Critical Filipinx Studies is a new book series from the University of Washington Press, edited by Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, founding director of the Bulosan Center for Filipinx Studies. This series lifts up the decolonizing identities and cultural productions of people who claim roots to the Philippines and illuminates how Filipinos in America and across the diaspora experience and imagine their everyday lives.
Informed by cultural studies, ethnic studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, this series is necessarily a feminist and queer project. Emphasizing work by scholar-activists who adopt a stance of care—ethical and political commitment—toward the people whose lives animate their work, it traces interracial solidarities, as fraught as they may be, to disrupt racial capitalism’s impulse to both homogenize and propagate “multicultural” difference.
“I can think of no better partner than the UW Press in launching this historically significant book series in Critical Filipinx Studies. UW has published important texts in Asian American Studies and will continue to be at the cutting edge of Asian American Studies scholarship with this series,” explains Robyn Magalit Rodriguez.
This series will publish books that engage with some of the following questions: What are the experiences of Filipinx migrants and what about these experiences sheds light on the nature of global racial capitalism? How do Filipinx people resist imperial and neocolonial structures and imagine and organize toward non-extractive, regenerative futures? How are Filipinx people represented across multiple forms of media and in what ways do they counter these representations? How do Filipinx people construct an alternative global archipelago of being and belonging?
“I’m looking for vibrant interdisciplinary projects or projects rooted in various disciplines, including critical ethnic studies, Asian/American studies, history, cultural studies, geography, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. I’m also particularly drawn to books that are theoretically rich but accessible to readers outside of academia. I’d love for these books to be on the shelves at local independent bookstores and public libraries,” adds Acquisitions Editor Mike Baccam.
Proposals for single-authored books across disciplines, from monographs to other compelling nonfiction books that appeal to a broader audience, are welcome for submission. We will also consider groundbreaking anthologies. Queries may be sent to Robyn at robyn@drrobynrodriguez.com and to Mike at mbaccam@uw.edu.
Almost a year ago six Asian women, four of them Korean, were shot and killed in Atlanta. More recently, here in western Washington, we have learned of human trafficking centered in a massage parlor. For us, this violence perpetrated against women echoes the victimization of the more than 200,000 Korean girls who were coerced into sexual servitude by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. Coincidental with the attack in Atlanta, the ongoing controversy about the circumstances of the Korean “comfort women”—the euphemism by which these girls have come to be known—was rekindled in an essay by a Harvard law professor claiming that the girls were recruited and contracted as sex workers. This essay and the ensuing outrage drew extensive media coverage nationwide.
As the translators of the first Korean novel to focus on the “comfort women”—Kim Soom’s Han myŏng, published as One Left by the University of Washington Press in 2020—we feel it is crucial that the voices of these girls be heard alongside that of the Harvard professor. And it is precisely those voices we hear in the novel, much of the detail based on the documented testimony of the Korean women who survived sexual servitude during World War II but did not break their self-imposed silence until the 1990s. By allowing us to hear of their experiences in the “comfort stations” as girls—some of them had yet to reach their teens and were premenstrual when taken from their ancestral villages in Korea—Kim Soom has restored to historical memory the overlooked and disavowed stories of a marginalized group of women, and by extension countless other victims of human trafficking. It is not just Korean girls who were taken to the “comfort stations”—if we add girls from China, Southeast Asia, the Netherlands, and Japan itself, the number swells to an estimated 400,000, according to scholars. In recent decades we have heard news reports of similar atrocities perpetrated against girlsin Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Contrary to the presumption of some observers of Korea-Japan relations and the “comfort women” controversy, One Left is not an exercise in Japan bashing. Instead, the novel attempts to remind us that each of the 200,000 girls taken from their homes in Korea was someone’s daughter, sister, and playmate, that the pain of their seizure was felt by families, villages, indeed by an entire nation. By allowing us to hear the voices of these girls, their testimony cited in more than 300 endnotes in her novel, Kim Soom offers us an opportunity to exercise our capacity for empathy and thereby work for reconciliation, healing, and closure.
Please listen to the voices of the girls in One Left and then take note that only 15 survive today. Let us remember these 200,000 girls not as an anonymous group of victims consigned to the remote fringes of our collective memory but as individuals who, like all of us, were each possessed of identity, agency, and family. And let us hope that by hearing their voices we can, in some small way, work for a more humane and a less contentious and divisive future.
Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton are longtime residents of Seattle and translators of modern Korean fiction. Ju-Chan Fulton worked for thirty years for Northwest and Delta Airlines. Bruce Fulton teaches Korean literature and literary translation at the University of British Columbia and is the editor of The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories, scheduled for publication in 2022. One Left is available now.
