? Asking and answering these questions leads me to intertwined Afro-Asian histories of racism and imperialism—shared injuries, stakes, and political possibilities,” explains Abeygunawardana.
Kale B. Fajardo
Professor and Director of the Asian American Studies Program
Department of American Studies
From 1521 to 1898, the Philippines was colonized by Spain. “Indios” (present-day “Filipinos”) who worked as sailors on Spanish ships jumped ship and settled in Saint Malo, a small fishing village east of New Orleans. This came to be the site of the first Asian settlement in the United States, and is the focus of one of Fajardo’s research projects.
Interestingly enough, Saint Malo was also a site of African American resistance, where formerly enslaved Africans escaped plantations and established independent communities.
“In my work, I looked at this palimpsest—a place that is Indigenous (Houma), that also holds important Black maroon histories, and where Indios/Indixs (Filipinos/Filipinxs) were present as well.” (Editor’s note: maroon refers to Black people who escaped slavery and established self-governing communities.)
Recently, Fajardo was invited by Filipinx artist and UC Berkeley art professor, Stephanie Syjuco, to write for one of her art projects. Syjuco was part of the recent New Orleans Triennial, titled “The Future is Present, The Harbinger is Home.”
In keeping with this theme, Syjuco made large wheat-paste murals with scenes from Saint Malo on them that were mounted in five public areas of New Orleans. She also created a free “give-away poster.” One side had Syjuco’s artwork, and on the other side, Fajardo was commissioned to write an essay explaining the Filipinx history at St. Malo and the other historical narratives that are tied to the bayou location.
“A lot of people know about Juan San Maló, the leader of the maroons, and Saint Malo, the place, but many Louisianans still don't know about Saint Malo in terms of the Filipino village.”
To raise awareness about the multifaceted history of the place, Syjuco and Fajardo collaborated with a local Filipinx organization in New Orleans called Bayou Barkada. The organization conducts cultural heritage advocacy, including boat tours to Saint Malo.
Karen Ho
Professor and Interim Chair of African American & African Studies
Department of Anthropology
Ho studies how finance is connected to today's inequality, especially when short-term and extractive financial models are used to reshape multiple other institutions (from universities to hospitals) that would benefit from other values and measures. She examines how big financial players exacerbate existing social hierarchies because their excessive profits often create widespread financial insecurity for others.
Instead of seeing capitalism as following some hidden, inevitable path, Ho uses insights and tools from the fields of feminist studies, African American Studies, and Asian American Studies to understand “capitalist developments not as the result of hidden and preordained logics, but rather as shaped from specific contingencies, conjunctures, and uneven relations.”
Drawing on these diverse fields, she argues that we can't understand capitalism and financialization without recognizing how race, gender, indigenous status, nationality, and family relationships have been essential to how capitalism changes and creates value.
The Lasting Asian-Afro Connection
Despite research topics varying greatly from one faculty member to the next, there is one common theme highlighted in everyone’s work–the undeniable, fundamental connection between the Asian American and African American communities. From their very inception, both interdisciplinary fields have been crucial in our understanding and examination of power in society.
According to Ho, all fields—from anthropology to economics, and from English to psychology—are indebted to the interdisciplinary scholarship on race, ethnicity, gender, indigeneity, sexuality, and postcolonialism, particularly work rooted in African American and African Studies, as well as Asian American Studies.
Ho says, “In light of current arguments about and criticisms of ethnic studies research, from Asian American to African American Studies, I am reminded of how important these inter-disciplines are to ethical, factual, and critical scholarship, to the life of the university and transformative education, and to the herculean task of addressing our most pressing social and global problems, from racism and inequality to climate change.”
This story was written by Anushka Raychaudhuri, an undergraduate student in CLA.
