Critical Mixed-Race Studies: A Transpacific Approach

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminars on the Comparative Study of Cultures

Faculty Member Organizers:
Duncan Williams, School of Religion 
Brian Bernards, East Asian Languages and Cultures
Velina Hasu Houston, School of Dramatic Arts

Presented by:
USC Center for Japanese Religions and Culture

As an interdisciplinary collaboration, “Critical Mixed-Race Studies: A Transpacific Approach” undertakes two overarching scholarly imperatives: first, to trace the history and historiography of mixed race in academic, popular, and legal discourses of various countries of the Pacific Rim (North and Latin America, the Pacific Islands, and East, Southeast, and South Asia), with a primary focus on the United States and East Asia; and second, to identify and measure the impact of transpacific migration, settlement, and sociocultural encounter and interaction on these mixed-race histories and historiographies. The project involves a series of ten regular seminars, conferences, and lectures designed to encourage broad, interdisciplinary debate connecting different historical periods and seemingly disparate or far-flung regions of the world, such as comparative racial ideology in Europe and Japan, comparative antimiscegenation laws in the American South and Pacific Coast, and comparative plantation culture in Hawai‘i, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. Along with a postdoctoral candidate search beginning in spring 2013, the first semester of the project will lay out some of the broader questions and goals of the seminar by tracing the origins of the transatlantic model, defining its limits, and identifying possible “transpacific alternatives.” Addressing one of these alternative models, the capstone seminar of the first semester will be a conference that examines Japan, the rise of the Japanese colonial empire in the Asia-Pacific region, and transpacific Japanese migration and settlement in North and Latin America through the lens of mixed-race studies.

Spring 2013 Seminar Schedule

Friday, January 18
Inaugural Sawyer Seminar
THE EVOLUTION OF MIXED-RACE HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THEORY

Friday, February 8
Sawyer Seminar II
THE TRANSPACIFIC SHIFT IN MIXED-RACE STUDIES

Friday, April 5
Sawyer Seminar III - Capstone Conference
SPOTLIGHT ON GLOBAL MIXED-RACE STUDIES: HAPA JAPAN - PART 1

Friday, April 5
Sawyer Seminar III - Capstone Conference
SPOTLIGHT ON GLOBAL MIXED-RACE STUDIES: HAPA JAPAN - PART 2

Fall 2013 Seminar Schedule

Friday, October 12
Sawyer Seminar IV
MIXED “RACE” IN SOUTHEAST ASIA?: RACIAL THEORIES IN COMPETING EMPIRES

**Check back for complete Fall 2013 Seminar Schedule**