It’s hard to pinpoint how a subject becomes important to a writer’s work, sometimes more difficult for the writer to see than it is for a careful and astute reader. Just how the writer decides what to focus on is evasive, always on the move. Maybe it’s not a decision at all. Maybe by a writer’s nature and the nature of the lived-in world, the writer unconsciously falls into subjects. There is the writer’s background, which produces certain influences and fascinations, even obsessions. There are the barely grasped elements. Then there is the attraction of what is called “literary weather.” Here, issues of little consequence in one time period unexpectedly emerge as riveting topics in another. How are they to be addressed? What network of consciousness makes meaning? Consider the fairly recent, transformative changes in the place of gay and transgender people in our culture, of male dominance, of the nature of white supremacism, and of the regard for people of different races.
My father was a preacher. As a preacher’s kid I was taught that there are important things to say and that a person is obliged to say them when called upon, even when they are difficult. I am from Canada, an immigrant brought to the United States by my parents. From early boyhood through college I lived all over California. I came of age during the sixties and grew up surrounded by anti-gay bias, the misogynist treatment of women, and the assumed dominance by heterosexual men at the portals of power. These were accepted as givens in what seems now my pre-cognizant life; they were woven into the fabric of everything around me, including my mother’s attempts to broaden her role as a “minister’s wife.” I would later see that it caused her great pain.
Also, during my early teenage years, I learned about “Indian lore” from an amateur archeologist. On Saturdays his family and mine traveled into the California desert in search of artifacts, focusing on burial grounds. We were stocking a San Bernardino museum. Although I learned something about desert Indians in the process, I was in a state of complete ignorance about what we were actually doing. I had utterly no conception of how our taking possession of the artifacts and spiriting them off—arrow straighteners, matates, heavily ornamented stone arrow points and hatchets, even bones—might be seen as white raids on past lives.
My father studied in Berkeley at the Pacific School of Religion with the Christian existentialist and Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich. He then joined the American Congregationalists (now the United Church of Christ) and came to be known for his commitment to integrating inner-city churches. He was “called” by several San Diego–area churches, the chief among which was in National City, one of three “American” communities south of San Diego, the others being Chula Vista, where we had also lived for a year, and San Ysidro.
Before we moved there, National City had experienced white flight to San Diego suburbs, leaving the church in decline yet still under the control of the few whites who returned to National City for Sunday services. At the time, I am told, San Diego County was second only to Orange County in California for the presence of arch-conservatives. During the very early sixties, the John Birch Society became a force. My father knew his calling was to redefine the church, to allow it to speak for the community, but these outsiders harassed him for installing a Japanese choir director and a Black soprano soloist and for welcoming Mexican Americans to church events. Awkward though he may have been at times, my father was a staunch believer in ecumenical religion. On Sundays after his own services, he gave over the space of the church to a congregation of Samoans, who had no church of their own. Above all, I remember them for their mesmerizing hymn-singing, which I eavesdropped on from the church’s narthex. Unlike our own congregation, this congregation sang in harmony as if it in its entirety were a well-practiced choir, the men with booming bass lines and the women with eerily penetrating melodies.
National City was a navy town. Its high school had a marginal white student majority, yet the closest thing to a nonwhite faculty member was an Iraqi immigrant who taught civics. Nearly equal in numbers to the white students were Mexican Americans, followed by Samoans. There were fewer Black students and fewer still Asian students. I knew of no Native Americans, probably because of my own ignorance, or their quietude, but I counted Mexican Americans among my friends, including a couple of baseball teammates, one of whom went on to play professionally.
When I left home for my first year at the University of Redlands, two out-of-town church members, John Birchers, took to harassing my mother. My father was often away during this period, and the two men had apparently learned his schedule. They badgered my mother with phone calls, filling them with accusations about the race mixing that was being wrought in the church by her husband. She attempted suicide by slitting her wrists in the bathtub. I don’t believe she ever fully recovered from this scenario, even though she and my father soon moved far away, to Albany, New York.
*
In 1980 I published my third novel, Yellowfish, and in it refined two topics to which I would return again and again: racism, in this case represented by a group of illegal Chinese immigrants, and white supremacy, represented by a coterie from northern Idaho’s Aryan Nations. Ruby, the wife of the novel’s protagonist, was conceived as a forceful and independent character. Some thirty years after that book, another novel, The Shadows of Owls, had a full-blown treatment of the Aryan Nations and of an heroic woman scientist victimized by them. This book was intended to partner with a book of short stories, published in 2005, and my latest work, an historical novel entitled The Appointment: The Tale of Adaline Carson. This latter book has a male narrator who recounts the life of a woman who is half Arapaho and explores the roots of American white supremacy. To true believers, this seems to mean the hoped for waning and ultimate disappearance of minority cultures in America and the renewed domination of white men.
I’ve been writing long enough—over fifty years—to look back and see an evolving shape to such subjects, particularly the attraction of this twin obsession—white supremacy and the experience of minorities in the face of it. A major thread includes Native American experience. I have always believed that a part of the writer’s duty is to imagine the world through other eyes. How else is the meaning of interconnections to be understood? I suspect that my old friend and colleague Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, a member of the Crow Creek Sioux tribe, would feel that a white man has no business writing from the perspective of Natives, that it’s an appropriation and falsification of history. I know she has a point. Still, I persist in investigating my own role and the role of others through these durable fascinations. It’s a fine line between the appropriation of a culture, with salient features unlike my own, and the practice of caring for and having a clear-headed acknowledgment and appreciation of the alien in that other culture.
