Harney Lecture Series: Understanding Race Beyond the Transatlantic Paradigm

Is “Race” a modern Western construction? This talk aimed to introduce a new understanding of race beyond the transatlantic paradigm. While transatlantic racialization often entailed encounters of peoples with pronouncedly different physical features, in parts of Continental Europe and Asia racialization initially took place mostly between groups who had no or nearly no identifiable phenotypical distinctions. Yasuko Takezawa presented what she calls the three dimensions of “race”—“race”, “Race”, and “race as a Resistance”— to provide a more encompassing, global understanding of race. She presented examples of each dimension of race and discuss how the three interconnect, coalescing to produce and reinforce an overarching idea of “Race.”

 

 

Yasuko Takezawa is Professor at the Intercultural Research Institute, Kansai Gaidai University, and Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, Kyoto University. She is currently the Paul I. Terasaki Endowed Chair of the International Institute of University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her fields of interest are Anthropology, Sociology, and American Studies.

Professor Takezawa has been leading a series of large international collaborative research projects over the past two decades. As visiting professor, she has taught at various universities outside of Japan as well, including MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Heidelberg University, and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is a member of Science Council of Japan (SCJ), the representative organization of Japanese scientist community. She has published two monographs, a dozen of edited or co-edited volumes in Japanese as well as several journal special issues.

 

Sponsors: the Harney Program in Ethnic, Immigration, and Pluralism Studies, the Asian Institute, and the Centre for the Study of Global Japan.