About

Diane C. Fujino is a professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her academic specialization includes Asian American social movement history, Japanese American radical history from the 1940s to the 1970s, Black Power studies and the Black Radical Tradition, Afro-Asian solidarities, political history, activist-scholarship research, and pedagogies. Her work is influenced by Black Liberation and Third World anti-imperialist internationalism, and she studies Asian American activist histories within this context. Fujino has contributed significantly to the understanding of Asian American activism, emphasizing the formulation of the term 'Asian American' as a form of resistance that is anti-racist, anti-imperialist, pan-Asian, and Third Worldist. She has explored collective leadership in Asian American movements, Japanese American radicalism, and the legacy of the Black Panther Party, including its ongoing impact on contemporary struggles. Her biography of Yuri Kochiyama, 'Heartbeat of Struggle,' was recognized by Esquire magazine as one of the 50 best biographies of all time. She has also co-edited works on Asian American activism and Black Power afterlives. Fujino's current research examines Japanese American activism during the early Cold War, focusing on alternative pathways to the model minority trope and the development of radical solidarities and democracy. She is actively involved in community-engaged projects, developing models of liberatory scholar-organizer collaborations, and fostering ethnic studies partnerships through programs like ÉXITO. She serves as Associate Dean and Faculty Equity Advisor in the Division of Social Sciences at UCSB, and she has held leadership roles such as Chair of the Asian American Studies department and Director of the Center for Black Studies Research. Her work aims to transform communities and create a more equitable world through scholarship, activism, and education.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Computer Science
• Management
• Media studies
• Library science
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• Rhizomatic Organizing, Collective Leadership, and Community-Centered Pedagogy in the Early Asian American Movement

  Journal of American Studies · 2024-09-20 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article examines the rhizomatic approach to political organizing developed by the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA). AAPA, founded in 1968 in Berkeley, CA, is an organization of historical significance, having introduced the term “Asian American” to signify a new political identity and developed the first pan-Asian nationwide social movement. Yet the scholarly treatment of AAPA has been rather cursory. This article is one of the the most extensively researched studies of AAPA. In three parts, it examines AAPA's (a) rhizomatic approach to political organizing, (b) model of collective leadership, and (c) community-centered pedagogy. First, the article conceptualizes AAPA's rhizomatic mode, which fostered the decentralized, interconnected participation of many people. AAPA prioritized a participatory model that also created space for women to have influence. Second, examining AAPA's activities shows an approach to community-based organizing that affirmed the knowledge produced by ordinary people gained through their lived experiences. Third, the article explores the importance of relationship building and rhizomatic networks in AAPA's growth across the nation. While not exclusive of vertical structures, AAPA's focus on egalitarian, collaborative organizing infused the national movement and helped to make collective leadership a hallmark of the broader Asian American movement.

