Associate Professor of History
Japanese History in global and comparative perspective, Comparative study of black and Asian people, Global white supremacy
The structure in back of me is Ise Jingu, the Grand Shrine of the Shinto goddess Amaterasu Ōmikami, or great divinity illuminating heaven, which in modern times became the main Shinto shrine and one of the most important pilgrimage sites in Japan. She is hailed as the ancestress of the imperial house and thus, of all Japanese.
The woodblock print depicts a famous scene from Japanese mythology, Amaterasu emerging from the heavenly rock cave to which she had retreated, taking sunlight from the earth. The sun goddess is in the middle panel. The print is the work of Utagawa Kunisada (1786-1864) one of Japan’s most celebrated artists.
As you will have surmised, I offer courses in Japanese history that cover Japan from prehistory to the present day. I also engaged in the comparative study of how Asian descent and African descent people have responded to global white supremacy, both in the US and in Asia. I am also keenly interested in theater and fiction and have written several plays and novels. My play Kamioroshi: The Descent of the Gods was performed at Boston University in December 2019, directed by Sonoko Kawahara and choreographed by Momo and Kevin Suzuki.
My main intellectual and artistic interests center on the study of the psychological, spiritual and intellectual impact of white supremacy on Asian and black people in the US and globally. My forthcoming book Being-in-America, White Supremacy and the American Self (Peter Lang) explores the often devastating impact of living under American white supremacy on blacks and other minorities. I do not limit white supremacy to its extreme advocates such as neo-nazis, but configure it as the dominant power position of white people in the US and, for the most part, globally. My current project looks at the infiltration and imposition of white supremacist ways of being, thinking and feeling-particularly at the unconscious level-on other peoples, societies and cultures since the mid-19th century, focusing on Japan. Among my concerns is a strong interest in popular religions and “folk beliefs” and, in particular, the ways Asian descent and African descent peoples have used spirituality to resist white supremacist impositions, particularly the spiritual, emotional and psychological damage that can result from exposure to passive/aggressive white supremacist ways of being. My colloquium Blacks and Asians: Encounters Through Time and Space compares Asian and black creative responses to modernity and its white supremacist manifestations. All of the above concerns and questions involve the puzzle of the self. So, I am deeply impressed with the mystery of the ambiguous thing we call the self and its relation to culture and society. I have never taken the self as a fixed entity, designated to remain what it was at some mythical point of origin for all time. We are entering an era in which what we regard as the self will undergo unimaginable transformations, some good, but others may be detrimental to all of our notions of what it means to be a person. I am thinking specifically about advances in AI and the currently, for the most part, unregulated aggressive quest to create Artificial General Intelligence, and intelligent and sentient machines. Nevertheless, I make use of AI developments such as ChatGPT in my courses because they facilitate varieties of comparative in-class work that would be difficult if not impossible without them.
I believe that the questions and issues I have outlined above are essential for understanding the problems facing the 21st century world, particularly for “non-white” populations, and for attempting to find solutions to them. I hope you will join me in my quest for comprehension and resolutions that may assist us in achieving a just, equitable and peaceful future world.