John Keeble is the author of eight books, including Yellowfish, Broken Ground (both reprinted by UW Press), The Shadows of Owls (a UW Press original), and The Appointment (Lynx House Press, distributed by UW Press). He is also author of Out of the Channel, the definitive study of the Exxon Valdez disaster, and a collection of short stories. Keeble was co-founder of the graduate Creative Writing Program at Eastern Washington University where he taught for more than thirty years, and has also taught at Grinnell College and three times as the Coal Royalty Trust Chair at the University of Alabama. Most recently he served as Distinguished Visiting Writer at Boise State University. With his wife, Claire, he lives in a house of their own construction on a wooded hillside west of Spokane, Washington.
Mike Gastineau’s latest book is Fear No Man, which tells the story of the 1991 national championship football team at the University of Washington and the man who led that team to success, Don James. The 2021 UW team suffered through a disappointing 4–8 season that led to a coaching change. Here, Gastineau details five interesting stories involving new Husky coaches.
At any social gathering this winter attended by UW fans, the future of new Husky football coach Kalen DeBoer will be discussed. Some will predict wild success for the new boss, others will caution patience given the state of the program, and still others will offer grave predictions of doom. No matter how loud or confident anyone seems about their prediction, it’s good to remember that no one knows what’s going to happen.
Every story about the hiring of a new coach creates speculation among fans and contains at least a little drama. Some new coaches look good, and things go badly. Some look meh and subsequently become great. Some become exactly what many thought they would become. Here are five interesting stories about men hired to coach at UW.
Rick Neuheisel, 1999
This hire still generates a lot of conversation and speculation as to how things might have gone if UW had stayed within the Don James coaching family.
After the 1998 season, Athletic Director Barbara Hedges decided to dismiss Jim Lambright, who had replaced James after he abruptly resigned in 1993, upset with what he perceived as a lack of support from UW president William Gerberding during an investigation by the then PAC-10 into the program.
Former James assistants Gary Pinkel and Chris Tormey were thought to be the front-runners for the job. Both men had been part of UW’s run of success in the ’80s and early ’90s. Both were now successful head coaches, Pinkel at Toledo, and Tormey at Idaho. They interviewed with Hedges, and fans waited to see which one would get the job.
Desirous of a break from the past, Hedges shocked the college football world by grabbing Rick Neuheisel away from Colorado, making him the second highest-paid college coach in America in the process. Most fans were excited by the move, and Neuheisel’s charming personality won over many of the skeptics.
He had success early on at UW, including a Rose Bowl and near national championship team in 2000, but his stay in Seattle ended like a case of beer bottles being hurled down a stairwell. Caught in lies about his pursuit of the San Francisco 49ers job and his participation in a gambling pool, he was fired in 2003.
A messy lawsuit (eventually settled by a $4.5 million payout to Neuheisel) followed, and many Husky fans believe the fallout from the mess led to the program’s downturn over the next several seasons.
Tormey went on to a successful run at Nevada, while Pinkel built Missouri into a national powerhouse. “What if?” Husky fans wondered for years. “What if?”
Rick Neuheisel. Photo courtesy UW Athletics.
Tyrone Willingham, 2005
On paper, this hire looked good. Tyrone Willingham had enjoyed modest success at both Stanford and Notre Dame. The UW program was still reeling from Neuheisel’s departure and the subsequent lawsuit (which played out over two years) and craved the stability Willingham appeared to offer.
On the field, the hire fizzled like a wet sparkler. Willingham lost seven of his first eight games and ultimately presided over the worst four-year stretch in Husky football history. His tenure engendered so much anger that security was necessary at his radio show during his final season due to threats from fans.
Tyrone Willingham. Photo courtesy UW Magazine.
Chris Petersen, 2014
Here’s an example of a hire that looked good on paper and was great on the field. Chris Petersen came to Seattle after a successful run as head coach at Boise State. His UW teams posted six consecutive winning seasons, made the College Football Playoffs in 2016, and played in the 2019 Rose Bowl. Petersen surprised everyone in college football with his sudden retirement announcement after the 2019 season.
Petersen was popular among fans and boosters. At the age of fifty-five, he appeared to have several seasons left to captain the Husky ship. But he cited an inability to balance his life with the demands the job placed on him before stepping down. His fifty-five wins left him sixth all-time on the list of winningest UW coaches, and had he not left he would likely be third by now.
It was at the end of his run that he made the single second-guessable decision of his UW career when he proclaimed Jimmy Lake as being ready to step into the job as head coach. Maybe Lake would have enjoyed more success and a longer run at UW if his first season (2020) hadn’t been derailed by the COVID pandemic. But it was, and after just thirteen games he was dismissed and replaced by Kalen DeBoer.