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• Editors' Preface

  Journal of Asian American Studies · 2023-03-01

  articleSenior author

  Editors' Preface Lisa Sun-Hee Park and Diane C. Fujino The Journal of Asian American Studies (JAAS) began publication in 1998 as the official publication of the Association for Asian American Studies. With the current issue, we are now commemorating the journal's twenty-fifth anniversary and to mark this significant moment, we invited distinguished scholars to comment on what they view as important intellectual developments in Asian American Studies. We had intended these "reflections of the field" essays to provide a focused and timely critique on a given topic that coincides with their own area of research. In their respective essays, Moon-Ho Jung, Professor and the Harry Bridges Endowed Chair in Labor Studies in the History Department at the University of Washington, and Martin Manalansan IV, Professor and the Beverly & Richard Fink Professor in Liberal Arts in the American Studies Department at the University of Minnesota, did just this and more. Moon-Ho Jung begins with an arresting vignette–lasting a few minutes at most–of an interaction between Arundhati Roy and Howard Zinn that occurred in 2003, after the US invasion of Iraq. This fleeting interaction sets the stage for Jung's incisive critique of nationalism and its persistent existence in articulations of Asian American history. Like some of the most significant contributions in Asian American studies, Jung takes a seemingly minute exchange and analytically pulls out a meaningful assertation that lies beneath–that the narrative of "immigrant America" is a nationalistic, sanitizing process that reinforces US empire. Martin Manalansan, takes a different but equally powerful approach in his essay. Following his own (disjointed) career trajectory, Manalansan outlines the experience of exceptionalism and isolation that results from the ways in which Asian American studies and LGBTQ studies have each worked to institutionalize their respective fields. Ever the optimist, Manalansan concludes his essay by providing an analytical key to creating a more expansive, fluid, and [End Page v] coalitional future–it is in fact something we already know as foundational to the beginnings of both Asian American studies and LGBTQ studies. He writes that we need to get back to "street knowledge;" grounded in the "realities of injustices, oppressions, and violence that compel us to act and move beyond institutionalized arrangements and scripted futures." To round out the commemorative section of this issue, Donna Doan Anderson took on the challenge of articulating a history of JAAS. Editorial Assistant for JAAS and graduate student in history and Asian American studies at UC Santa Barbara, Anderson contacted past editors of JAAS and sorted through data accumulated over the past twenty-five years to provide a snapshot of the journal and its reflection of the many shifts and tensions in the field. Anderson astutely notes that JAAS exists to "grapple with the field's growing pains" and, while the journal has successfully developed into an important academic resource (top 10 percent of journals viewed on Project MUSE!), questions remain about the costs of institutionalization and the current purpose of Asian American studies. As Editors of JAAS, we view these pressing, difficult concerns as central to the continued relevance of the journal itself. It is why JAAS exists. The next section of this issue is devoted to two research articles. The first is an important contribution by Na-Rae Kim, which focuses on the shifting cultural, legal, and political uses of North Koreans in the US imaginary. Bringing together theoretical critiques of war, militarization, humanitarianism, and critical refugee studies, Kim analyzes memoirs by a North Korean defector and a Korean American journalist about their experiences in North Korea, both published in 2015. Kim argues that 2015 was a pivotal year in which North Korean refugees became assimilable; culminating in 2018, when Donald Trump (who won the presidency based largely on anti-immigration politics) featured Ji Seong-ho, a North Korean defector, as an "American hero" in his State of the Union address. Kim's fascinating interdisciplinary study thoughtfully and engagingly explains how such an incongruent event came to pass. She shows also that the narrative structure of both memoirs are familiar constructions, with deep roots in both US and global literary traditions. Kim summarizes her analysis by reinforcing a foundational lesson in...

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• Introduction BUILDING AN ARCHIVE OF ASIAN AMERICAN ORGANIZING PRAXIS

  University of Washington Press eBooks · 2022-12-31

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Editors' Preface

  Journal of Asian American Studies · 2022-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Editors' Preface Diane C. Fujino and Lisa Sun-Hee Park This special issue of the Journal of Asian American Studies presents a wide range of scholars raising critical questions about the work of Asian American studies. The guest editors, Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Lily Anne Y. Welty Tamai, and Paul Spickard, invited scholars to wrestle with the inter/discipline of the field at the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Association for Asian American Studies in 1979. Several of the essays began as presentations at the 2018 AAAS, and all had drafts completed before the pandemic. COVID-19 disrupted this special issue, as it did all our personal, professional, and collective lives. Many authors revised their essays in 2021, revisiting their ideas through the lens of the urgencies of the global health pandemic as well as the intensified focus on anti-Asian racism and antiblack state violence. The seventeen scholars in this special issue interrogate—from different disciplines, methods, and perspectives—the work of Asian American studies, not as a static field, but as one responsive to scholarly theorizing and to interventions and changes in the material and discursive society in which we are embedded. The essays vary widely. But taken as a whole, this issue makes explicit and implicit inquiries about the kinds of questions that frame Asian American studies and what this then obscures. They wonder whether the original goals of the field—with its focus on, as the guest editors note, "communities, partnerships with activism, solidarity with other communities of color, and defense against racism and gender and class oppression"—ought to be the primary mechanisms animating the field, or in what ways these ideas have shifted and towards what new formations. This is not to suggest that there is a disavowal of the original goals of the field. In fact, many authors suggest that the ideas and critiques and activist struggles that established the field either remain or, having shifted away, are now being revisited. While some might assume that Asian American studies [End Page v] is "designed for the advancement of Asian-raced people," it is, as Kandice Chuh states, "a way of bringing to bear the critique of power as the energizing force of the field." Her essay invites us to re-evaluate the meanings of what we think we understand about the field and its interrogations of power. Several of the essays work to critique and expand the field, and, perhaps seemingly paradoxically, some "newer" ideas actually reactivate ideas permeating the field's founding. Yê´n Lê Espiritu, in her article in this issue, looks at the ways critical refugee studies demands the global study of race, imperialism, and war, beyond the domestic landscape of what some consider Asian American studies. Lisa Yoneyama invites the field to consider how transpacific critique, as well as Native Pacific Islander studies and Southeast Asian studies, shapes Asian American studies. Josephine Nock-Hee Park, borrowing from Roderick Ferguson, asks what it means when we replace redistribution power with representational frameworks. She uses her own experiences at the university to critique narratives of success and to explore what is gained and what is lost through institutionalization. Naoko Shibusawa similarly uses compelling examples from her own experiences in various campus struggles to offer reflections on solidarity. She delves into the tensions swirling today among people centering antiblackness and Afro-pessimism to the exclusion of other kinds of racisms. Her musing on the specific and nuanced ways in which anti-Asian racism manifests (as a "sucker-punch" in her formulation) reminds us of Mitsuye Yamada's widely circulated essay, "Invisibility is an Unnatural Disaster." Jean-Paul R. Contreras deGuzman, and Douglass Ishii in a separate essay, share candid reflections on the life of contingent labor in the university and what is being asked of a field that claims to center critiques of power and work for transformative justice. We are proud to have redesigned the journal's cover to feature artwork, and view the cover's visual image as evocation of the themes in this issue. The artist, Cece Carpio, identifies as an Asian American, Filipina Indigenous immigrant who specializes in creating public art locally, nationally, and internationally. Her...

