Prof. Takashi Fujitani is the Dr. David Chu Professor and Director in Asia Pacific Studies at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on modern and contemporary Japanese history, East Asian history, Asian American history, and transnational history (primarily U.S./Japan and Asia Pacific). Much of his past and current research has centered on the intersections of nationalism, colonialism, war, memory, racism, ethnicity, and gender, as well as the disciplinary and area studies boundaries that have figured our ways of studying these issues. He is the author of Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan and Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Koreans in WWII; co-editor of Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s) and editor of the series Asia Pacific Modern. Prof. Fujitani is joined in conversation with JSAP contributors Harrison Watson, Sophie Hasuo, Rachel Willis, and Prof. Reginald Jackson. Topics of discussion include: the possibilities and politics of naming; growing up in Berkeley; segregation; ties between Black people and Asian / Asian American people; jazz; James Brown; W.E.B. DuBois; disidentifications with whiteness; Malcolm X and Yuri Kochiyama; solidarity politics; the model minority myth; race and racism in the Japanese empire; learning from professors of color; Asian American Studies; responses in Japanese Studies to discrimination about Buraku people and Korean-Japanese people; Clint Eastwood; Asia in the American political unconscious; Indigenous theory; palliative monarchy; the demise of Japanese Studies.

To learn more about Professor Fujitani's research, please watch his JSAP webinar, "Challenges and Opportunities for a Historian of Japan Teaching about Race and Imperialism." In this conversation, Prof. Fujitani mentions his article, "Minshūshi As Critique of Orientalist Knowledges."

This podcast is created with generous support from the University of Michigan’s Center for Japanese Studies.  Recording, editing, and transcription support came from Reginald Jackson, Justin Schell, Sophie Hasuo, Rachel Willis, Harrison Watson, Robin Griffin, and Allison Alexy. Please see the Japanese Studies and Antiracist Pedagogy homepage for more information.