Chris Petersen. Photo courtesy UW Athletics.
Gil Dobie, 1908
The general feeling of fans toward this hire is not known, but it’s easy to speculate how some would have reacted if Ye Olde Sportstalk Radio had been invented.
“Here’s Clarence, in a horse and buggy on the waterfront.”
“Thanks for taking my call. I don’t mean to be taken as scurrilous, but we need an Ivy League man. THAT’S where football was invented. What does a chap from North Dakota know about the game?”
Gil Dobie came to UW after two years at North Dakota Agricultural College in Fargo. He wasn’t a Seattle guy, and he didn’t have a fancy educational background. What he did have was an ability to coach football. In eight seasons at UW, he never lost a game. His teams were 58–0–3 and the Huskies became the biggest powerhouse on the West Coast.
After the 1916 season Dobie had a falling out with UW president Henry Suzzallo and was dismissed. He went on to great success at Navy, Cornell, and Boston College, and his .781 winning percentage is among the best in college football history.
Gil Dobie. Photo courtesy of UW Athletics.
Don James, 1975
The best example ever of a hire that didn’t move the excitement needle at all but ended up being a perfect fit. Don James wasn’t the school’s first choice to replace Jim Owens. That was Dan Devine, who turned down UW when the Notre Dame job suddenly opened.
The second choice thus became the new coach, and the Ohio native was so unknown in Seattle that one of the first things he remembered seeing upon his arrival was a giant sign outside Husky Stadium welcoming new head football coach “Don Jones.”
Fans almost didn’t have to learn his actual name. His first two teams went 6–5 and 5–6, and his third team started the season 1–3, leading to calls for a change. But that 1977 team rebounded to go 7–1 down the stretch, including a Rose Bowl win over Michigan.
Don James. Photo by Doug Glant.
Kalen DeBoer is the thirtieth football coach in UW history, and speculation on how he’ll do is well underway. His first game is Labor Day weekend against Kent State, coincidentally where James worked before coming to UW. James’s career began with his name being misspelled and ended with a statue built to recognize his achievements.
This year marks the tenth anniversary of the Association for University Presses’ annual University Press Week, and member presses are celebrating how we have evolved over the past decade. The story of UW Press’s evolution can be seen through the following ten books published in the last ten years.
Initially ignored and quickly forgotten, John Okada’s powerful novel reached a broad audience only after its republication in the late 1970s by a group of activists intent on proving the existence of an Asian American body of literature. Since then, it has remained central in discussions of Asian American literature and resistance on campus and off, and is one of the press’s all-time bestsellers.
Mark Fiege reframes the canonical account of American history based on the radical premise that nothing in the nation’s past can be considered apart from the natural circumstances in which it occurred. He demonstrates how environmental history permeates the breadth of the United States, including in unexpected places such as the Salem witch trials, racial segregation, and the modern women’s movement.
Through his careful studies of hundreds of artworks, Bill Holm developed a description of and terminology for the visual language used by northern Northwest Coast artists to illustrate inherited crests and tell family stories. His book has become a foundational reference work and study guide for contemporary Native carvers, painters, and weavers looking to draw upon or reinterpret the traditional work of their ancestors.
Carlos Bulosan’s fictionalized autobiography of his journey from the Philippines to Seattle to California reveals the brutal reality of oppression, racism, poverty, and violence experienced by Filipino American migrant workers in the twentieth century. Following UW Press’s reissue of the book in 1973 and against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, it became a critical text in the emerging field of ethnic studies. A masterful, searing critique of US imperialism, America Is in the Heart illuminates the human costs to US exploitation and global capitalism and asks readers to consider whether it’s possible for America to live up to its promise.
Native Seattle transformed historical understandings of Pacific Northwest urban spaces by centering the region’s Coast Salish peoples in this revealing urban history. Thrush’s research not only restores the foundational stories of Native people within Seattle’s deeper history, but also identifies the processes used to actively relegate Indigenous people to a remote past rather than acknowledging and representing their continued dynamic shaping of the history of cities beyond the Northwest.
Translated by Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li, and David Schaberg
These three volumes make China’s earliest narrative history available for scholars of the ancient world in an unabridged, extensively annotated translation. The authoritative edition for teaching, research, and citation, it offers facing pages of Chinese and English that enable it to serve the needs of a wide range of researchers.
The first edition of Flora was quickly established as the bible of botanists and gardeners in the region, who used it in the field and in the classroom for a half-century. The second edition, revised by David E. Giblin, Ben S. Legler, Peter F. Zika, and Richard G. Olmstead, incorporates extensive changes in plant nomenclature, taxa new to science, and documentation of new native and nonnative species in the Pacific Northwest, but follows the same now-standard structure.
