Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

Lily Anne Welty Tamai, "Mixed-Race Black Identities in Postwar Japan and Okinawa"
2021-05-19 16:00 - 17:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Zoom, CA
The East Asia Center welcomes UCSB History alumna Dr. Lily Anne Welty Tamai (Asian American Studies, UCLA) for a talk on “Mixed-Race Black Identities in Postwar Japan and Okinawa.”
Mixed-race people born at the end of World War II made history quietly with their families and their communities. Wars and the military occupations that followed, coupled with increased migration across the Pacific, created a surge of interracial relationships, resulting in a mid-century multiracial baby boom. Easily identifiable by their mixed-race features, they were the children of the enemy: in Japan they symbolized defeat and racial impurity. In the U.S., they represented an extension of America’s democratic intervention abroad and for mixed-race adoptees in particular, they embodied the salvation that the U.S. offered Japan during the postwar occupation. Interracial
communities, families, and mixed-race individuals challenged the default narrative of White normativity in the U.S. military and in the post-war period, while also expanding our understanding of the transnational Black Pacific, or the diaspora of Blacks in the Pacific Rim. While Black soldiers migrated west across the Pacific, some of their mixed-race children migrated east to the U.S. in the
decades following World War II. This presentation with center the voices of mixed-race Black Japanese in post-war Japan and within the militarized borderland of Okinawa to examine the tropes of hybrid degeneracy and hybrid vigor as these individuals navigated their lives between
invisibility and hyper-recognition.

Lily Anne Welty Tamai earned her doctorate in History from UCSB. She conducted research in Japan and in Okinawa as a Fulbright Graduate Research Fellow and was also a Ford
Foundation Fellow. Her forthcoming book, titled Military Industrial Intimacy: Mixed-Race American Japanese, Eugenics and Transnational Identities, documents the history of mixed-race American Japanese and American Okinawans born after World War II and raised during the post-war period. Dr. Tamai was formerly the Curator of History at the Japanese American National Museum and served on the U.S. Census Bureau National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic, and Other
Populations. She is currently a lecturer in Asian American Studies at UCLA.

To join the Zoom meeting, use Zoom ID 925 5728 2471.

Center for Cold War Studies Talk: Nancy Mitchell, "Andrew Young: Challenging Anglo-Saxon Foreign Policy?"
2021-05-20 11:00 - 12:15
Andrew Young, one of Martin Luther King’s top aides and a former member of Congress, served as Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations. Outspoken and controversial, Young questioned prevailing Cold War assumptions. “Communism has never been a threat to me,” he said. “Racism has always been a threat—and that has been the enemy of all of my life.”
Nancy Mitchell is Professor of History at North Carolina State University. She is the author of Jimmy Carter in Africa: Race and the Cold War (2016), which received the Douglas Dillon Award from the American Academy of Diplomacy and the Robert Ferrell Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Professor Mitchell’s first book was The Danger of Dreams: German and American Imperialism in Latin America, 1895-1914 (1999). She contributed the chapter on “The Cold War and Jimmy Carter” to The Cambridge History of the Cold War (2010), and her articles have appeared in Cold War History, International History Review, Diplomatic History, American Historical Review, Journal of American History, Prologue, H-Diplo, and H-Pol.
Click here to join the Zoom for this event.

Conference on "Imperial Foodways: Culinary Economies and Provisioning Politics"
2021-05-21 - 2021-05-23
Registration is now open for the virtual conference “Imperial Foodways: Culinary Economies and Provisioning Politics.”
The full program, with panel and paper titles, can be viewed here. To Register, please click here.
Because papers are pre-circulated, organizers Elizabeth Schmidt and Erika Rappaport ask attendees to indicate which panels they plan to attend on the registration form. Once you complete the registration, a conference organizer will be in touch with links to the relevant papers.
Please be advised that the format of this conference is workshop-style: because the papers are pre-circulated, authors will not be giving a formal presentation, and attendees are expected to have read papers beforehand to participate in the discussion.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact organizers at foodandempireworkshop@gmail.com.

FOCAL POINT Dialogues in History Keynote Lecture with Prof. Herman Bennett: "Body, Soul & Subject: A History of Difference in the Early-Modern African Atlantic"
2021-05-21 13:00
The History Department’s Colloquium Committee warmly invites you to attend the keynote lecture of our FOCAL POINT Dialogues in History series. The lecture, “Body, Soul & Subject: A History of Difference in the Early-Modern African Atlantic,” will be delivered by Prof. Herman L. Bennett.
Herman L. Bennett is Professor at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. A scholar of Latin American history and the African Diaspora, Prof. Bennett’s previous books include Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness (2003), Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (2009), and the forthcoming The African Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction. His notable essays include “The Subject in the Plot: National Boundaries and the ‘History’ of the Black Atlantic,” in African Studies Review (2000) and “Writing into a Void: Slavery, History, and Representing Blackness in Latin America” in Social Text (2007). He has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, and the American Council of Learned Societies. The American Historical Association recognized his mentorship of racially and ethnically underrepresented students in the historical discipline through the AHA Equity Award in 2012. Prof. Bennett has served on the editorial boards of the Hispanic American Historical Review, Social Text, The Americas, the Blacks in the Diaspora series at Indiana University Press, and the American Historical Review.
Prof. Bennett’s most recent book, African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic (2018) invites our attention to politics of sovereignty, enslavement, and power in the earliest Iberian and African interactions as a point of inquiry to critically rethink the ways in which liberalism has subsequently shaped analyses of culture, economy, and history.
The inaugural FOCAL POINT Dialogues in History series is inspired by the UCSB History Department’s Statement on the George Floyd Uprising and its invocation to understand and interrogate our racialized past and the investments of disciplinary history within it. Following three webinars led by History Department faculty and graduate students on topics like sovereignty, the political, liberation, racial capitalism, liberalism, and empire, from their own scholarly angles of vision, the keynote lecture brings the series to a close and invites more conversations to be continued in the future.
The keynote lecture will use the Zoom webinar format. Prior registration is required.
Date: Friday 21 May, 2021
Time: 1:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Keynote Lecture: “Body, Soul & Subject: A History of Difference in the Early-Modern African Atlantic”
Zoom registration: Please register in advance for this webinar using the link below:
https://ucsb.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_RbHCtjyoS8S-l6vbTiFEzw
