Hey, welcome, everyone.
Thank you for joining us today.
Today's lecture is
presented from the Center
of the Study of Race and
Ethnicity in America, CSREA.
It's also co-sponsored by
the Department of History,
the Department of
American Studies,
and the Office of
Institutional Diversity.
CSREA is an
interdisciplinary hub
that aims to build
community with the public,
and among scholars and students
working on race and ethnicity
in America.
My name is Naoko
Shibusawa, and I'm
in the Department of History
and American Studies,
and I'm on the
governing board of CSREA
or what Tricia Rose
likes to call us GB.
And I also want to thank
Tricia Rose for agreeing
to invite Gary Okihiro.
Of course, always Christina
Downs, and Caitlin Murphy,
without which any of
this could happen at all.
And so we're always
forever grateful to them.
And let me just start.
Oh, one more other thing.
We also invite you to attend a
research seminar with Professor
Okihiro tomorrow from 9:30 a.m.
To 11 a.m. at CSREA.
So you guys are all invited
to come if you can make it.
There are still-- there
are still some spots.
Not everyone can come, but if
you can come, please do come.
Gary Okihiro is professor
of international and public
affairs at Columbia University,
and the founding director
of Columbia Center for the
Study of Ethnicity and Race.
Before going to Columbia,
Professor Okihiro
was the director of
Asian-American studies
at Cornell University.
He is a past president
of AAAS, the Association
for Asian-American Studies,
and he was quite appropriately
a recipient of the
Lifetime Achievement
Award from the American
Studies Association.
He holds an honorary
doctorate from the University
of Ryukyus in Okinawa.
Professor Okihiro received
his PhD in African history
from UCLA in 1976.
But he is best known as
one of the leading scholars
of Asian-American history and
comparative ethnic studies.
He's amazingly prolific.
He has written 11 books.
11 books.
In all his books, but
particularly Cane Fires, 1991,
Margins and Mainstreams,
1994, Common Ground, 2001,
Pineapple Culture, 2008,
Island World-- I'll stop,
don't worry-- 2009.
And the subject
of tonight's talk,
Third World Studies:
Theorizing Liberation,
just published this September.
Professor Okihiro has urged
us to rethink binaries
and other divisions that
had been naturalized
in popular and
scholarly discourse.
Although he has helped
shaped the field
of Asian-American history and
comparative ethnic studies,
he's also actively working
to transgress the boundaries
that both defined and
constrained those fields.
As Professor Okihiro says,
"Academic disciplines
can liberate, but they can
also curb the imagination
and deny political commitments."
I think all of us can
agree, especially now more
so than ever, that this
is precisely what we need
into the foreseeable
future, both imagination
and political commitment.
So-- so welcome.
Well, thank you very
much, Professor Shibusawa.
In fact, I have to thank her
because she is the one who
invited me here, really.
I mean, she asked
about it, and you know.
So while I'm grateful to the
Center for Ethnicity and Race?
Race and Ethnicity.
Center for the Study of Race
and Ethnicity in America.
In America.
And its director, Tricia Rose.
Yeah.
Hey, man.
Did I actually shake
your hand before?
Come on.
Huh?
Welcome.
Oh.
Thank you so much.
She is the powerhouse.
We love her on the [INAUDIBLE].
Yeah.
All right.
I'm really grateful to be here.
Well, not really.
I'm an old man.
You know what I mean?
Like, I'm going to
face retirement,
and I just got through
teaching at Yale
and I have to take the
train, and oh my god.
I'm so tired now.
Like I told the guy here,
this is my happy hour.
I'm supposed to be drinking
wine, now, you know?
That's phasing
out, but I'm trying
to get my brain going
to talk to you guys.
Not that happy.
I'm sorry.
No.
I'm kidding, OK?
No, I'm really gratified that
all of you have come here,
and I appreciate that very much.
I know that you guys
record us, but that's OK.
Right?
No.
No.
OK.
That's wonderful.
So I don't want
to talk-- I don't
want this to be a monologue, so
like, I much prefer engagement.
You know?
But I'm hard of hearing.
So if I don't hear your
question, I'll be like--
No, I won't even mention this.
I won't even address
your question,
but you'll know that it's
because like I don't hear it,
OK?
Yeah.
So Third World Studies.
Hey, what is it?
Yeah, Theorizing Liberation.
The book itself
comes from my course
that I've taught for about 10
years, I guess, at Columbia.
And then now right now at Yale.
And it's called Third World
Studies or Introduction
to Third World Studies,
which I'm trying to invent?
Imagine?
A field of study that was
terminated on its birth.
It was killed on its birth.
And what I mean by that is in
the fall of 1968, third world
students or a coalition of
the Black Student Union,
a couple of Asian-American,
a Mexican-American,
an American Indian group joined
together in this coalition
called The Third World
Liberation Front.
