Lacey Parks Events

Program Description

Join James Ikeda as he presents a narrative of Asian American history that goes beyond the traditional story of Asian immigrants overcoming discrimination and assimilating into the United States. This talk will focus on the larger contexts which shaped the flows of Asian migrants to the US in the first place—contexts defined in large part by the history of empire. Ikeda hopes to reframe Asian American history to shed light on the present, and the future, of Asian America.   

Speaker

James Chiyoki Ikeda is a Japanese-American educator, historian, union organizer, and musical artist based in Greater Boston. He is also a PhD candidate in World History at Northeastern University, where he is writing a dissertation on the Black feminist poet June Jordan and the development of her vision of universal liberation from the 1960s until the early 2000s. More broadly, his research concerns the various ways African Americans and Asian Americans have understood their own national liberatory projects as part of a global liberatory project that blended antiracism with anticolonialism in the years since the Vietnam War. When he is not teaching, writing, researching, or organizing, he tours the country with his punk band The Michael Character.