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• Preface

  Journal of Asian American Studies · 2022-02-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Preface Diane C. Fujino and Lisa Sun-Hee Park The articles in this issue work in two kinds of temporalities, looking back in history and looking forward in ways that recognize how the past shapes the present and future. We release this volume on the eightieth anniversary of Executive Order 9066, established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, that set in motion the forced displacement and incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans. The cover art represents the 1940s/1980s/2020s, or 40-year intervals of incarceration, redress, and ongoing struggle. All the pieces in this issue, while not planned in this way, signal new challenges for the future of Asian American studies or ways to rethink the past. SCHOLARLY ARTICLES Four scholarly articles are featured, two of which focus on textual analysis of literary works, poetry, and film, and two on studies of activism. Hee-Jung Joo’s provocative article examines the dominant narrative of Asians as technically efficient robots, yet paradoxically asks us not to critique the dehumanization of the trope, but instead to ask what changes when we move away from a demand for full humanity. She pivots away from the re-inscription of liberal humanism to an invocation of queer inhumanism, one that challenges queer liberalism’s call for assimilationism into hegemonic institutions as well as the supremacy of the human itself. The author’s study of three media that frame Asians as robots—Margaret Rhee’s poetry, Greg Pak’s short films, and Chang-rae Lee’s speculative novel—offers many insights about race and Asian American racialization, gender, and queer embodiments. All of this rests on a pedagogy of raising questions. Rather than viewing human above machine, Joo offers a [End Page v] biosocial and relationship approach to race that invites us to explore the already present entanglements of humans and machines in ways that distance us from anthropocentric claims for inclusion into liberal humanism. Then, Jennifer Lee raises the need for robust multilingual approaches to Asian American literature, against the anglophone bias of the field. She presents a nuanced analysis of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s literary publication, Dictee, as well as a discussion of the author and artist herself. Once discovered and circulated in the 1990s, Dictee became a central text in the development of Asian American literary studies. Following Kandice Chuh’s position that Asian American studies is defined less by its subject formation and more by its critique, Lee argues that the field’s reliance on English-language texts limits its own commitments to anti-imperialist critique. In the anglophone, there is so much that cannot be expressed, creating an impossibility of writing of Asian American experience, of history and culture. Lee’s discussion of the Korean-language reception to Dictee opens a conversation about Asian American studies’ focus on critiques of empire, whether “problematizing flows of capital and knowledge production” or understandings of colonialism, militarism, and migrations. In the end, Lee asks: What is foreclosed by the reliance on English-language texts in Asian American literature? We next turn to two articles on Asian American activism, with different foci of time, geography, and thematics. Jane Hong examines the role of religious-based organizations in the Asian American Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Her article fills in gaps in the study of faith-based activism within Asian American studies, which contrasts with Black studies’ centering of the church and activism. Hong’s study examines two California-based Asian American Christian organizations that diverge in size, scope, and approach to leadership: the Asian American Center for Theology and Strategies (ACTS), based in Berkeley, focused on reforming the established church; and the Agape Fellowship, in Los Angeles, formed as an evangelical commune. ACTS, comprised of multiple denominations and Chinese, Filipino, and primarily Nisei (second-generation Japanese American) ministers, worked inside and outside the church, including in the justice-oriented Glide Memorial church and the Third World Liberation Front strikes for ethnic studies. Agape, a small and intensive communal living space for activist and religious practice, developed youth leadership that became active in Asian American ministries and community-based organizations. Hong’s examination of the problems emerging from authoritative leadership...