This collection, featuring work by both senior and rising scholars, brings together groundbreaking essays that speak to the relationship between Asian American feminisms, feminist of color work, and transnational feminist scholarship. Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics provides a deep conceptual intervention into the theoretical underpinnings of Asian American studies; ethnic studies; women’s, gender, and sexual studies; as well as cultural studies in general.
This courageously personal book about the Hupa revitalization of the Flower Dance challenges anthropological theories about menstruation, gender, and coming-of-age; and addresses gender inequality and gender violence within Native communities. In addition to being widely used in college classes, We are Dancing for You has been distributed to American Indian youth centers, Native rehabilitation programs, correctional facilities, and Tribal libraries across the state of California through the Native Women’s Collective, the nonprofit cofounded by Dr. Risling Baldy.
Taking readers inside the private workshops, crowded marketplaces, and great palaces, temples, and tombs of early China, Barbieri-Low explores the lives and working conditions of artisans, meticulously documenting their role in early Chinese society and the economy. First published in 2007, winner of top prizes from the Association for Asian Studies, American Historical Association, College Art Association, and the International Convention of Asia Scholars, and now back in print, Artisans in Early Imperial China will appeal to anyone interested in Chinese history, as well as to scholars of comparative social history, labor history, and Asian art history.
In 1983 Richard Berkowitz and Michael Callen, two gay men in their twenties, published a manual called How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach, under the guidance of Dr. Joseph Sonnabend. At this early point in the AIDS epidemic, it was unclear exactly how the disease spread—whether from a single agent or a confluence of multiple factors. Because the disease hit already-maligned groups like gay men and drug users the hardest, there wasn’t a widespread rush among medical or public health professionals to find the cause or a cure.
Sentiment among many people in the United States ranged from prejudice to rage to fear. Widespread calls to quarantine people living with AIDS first came from the evangelical right but eventually seemed like a commonsense response to some lawyers, physicians, politicians, and ordinary people, as I detail in my new book, The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance. Gay men like Berkowitz and Callen found themselves in a situation where they alone would be tasked with helping their communities figure out how to relate to one another within the confines of this new and deadly epidemic. Although Berkowitz and Callen got some things wrong, they also got some things right. Perhaps most important, their manual was the first to recommend the use of condoms to men who had sex with other men.
As in the early years of the AIDS pandemic, the past eighteen months living with the COVID-19 pandemic have left people trying to figure out how to safely relate to others. And also like the early years of AIDS, a mix of misinformation and conflicting and constantly changing information has made navigating the social realm feel confusing and risky for many. For those who took pandemic precautions seriously and are now fully vaccinated, having the permission—at least from the CDC—to move about virtually mask-free feels strange.
Over the past several weeks, dozens if not hundreds of reports and advice columns have been published suggesting healthy ways to reenter our communities and how to reduce anxiety when heading back into the world. Such suggestions have become all the more vexing as recent reports cite preliminary research indicating that those who are immunosuppressed, including people with HIV/AIDS, cancer, organ transplants, and autoimmune diseases may not be protected by any of the existing vaccines. As one of my friends with lupus, a chronic autoimmune illness largely impacting women and especially women of color, put it, first they hoarded our hydroxychloroquine, and now the vaccines won’t protect us.
Although AIDS analogies have proliferated during the COVID-19 pandemic, at the fortieth anniversary of the medical and public recognition of AIDS, the most important lessons to learn from those early years of the AIDS pandemic in the United States have to do with how people who were most at risk and who were sick chose to protect and care for themselves and each other. In June 1983, when scientists had still not identified the cause of AIDS, a group of a dozen gay men living with AIDS at the Fifth Annual Gay and Lesbian Health Conference formed a People with AIDS advisory committee and wrote a manifesto known as “The Denver Principles.” The principles include recommendations for health professionals, all people, and people living with AIDS, and they insisted upon the rights of people living with AIDS. Several years before the formation of the famed group ACT UP—the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power—the authors of the principles insisted that people living with AIDS take the following actions:
“1. Form caucuses to choose their own representatives, to deal with the media, to choose their own agenda, and to plan their own strategies.
2. Be involved at every level of decision-making and specifically serve on the boards of directors of provider organizations.
3. Be included in all AIDS forums with equal credibility as other participants, to share their own experiences and knowledge.
4. Substitute low-risk sexual behaviors for those which could endanger themselves or their partners; we feel people with AIDS have an ethical responsibility to inform their potential sexual partners of their health status.”
Although the context differs significantly, those who are most at risk for suffering the consequences of a widespread reopening amid the still-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic would be well served taking a cue from these early AIDS activists. Moreover, in the present day, we have the benefit of decades of organizing by disability justice advocates who insist on putting those most impacted in leadership roles in decision-making, as well as demanding principles such as intersectionality, a critique of capitalism, and cross-movement organizing. Reentering society and being “open for business” are not experienced in the same way by all of us, as some of us will experience severe consequences. Listening to the most impacted people may seem an inconvenience to some, but failing to do so will likely have dire results for many.