Now think about that name--
Third World Liberation Front.
At that time, in
1968, the third world
conjured peoples of color.
Latin America, Africa, Asia,
the islands of the Pacific.
People of color were
placed within that umbrella
of the third world.
And some of you read
Vijay Prashad's book,
and he describes the third
world as a project named
by this French journalist,
Albert Sauvy, who
saw the world in the height
of the Cold War in 1955
as three worlds.
The first world being
the capitalist world.
The second being
the socialist world.
And the third
world, the majority
of mankind or humankind.
That's where we are.
We're the third world
and the third world
was being struggled over by
the imperial powers, both
of the first and second world.
These students named
themselves in solidarity
with peoples of the
third world, who
were seeking their
self-determination, liberation
from colonial rule.
Now think about that.
These are US students
identifying themselves
and their cause with the
people of the third world.
I was part of that generation,
and our generation's interests,
principally in the
US, was with that war
in Southeast Asia, which was
an imperial war of expansion
and conquest of that area.
And we understood ourselves
and our struggles in the US
in concert with, in solidarity
with, in identification
with the peoples
of the third world.
Now that's a remarkable thing.
And what they
realized, what they
understood from their
writings of the time,
that they were part of
this global liberation
struggle that was
about to change over
400 years of world history.
Now you think about that.
400 years the world had
been colonized by Europeans.
And these third world nations
were rising up in opposition
to that colonial rule.
They, little students at
San Francisco State College,
they were part of this third
world liberation movement.
It was an immense
project, an immense moment
to imagine oneself in
solidarity with that movement.
Now we know there are
all sorts of problems
with that identification
and so forth.
And yet, it was, I think,
a magnificent gesture
on the part of those students to
identify themselves with that.
As opposed, for example, with
the movement for equality
in the United States,
acquisition of civil rights,
which we shouldn't denigrate.
But they saw themselves as
part of a bigger movement.
They didn't name themselves
Third World National Front.
They called-- wait, no.
The National Liberation Front.
Oh, wow.
See?
I need my wine.
They didn't name themselves
National Liberation Front,
which was the names in
Vietnam and in Algeria.
They were national
liberation movements,
but the students saw themselves
beyond the nation state,
and imagined themselves globally
within this global struggle.
The faculty, when
they acquiesced,
and the administration,
they said OK.
After the longest strike in
higher education in the US,
we'll give you ethnic studies.
That's what they said, right?
They'll give you ethnic studies.
That's an interesting moment.
Third World Liberation Front
demanding a third world
curriculum, given
ethnic studies,
which is the name we use today.
That's why I'm saying third
world studies was terminated
at its inception.
We were given ethnic studies.
And I don't think that
the students recognized
that term or its genealogy,
its intellectual genealogy.
Because if they did, they
would reject it out of hand.
Some of the faculty
understood third world
to conjure up liberation
struggles, maybe Marxism, all
of these sort of bad things.
We'll give you ethnic studies.
All right.
I don't know where
I'm going now.
OK so maybe I should trace
the genealogy for you
of those terms and
the meanings of them.
OK.
Oh, wait.
Let me think, OK.
OK.
Let me just do that intellectual
genealogy first, OK?
All right.
So third world
studies, I believe,
comes from 1900 with WEB DuBois.
In London in 1900 at the
first Pan-African Congress,
DuBois said the problem
of the 20th century
is the problem of
the color line.
You all should know
that phrase, right?
The problem of the
20th century is
the problem of the color line.
You might not have
known that he said it
right at the start of the
century, the 20th century.
He declared it in London, the
seat of the British empire,
on which the sun never set.
It was the biggest imperial
power in the world at the time.
The first Pan-African
Congress met there,
and Du Bois said that was the
problem of the 20th century.
The problem he and others
like Frantz Fanon said
is not the rising of the third
world against colonial rule.
It is colonial
rule to begin with.
The institution of imperialism,
discursive and material,
that encompass the world.
And that has been fed on
the labor and the resources
of people of color.
Their land, their
resources, their labor
produce those great
European empires.
And Europe is rich because
the third world is poor.
They are relational.
They exist in relation,
one with the other.
Development is predicated
on under development, right?
So the problem of the
20th century begins there.
And that is the start
of this field of study
called Third World Studies.
It begins with anti-colonialism.
It begins with anti-racism.
Racism was the ideology that
supported colonial rule.
It justified the
imperial project,
and that's what Du
Bois had in mind
when he said the problem
of the 20th century
is the problem of
the color line.
So the ancestry of this field
of study is pretty considerable.
It doesn't start in 1968, this
starts in 1900, I believe.
OK?
All right.
To contain that problem
of the 20th century,
a discourse arose
called race relations.