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• Chapter 5 DRIVERS ON THE FRONT LINES The New York Taxi Workers Alliance, Neoliberalism, and Global Pandemic—An Interview with Javaid Tariq

  University of Washington Press eBooks · 2022-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Chapter 5 DRIVERS ON THE FRONT LINES The New York Taxi Workers Alliance, Neoliberalism, and Global Pandemic—An Interview with Javaid Tariq was published in Contemporary Asian American Activism on page 130.

  PublisherDOI

• Editors’ Preface

  Journal of Asian American Studies · 2021-01-01

  articleSenior author

  Editors’ Preface Lisa Sun-Hee Park and Diane C. Fujino We write this preface at a particularly difficult moment within a particularly difficult year and a half. The targeted deaths of Asian American women in Georgia graphically punctuated the heightened violence against Asian Americans in general during the COVID-19 pandemic. In response, there have been numerous public engagements on these incidents as people try to grapple with the larger issues that lie beneath. Overall, these writings and pronouncements brought limited solace. It is our hope that the articles in this issue, which coalesce around matters of alternative knowledges and their potential radical solidarities in the face of profound structural injustices, provide the analytical grounding needed to grasp how we might move forward in ways that unsettle the now-standard resolutions. In addition, we would like to highlight the important work of the new JAAS Podcast (available through the New Books Network), hosted by our reviews editor, Christopher Patterson. The latest episode features a roundtable discussion with organizers and scholars on Asian migrant sex work and is definitely worth a listen. The articles presented here come together in striking and powerful ways. Each focuses on settler colonialism through the vantage point of the Pacific Islands and/or Philippines, but each also brings a distinct analytical and methodological contribution. On their own and collectively, the works presented in this issue push our thinking of the possibilities of Asian American studies. Nadine Attewell and Wesley Attewell’s article focuses on photographs taken by Benedicto Kayampat Villaverde, a Pinoy man from Hawai’i who [End Page v] was a member of the US armed forces and deployed to Vietnam in the 1960s. “War correspondence” of a different sort, Villaverde captured hundreds of images of Southeast Asian women who labored on a US military base. The authors argue that these images are distinct in their banality. These photographs of wartime display the “bright light, blue skies, and puffy white clouds” of a seemingly peaceful afternoon. The authors note that they “encourage us to wonder about the textures of everyday life during wartime for both (Asian) Americans like Villaverde and Southeast Asians alike” and, in so doing, they point towards “alternative orders of knowledge, affinity, and attachment.” In their beautifully written piece, Attewell and Attewell articulate a particular, transpacific circuit of learning structured by empire that is recognized and contested as such by its diasporic subjects. Sony Coráñez Bolton’s article focuses on the complex implications of one such diasporic narrative—a fictional one created by Miguel Syjuco. Here, Bolton considers the “settler ideologies” that adhere to queer diasporic subjects as they engage and absorb knowledges of settler colonies before returning to the homeland. Are we witnessing the formation of a “settler sexuality” created at least in part from liberal cosmopolitan queerness in these imperial movements? In analytically centering the return of a queer diasporic protagonist, Bolton provocatively asks if the ideology of settler colonialism is yet another “remittance” paid by Filipinos. And, a Filipinx American critique, Bolton argues, is key in addressing these connections, or queer intersections, of US imperialism and settler colonialism. The particular queer intersections articulated by Bolton are familiar in the “illegible” imperatives described by Alana Bock in her analysis of the artwork of Crystal Z. Campbell, a Filipina, Chinese, and African American artist based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Campbell’s creative excavation of public secrets proves to be a fertile space for the author in not only grappling with the “intimacies between imperial violence, (neo)liberalism, and anti-blackness,” but also the radical possibilities of moving squarely into such difficult convergences. Through Campbell’s art, Bock shows how one might embrace illegibility in an effort to imagine, in Attewell and Attewell’s words, alternative affinities. In this way, Bock subverts common understandings of illegibility, or in this specific case, the unknowingness of Filipinx America as an act of failure to make sense. Instead, Bock argues that in Campbell’s work, an unruly Black presence within an already illegible Filipinx America serves to unsettle imperial ideologies in a productive, radical way. In her article, Kim Compoc shifts our attention to another creative form—poetry—as a mode to consider the continued...