Karma R. Chávez is associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities. Her latest book, The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance, is available now.
“What, to the [enslaved and colonized], is your Fourth of July?”
— Frederick Douglass
On US Independence Day, for years it has been an African American custom to circulate the poignant speech—widely known as “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”—by self-emancipated abolitionist Frederick Douglass.* His iconic oratory points out the stark contrast between America’s exaltation of self-determination through words and its actions of violence, false imprisonment, cultural imperialism, and other human rights violations to block African Americans from having the power necessary to shape their own destinies. Since before Douglass’s time, Black people in the United States and Africa have rebelled against the infantilizing nature of White supremacy by fighting to claim a fair share of the wealth their labor and cultures produce. As revealed in my new book, Love for Liberation: African Independence, Black Power, and a Diaspora Underground, part of what unites Black communities on both sides of the Atlantic is a consensus that the key to protecting Black lives is Black autonomy.
In his speech to a predominately White audience in 1852, Douglass stated plainly that the “rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not me . . . I shall see this day from the [enslaved’s] point of view.” While slyly pointing out the intersection between patriarchy, capitalism, and racism in America, he also highlighted a recurring theme in Black cultures throughout the diaspora: authenticity’s valor versus hypocrisy’s disgrace. American, British, and French empires have all waved the flags of self-determination in public while, for example, turning a blind eye to the mass rape of Black women during slavery. Douglass’s assertion that a nation’s democratic self-image can only be validated by its most marginalized community members became a core belief of the Black freedom struggle in the United States and abroad.
Just over a hundred years after Douglass confronted his audience, anti-colonial activist and former political prisoner Kwame Nkrumah celebrated the hard-won independence of his country, Ghana. During the festivities, which were attended by prominent African Americans, including Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and Mrs. Coretta Scott King, Nkrumah encouraged the Ashanti, Ewe, and other tribes in his homeland to see themselves as a shining example of a new era in the diaspora: “From now on there is a new African in the world [who] is ready to fight his own battle and show that, after all, the Black man is capable of managing his own affairs.”
The wave of African independence in the mid-twentieth century—and its accompanying critique of the two-faced nature of colonizing White supremacist institutions—profoundly influenced an upstart generation of African American activists. Malcolm X, Kathleen Neal Cleaver, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) were just a few of the Black Power movement leaders who were frustrated by the slow pace of progress toward racial equality. At the heart of their exasperation was the glaring divergence between American institutions’ stated values of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and their willingness to enable the lynching, disenfranchisement, and economic exploitation of African Americans. As a result, Black Power activists began to seek alternatives to the changing hearts-and-minds strategy advanced by Dr. King.
Reaching out across borders, Black Power and African independence activists connected within a diaspora underground. A diaspora underground consists of the physical emancipated spaces in which activists engage and the shared understandings of the past, present, and future that are created in such spaces. This kind of international engagement helps Black activists dismantle dominant gaslighting myths about the benevolence of White supremacy and colonialism. In this diaspora underground, Black Power and African independence leaders were able to ground themselves in an authentic vision of paths toward autonomy and full enjoyment of human rights that they themselves could construct. They discovered a deeper understanding of their roots as well as routes toward liberation that did not depend on changing White hearts and minds.
During his speech, Douglass asked the rhetorical question, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” He responded, “A thin veil to cover up crimes.” Revealing the truth about White supremacist aggression has been part of the continuous work of the Black freedom struggle from Douglass, to African independence and Black Power, to Black Lives Matter. Through the affirmation of authenticity’s valor over hypocrisy’s disgrace, the Fourth of July has also become an opportunity to reflect on the rights Black communities have to assert autonomy over their own bodies, relationships, neighborhoods, and nations. This kind of Black self-determination, which can be nurtured from within, remains the true meaning of independence.
*The original title of this speech is “The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro.”
Robin J. Hayes, PhD, is a contributor to the Atlantic, writer and director of the award-winning documentary Black and Cuba, and creative director of Progressive Pupil.
A common thread running through the contemporary artworks included in my book, Painful Beauty, is the deep respect for the tangible and intangible gifts received by the artists from their mothers and grandmothers through the beadwork they created. Two ephemeral fragments—a family snapshot of a mother and daughter beading moccasins and a paper beadwork pattern stored in a fruitcake tin—inspired the poignant and powerful artworks by Larry McNeil and Tanis S’eiltin that are critical to my own consideration of the histories of Tlingit beadwork.
Tlingit mothers and grandmothers in Southeast Alaska and elsewhere have known the power of beadwork to feed their families and also affirm thousands of years of connections to the land and its bountiful resources. Yet throughout the twentieth century, their beading has been dismissed by many scholars and collectors as derivative and inauthentic. Tlingit communities, however, have long recognized the strength and resilience of these women through the overt racism and discrimination brought to bear by the institutions of settler colonialism. Through the generosity of the descendants of these beaders, who are telling their stories through contemporary artistic production, the historical significance and impact of these powerful Indigenous women is being shared more widely with the public.
