Community as a Co-Creator

Associate Professor Yuichiro Onishi studies history and reimagines how we engage with it.

This perspective, coupled with his commitment to community and solidarity, will guide his work as the newly appointed director of the Liberal Arts Engagement Hub.

Onishi approaches the past as a living conversation, one that unfolds across cultures, generations, and social movements. Trained as a historian, his research explores African American intellectual history, focusing especially on 20th-century Black radicalism and internationalism. His work also crosses racial, national, and ideological boundaries to explore how communities in struggle have imagined justice together, and sometimes misunderstood one another along the way.

His current book project traces the post-World War II journeys of Japanese intellectuals and writers engaging with African American radical thought. Onishi examines how those encounters, particularly those taken up by Japanese women writers, opened space for new insights, solidarities, and liberatory possibilities. It’s a fundamentally comparative approach, grounded in historical research and shaped by lived experience.

That spirit of connection and critical reflection is central to his vision for the Liberal Arts Engagement Hub. Rooted in the values of CLA, The Hub brings artists, scholars, students, and community members together to grapple with the most pressing issues of our time. It is a space where the public humanities come alive, where dialogue becomes action, and action becomes knowledge.

For Onishi, The Hub represents a place to rethink how universities relate to the communities around them. “Solidarity isn’t a fixed identity,” he says. “It’s a practice, something shaped by humility, by reflection, by a willingness to be transformed.” 

As director, he hopes to continue building upon the spaces where those possibilities can thrive and where the work of history becomes part of the work of transformation.

The Intersection of Asian American and African American Experiences

The experiences of Asian and African communities in the US are deeply connected. Faculty in CLA, including Associate Professor Yuichiro Onishi, explore this fascinating intersection with their research.

Beyond Black and White

What drew you to the role of director of the Liberal Arts Engagement Hub?

After I was granted tenure in 2013, the field opened up in a massive way. I got to know two community organizations: Model Cities, a human services agency located in the historic African American neighborhood Rondo, and the Twin Cities Chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League (TC-JACL).

These two experiences were formative. These community partners were deeply self-taught and voracious in their reading habits. They showed me how to operate outside of institutional power while producing this rich knowledge about the past, the people, the community, and justice. They also showed me the power of self-activity, of doing things on your own, and that autodidactism was so infectious. 

How will you apply those experiences to your tenure as director in January 2026?

Reflecting on the relationships I’ve built over the years with educators, artists, and activists, I’m inspired by their commitment to “worldmaking.” 

Many of these collaborators, including those participating in my most recent work with Professor Rose Brewer in the Department of African American & African Studies, my colleague, all possess this commitment. Professor Brewer led the Humanities Without Walls project, Environmental Justice Worldmaking (EJW), which brought together the Minnesota Environmental Justice Table, the Interdisciplinary Center for Global Change at the University of Minnesota, and Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. This ongoing work, EJW, is grounded in local action; community mobilizations to shut down the trash burner in Downtown Minneapolis called the Hennepin Energy Recovery Center, or HERC. This incinerator has operated since 1989, causing lasting harm to both the environment and the surrounding community in North Minneapolis. The local activists organizing to close it are not just rejecting the current arrangement of power, they are imagining and building something different. They embody a revolutionary spirit, not in a purely abstract sense, but through deep and concrete engagements from within and outside the system: working toward changing the structures and ourselves through movement building, all the while wrestling with limits in formal politics. 

They may not view higher education as a priority, which complicates how we, in University spaces like The Hub, might relate to them; we surely cannot assume the role as saviors or leaders. But we need to find our ways to get there, to be in struggle with the people. That tension is instructive.

My goal is to shift how I inhabit institutional power so that it can serve this kind of transformative, future-oriented work. It’s a prefigurative practice, operating as if the future is already here and really pushing hard to change the existing power structure. These activists are, at their core, artists of possibility. They challenge us to stand in a different place, think differently, and transform ourselves.

How do you see the role of the liberal arts in addressing urgent public issues through community engagement?

The Hub Residency Program is the pacesetter of the Liberal Arts Engagement Hub. It is a public engagement funding opportunity in the arts and humanities to strengthen the ethical and political bonds among university faculty, staff, students, and community partners. Deepening such bonds in these perilous times like now is all the more important so that we can begin exploring how to craft a new language of struggle. The Residency Program is appealing for this reason. For me, there are several keywords and framings that help define this work of building a culture of liberation:

• Crisis and change;
• Challenges around access and unencumbered open inquiry, including wrestling with institutional power and historical injustices;
• Political commitment to do all we can to model mutualism and solidarity from where we are – the historically white institution that sits on Dakota homeland – catalyze new norm-setting and relationship building in and out of this physical (and virtual) space called The Hub.

My top priority, as such, is to get to know our community partners who will inhabit The Hub as residents, especially the nature of their collaboration with our colleagues – CLA faculty, staff, and students. But more than anything, I want Hub residents to get to know each other. I am interested in facilitating community building among Hub residents. This is about fashioning a method of habitation.

Learn more about recent Hub Residencies