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• Editors' Preface

  Journal of Asian American Studies · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Library science

  Editors' Preface Diane C. Fujino and Lisa Sun-Hee Park We are pleased to announce the transition of the Journal of Asian American Studies to the University of California, Santa Barbara, with Lisa Sun-Hee Park and Diane C. Fujino taking up the helm as co-Editors-in-Chief. This issue begins with a special forum that focuses on issues of utmost importance and complexity and using an innovative format for an academic journal. We would like to think that this anticipates the continuing growth of the journal and expansion into thinking, writing, reading, and exploring in ways that intertwine critical analysis with experimentation and praxis to advance knowledge in our field and society writ large. This will require us to fill big shoes—both those developed in Asian American Studies across more than 50 years and those built by the outgoing editor-in-chief, Rick Bonus. We extend our deep appreciation to Rick for his vision, his ethos of democratic and liberatory practice, his fierce organization, and his caring ways. Our thanks also go to the Association for Asian American Studies Board of Directors; Reviews Editor Lan Dong, Assistant Editor Thaomi Michelle Dinh, the JAAS Editorial Board, and the Johns Hopkins University Press editorial staff. We wish to introduce the journal's new editorial team, which includes Christopher B. Patterson as Reviews Editor and Donna Anderson as Assistant Editor. This issue begins with erin Khuê Ninh and Shireen Roshanravan's co-edited special forum, "#WeToo: A Reader." This daring collection of writings focuses on racialized sexual violence, but not in ways that create any easy divide between perpetrator and survivor. The articles examine the multiple forms of violence and ongoing traumas caused by active aggressors and [End Page vii] enabled through the silencing, denial, and complicity of men and women. The narratives reveal unmistakable acts of violence as well as the ambiguous. They address interlocking systems of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation, and intergenerational trauma, both structural and interpersonal, that impact the lives of Asian Americans. The authors self-identify as cis, queer, and trans of various Asian and multiracial ancestry. Together, the pieces seek to address, as the co-editors write, "a research question, or maybe a riddle: "What do you get when you cross model-minority racialization and rape culture?" In ways unusual for scholarly journals, this one included, this forum includes primarily poetry, fiction, memoir, and graphic novel, as well as scholarship. Yet, the ways it intersects with scholarly knowledge is clear. It explores the richness, nuances, and contradictions of inner life, "theory in the flesh" that too often disappears in academic writings. It engages honesties and vulnerabilities of a personal nature that require courage and a steady pen. It is intended as a "reader" and we, like so many other readers of JAAS, will recognize the need for such a compilation of writings to assign, bravely, in our classes, to offer language to break the model minority silence around sexual violence in Asian American communities, and to support our students and perhaps ourselves as well. This issue further includes two scholarly articles outside the special forum. Constancio Arnaldo's article, "'We're just as good and even better than you': Asian American Female Flag Footballers and the Racial Politics of Competition," examines the workings of racialized gender and the Asian American feminine body in sports. Based in ethnographic research, Arnaldo shows flag football as a site where Asian American women athletes perform identities that are both constrained by and contest constructions of Asian American women as hyperfeminine and hypersexual. Their agility and athleticism are seen in spectacular spin moves, touchdowns, and defensive maneuvers, and yet, they face the ongoing invisibility so familiar to Asian Americans in sports. Arnaldo reveals the Asian American women athlete's off-the-court maneuvers to assert identities and performances on their own terms. Balbir Singh's article, "'Anchorless Unknown': Reading and Feeling the Komagata Maru Beyond Repair," expands the notion of the archive to read feelings into a historical incident through textual analyses of two state apologies and a poem. In 1914, the Canadian government refused the disembarkment of 376 mainly Sikh, but Muslim and Hindu migrants as well...

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• M<scp>asumi</scp> I<scp>zumi</scp>. <i>The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law: Civil Liberties Debates from the Internment to McCarthyism and the Radical 1960s</i>.

  The American Historical Review · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Law
  • Political Science

  In The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law, Masumi Izumi intervenes in the debates between civil liberties and national security by tracing the ideas that led to the passage of a law that was never implemented and yet has far-reaching implications to this day. Her focus is on Title II (Emergency Detention Act) of the Internal Security Act of 1950, or the McCarran Act, that upon declaration of a national emergency legalized “preventive detention,” authorizing restrictions on freedoms for certain individuals who might threaten internal security (2). The act reflected and reproduced the nation’s growing anti-communist sentiments and represented a shift away from the yellow peril fears of the previous decade. The book’s most outstanding contribution is its compelling examination of how another preventive detention—the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans—formed the basis for the McCarran Act. Izumi is interested in the discursive ideas that shaped the balance...