I was first drawn to Larry McNeil’s photographic collage, Once Upon a Time in America, because of the 1943 snapshot at its center depicting his mother Anita McNeil (kaajee seidee) and grandmother Mary Brown Betts (kah saa nák) holding and sewing beaded moccasins. Here was a beautiful illustration of the intangible intergenerational knowledge that fueled so much beading in the mid-twentieth century. I knew, from archival research, that around five hundred women had beaded moccasins and other work for sale through the Alaska Native Arts and Crafts Cooperative from the 1930s to the 1970s. Many contemporary artists I have spoken with shared memories of watching or helping their grandmothers with beaded work. In this print and in his writing, McNeil foregrounds the power of these women through a seemingly mundane activity, which, in fact, was central to their fight for equal education as well as perpetuating intangible Tlingit ways of knowing in a difficult and discriminatory era. I am deeply grateful to Larry McNeil and his sisters, Helen and Patty, for sharing stories of their mother and grandmother with me.
Larry McNeil, Once Upon a Time in America from Fly by Night Mythology series, 2002. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Over the years Tanis S’eiltin and I have discussed octopus bags—distinctive pouches with four pairs of “tentacles” made from wool and beaded with seaweed and floral designs—and how they express historical trade relationships with interior peoples as well as the ways in which Tlingit women transformed them aesthetically to better represent local knowledge. When I first saw photographs of S’eiltin’s untitled armor-like floor-length coat featuring an oversized beadwork pattern depicting an octopus, I was thrilled to see how she had transformed the idea of an octopus bag into a life-size work celebrating Tlingit women.
During my visit to see her coat, Tanis mentioned that she had a fruitcake tin filled with beadwork patterns that dated to her great-grandmother’s era. I was nearly brought to tears when she brought it out. I had been told of these tins filled with patterns, but this was the first time one was shared with me. We pulled out hundreds of delicate pieces of paper, cut from old envelopes and cookbooks, and Tanis shared stories of the women, including her great-grandmother Mary Barries and her mother Maria Ackerman Miller (Ldaneit), who filled the tin over the years. These patterns and others like them adorned hundreds, if not thousands of pairs of moccasins made for sale throughout the twentieth century. The oversize octopus pattern on the coat foregrounds those powerful Tlingit women and their centrality to trade in all its forms, including the relationships that brought octopus bags and other treasures to Southeast Alaska. S’eiltin has drawn inspiration from this battered “box of treasures” to create work for her own children and grandchildren to teach them about their matrilineal legacies. I am so grateful for the opportunity Tanis has given me to write about her work.
Tanis S’eiltin, Untitled, 2017. Photo courtesy of the author.
Tanis S’eiltin’s fruitcake tin holding three generations of beading patterns. Photo courtesy of the author.
Tanis S’eiltin, Untitled, 2017. Photo courtesy of the author.
I extend my gratitude to all Tlingit people, past and present, who have always expressed longstanding cultural practices through the incorporation of new ideas and materials in innovative and creative ways. The histories and stories shared in Painful Beauty are a testament to the power of their art and the strength of their resilience.
Megan A. Smetzer is lecturer of art history at Capilano University.
The University of Washington Press, the MIT Press, Cornell University Press, the Ohio State University Press, University of Chicago Press, Northwestern University Press, and the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) today announce the recipients of the 2021-2022 Mellon University Press Diversity Fellowships.
These fellowships are generously funded by a four-year, $1,205,000 grant awarded to the University of Washington Press from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the continued development and expansion of the pipeline program designed to diversify academic publishing by offering apprenticeships in acquisitions departments. This second grant builds on the success of the initial 2016 grant from the Mellon Foundation, which funded the first cross-press initiative of its kind in the United States to address the marked lack of diversity in the academic publishing industry.
Please join us in welcoming the 2021-2022 Mellon University Press Diversity Fellows:
Chad M. Attenborough joins the University of Washington Press from Vanderbilt University, where he is a PhD candidate studying black responses to the British abolition of the slave trade in the Caribbean. While completing his research, Chad worked for Vanderbilt University Press as a graduate assistant where his passion for publishing developed in earnest and during which he helped process works for VUP’s Critical Mexican Studies series, their Black Lives and Liberation series, alongside their Anthropology and Latin American list. Chad received his MA from Vanderbilt in Atlantic History and his BA from Bowdoin College in French. His areas of interest include black diaspora studies, imperial and intellectual histories, global migration studies, and critical geographies.
Fabiola Enríquez joins the University of Chicago Press after having served as Managing Editor for the Cambridge University Press journal International Labor and Working-Class History. She received her BA in History from the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez. She is currently pursuing a PhD in History at Columbia University, where she is writing a dissertation on the intersection between religion and politics in late-nineteenth century Cuba and Puerto Rico. Her interest in publishing comes as a continuation of these academic pursuits, seeing in acquisitions editing a platform from which to facilitate the global dissemination of knowledge and rescue perspectives that have thus far been underrepresented in historical discussions. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, she has been living in Chile for the past two years, and is the proud human to a reformed Chilean street dog.