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• Editors' Preface

  Journal of Asian American Studies · 2021-01-01

  articleSenior author

  Editors' Preface Lisa Sun-Hee Park and Diane C. Fujino The articles in this issue provide a glimpse of the difficult questions and expansive, insightful possibilities that drive the discipline of Asian American studies. While each paper identifies a distinct research agenda and methodological approach, they all make clear the urgency of their fundamental contributions. The unsaid and unspeakable are exposed in careful and meticulous ways, with the understanding that such acts of engagement are crucial steps toward justice. The first three papers begin in Korea—a tiny peninsula, forever entangled with one empire after another, and the far too common horrors of sexual violence as an instrument of colonization. Yuri Doolan's piece begins by uncovering the origins of a "vexed intrapersonal relation" associated with adopted children from Korea. Doolan begins by noting that studies of Korean adoption often reference camptowns—neighborhoods near US military bases where off-duty troops find recreational activities, including sexual services, provided by local residents—in passing, as mere background context to a larger point. Doolan convincingly argues that this is a crucial, missed opportunity in understanding not only international adoption but also the sexual and racial formation of Korean and Korean American women in the United States. The author traces the discursive and ideological framing of adopted girls from Korea as rescued and rehabilitated prostitutes, as needing to be saved from "a perverse heredity and carnal savagery." The presumed origins of adopted children as sons or daughters of prostitutes became central to the maintenance of international adoptions from South Korea. Doolan illustrates how this [End Page v] persistent hypersexualization of Korean orphans and Korean American women functions to promote US exceptionalism as a humanitarian nation. Then, Laura Barberán Reinares shifts our approach to issues of sexual violence, empire, and Korea through the literary works of three Korean American authors: Therese Park, Nora Okja Keller, and Chang-rae Lee. Reinares focuses on the ethics and aesthetics of representing sexual violence through language by analyzing the narration of systematic rapes endured by "comfort women" in World War II. In this article, Barberán Reinares outlines the complex task of writers in depicting sexual violence, or verbally representing the "unrepresentable." Barberán Reinares highlights the conundrum for these writers as they grapple with the discursive limits of a human rights approach to faithfully relay stories of violence as evidence for justice, knowing that the narration (fictional or otherwise) of detailed accounts may in fact reobjectify victims by merely serving others' voyeuristic curiosity. In her careful analysis, Barberán Reinares shows how these three authors avoid potentially exploitative imagery without necessarily sacrificing the political for the aesthetic. In their fictionalized representations, each author, in their own manner, creatively focuses on the inner, abject aspect of violence through a variety of narrative tools. In this way, fictional representations can convey the gravity of the violence while also developing characters not solely defined by their abuse. In Na-Young Lee's paper, we see that human rights discourse comes with further complications. The struggle to bring accountability for the violence inflicted by the Japanese military sexual slavery system illustrates how even the most egregious acts of state violence do not necessarily warrant collective repudiation or international action. Justice does not just happen. In the case of "comfort women," a coordinated effort by many individuals was required. These activists had to not only shift our understanding of human rights beyond issues that center men and thereby obscure sexual or intimate violence as worthy of global attention, but also question normative Western notions of "universal" human rights, which diminish issues raised by global south nations as "local" concerns. Lee provides a detailed "backstage" account of how "comfort women" activism by Korean women was central in making this shift. Lee argues that an international movement in solidarity with "comfort women" rewrote the norms of global women's rights in the 1990s. Incorporating methods of oral history interviews, participant observations, and textual analysis of activist archives, Lee carefully maps how this international effort transcended the boundaries of nation, race, and gender. The next article, by Lei Zhang, details a human rights activism of a different sort. Following the Tiananmen Square crackdown of...

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Frequent coauthors

• Lisa Sun-Hee Park

  6 shared

• Robyn Magalit Rodriguez

  5 shared

• Stanley Sue

  Palo Alto University

  4 shared

• David T. Takeuchi

  3 shared

• Li‐tze Hu

  2 shared

• Nolan Zane

  2 shared

• Matef Harmachis

  1 shared

• Sumie Okazaki

  Reinhardt University

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Inaugural Faculty Diversity Award from the UCSB Academic Sen…