Suraiya Anita Jetha is a former contributing editor of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology’s AnthroNews column. She has extensive experience in academic programming, most recently with the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California-Santa Cruz. She received a BA in Anthropology from Yale University, an MA in Migration and Diaspora Studies from SOAS University of London, and an MA in Anthropology from the New School for Social Research. She is currently writing a dissertation to complete a PhD in Anthropology and Feminist Studies at the University of California-Santa Cruz. Her research interests include anthropology, science and technology studies, feminist studies, and ethnography.
Robert Ramaswamy joins the Ohio State University Press from the University of Michigan, where he is a PhD candidate in American Culture. He recently completed an internship with Michigan Publishing, during which he worked on title selection and user access for the American Council of Learned Societies’ Humanities Ebook Collection (HEB). At HEB, he coordinated with scholars in learned societies across the humanities to include more work from scholars, subfields, and presses that have historically been excluded from “the canon.” His scholarly interests include feminist theory, histories of capitalism, and twentieth-century African American history. He lives in Ann Arbor with his partner, Anna, two dogs, and nine chickens.
Jacqulyn Teoh joins Cornell University Press after working as an apprentice at the Feminist Press at CUNY and a part-time acquisitions assistant at the University of Wisconsin Press, where she was a member of UW Press’s Equity, Justice, and Inclusion working group and helped to prepare a demographic survey of authors as a baseline understanding of diversity, representation, and inclusion. She holds a BA from Pennsylvania State University, an MA from the University of Leeds, and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her dissertation looked at the structures of the contemporary literary marketplace with a focus on Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian American writing.
Jameka Williams is a MFA candidate at Northwestern University in poetry. She received her BA in English from Eastern University in St. Davids, PA. After supporting herself as a pastry chef during her graduate studies, she is transitioning into pursuing a career in book publishing, having interned with independent publisher, Agate, in Evanston, IL. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and she is a Best New Poets 2020 finalist, published by University of Virginia Press annually. She is currently completing her first full-length poetry collection.
Author, professor, activist, and lifelong advocate for Asian American literature Shawn Wong received this year’s Stand UP Award from the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) during its virtual 2021 Annual Meeting today.
The Stand UP Award honors those who through their words and actions have done extraordinary work to support, defend, and celebrate the university press community. The award is intended to recognize advocates who are not on staff at a member press but who stand up from within the communities that presses work with, speak to, and serve.
Wong, who is Chinese American, was recognized for leading grassroots efforts in 2019-2020 to protect the University of Washington Press’s right to publish the landmark 1957 novel No-No Boy by Japanese American author John Okada (1923-1971), set in the aftermath of Japanese Americans’ incarceration during World War II. At Wong’s urging, and with the consent of the Okada estate, the press (UWP) reprinted the novel in 1979 and has kept it in print since as part of its commitment to a growing catalog of Asian American literary classics. When Penguin Random House unexpectedly issued its own Penguin Classics edition in 2019, asserting that the work was in the public domain, Wong led a social media campaign to call attention to UWP’s work that garnered national and international media coverage, endorsements from Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen and Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang, and statements of support from scholars, including the Executive Committee of the American Studies Association. As a result, Penguin Random House agreed to withdraw its edition from US bookstores and also to license an international edition from UWP, with the Okada family receiving royalties on all copies sold.
“Professor Wong’s social media campaign advocating for the University of Washington Press and the responsible publication of this beloved novel brought attention to the longstanding value of university presses: our commitment to keeping important texts in print, our focus on quality and scholarly/historical significance over profit, the care with which we interact with authors and their estates, and our deep consideration in responsible publishing with respect to marginalized populations,” said UWP acquisitions editor and Stand UP Award nominator Mike Baccam.
“In the process of his successful advocacy, Professor Wong brought the important work we do as university presses into the spotlight,” said UWP editorial director Larin McLaughlin in her nomination letter. She also noted that “ongoing sales of No-No Boy secure a future for our work in a very material way” by contributing to UWP’s annual operating budget; its edition of the book has sold over 170,000 copies at this writing.
Wong has taught at the University of Washington since 1984. He is the author of two novels: Homebase (Reed and Canon, 1979; reissued by Plume in 1990 and again by UWP in 2008) and American Knees (Simon and Schuster, 1995; reissued by UWP in 2005). In addition, he is the editor or coeditor of six Asian American and American multiethnic literary anthologies, including the pioneering anthology Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (Howard University Press, 1974; 3rd edition, UWP, 2019), and a coeditor of Before Columbus Foundation Fiction/Poetry Anthology: Selections from the American Book Awards, 1980-1990 (W. W. Norton, 1992).
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