Race relations was
a means by which
to identify and to suppress the
problem of the 20th century.
Race relations followed the
enlightenment ideas about race.
You guys know that, huh?
You guys-- Do you know, like--
when we talk about race,
what Are we talking
about, anyway?
Huh?
Huh?
What?
How would you, instead of
trace the idea of race,
where to and so forth?
It arises, I think, with the
European imperial project.
Imperialism, or the
spread of sovereignty,
European sovereignist
states that
cross the border,
beyond their borders,
extraterritorial expansion,
was accompanied by discourse.
Ideology and language
of rule and that
was a systematic way by which
to classify, characterize,
give attributes to, and rank
people, lands, plants, animals.
And that scheme was
a continental scheme.
Europe, Africa, Asia America
names the four major reasons
that you know today.
So it's a topographical
geographical determination
of peoples.
That organization
you see everywhere,
even today, in like
natural history museums.
You go to Africa hall,
you go to Asia hall,
you go to the Europe hall.
You see the people plants
animals of each continent
as if they were separate,
one from the other, when
in fact they are not.
Biotic communities cross
these borders, even oceans.
In Hawaii, where I come from,
we have plants and animals
that came across from
America and from Asia
before humans arrived there.
These biotic communities
violate those human inventions
of continents as discrete
entities and life
forms as discrete entities.
But that provided
a means by which,
say in like Linnaean system of
taxonomy, of ranking humans.
Describing their attributes.
You know the Linnaean
system of racialization
is based on an old Egyptian
idea of humors, humors you know?
Like joke telling.
No?
What are the humors?
Do you guys know?
Huh?
Emotions.
Emotions.
Sort of, yeah, which
derives from bodily fluids.
These are bodily
fluids that determine
one's sort of emotions
or characters,
along with one's stature,
conformation of musculature,
and so forth.
These humors determine
those four racial groups,
or racialized groups.
And you'll be surprised
that those attributes
remain in our discourse today.
You know?
For example, like phlegm
is the bodily fluid
that defines Africans.
Phlegm means Africans
are phlegmatic.
Slow, lazy.
Those ideas persist to today.
OK.
Anyway, wait, what am
I talking about anyway?
These imperial scripts that
accompany the actual material
subjugation of the
world, all right?
And those discourses are what
our subject matter is about,
because it is about
liberation, self-determination.
That term itself, by the
way-- I mean these are all
European ideas, OK?
Which is a problem.
That is a problem in trying to
devise a field of study that
is liberated from
Eurocentrism, European ideas.
Those ideas in this book do not
derive from third world people.
It derives from
Europeans, all right?
And that's a major problem.
But the major
problem is that you
have to use the master's tools
to dismantle the master's
house, regardless of
what Audre Lorde said,
I believe that we can do that.
We can.
We have to master those tools
and deconstruct the master's
house with those tools,
but in the process
create an entirely new
space, a new language,
new ideologies that have no
bearing with those ancestors.
So it's a strategic
move, only on way
to a kind of liberating idea
that might be only imagined
at this point.
That's why I conclude
with the fourth world, OK?
But we can talk about that.
But anyway-- all right.
See?
I'm going all over the place.
Let me structure this-- no.
I don't like structure.
I'm against structure.
I'm against borders.
We've got to break them down,
as Professor Shibusawa said.
OK, so like-- wait
I was going to trace
the genealogy of that idea,
the idea of race relations.
You don't understand.
Race relations was a means by
which to colonize, all right?
It identified-- Robert Park,
a sociologist at University
of Chicago-- and I'm sorry
I'm just picking on you guys
at the front row.
Let me look farther back.
Robert Park, a
Korean-American guy
at the University of Chicago.
You guys know that, huh?
Robert Park was not a
Korean-American, OK?
Robert Park studied
guess who with?
Huh?
Du Bois?
No.
Who was the
antagonist of Du Bois?
Huh?
Washington?
Booker T. Washington.
He was a research assistant
for Booker T Washington
at Tuskegee.
Hey, you guys are pretty good.
Very good.
All right.
Bob, you guys have
sharp students at Brown.
Yeah.
All right.
[LAUGHTER]
I actually-- I was a little
embarrassed because at Yale
I read this passage.
"When in the course of
human events it becomes--"
Where is that from?
Nobody could identify that, the
US Declaration of Independence.
You know?
Yeah.
Anyway, Booker T.
Washington, all right?
Yeah, at Tuskegee.
He learned race relations there.
You know who Booker T.
Washington's master teacher
was?
Nobody would know him,
Samuel Chapman Armstrong.
When my wife and I went
to Hampton Institute,
he's the founder of Hampton
Institute in Virginia.
We went to the
gate and the guard
at the gate approached
us, and I said,
do you know where the grave
of Samuel Armstrong is?
And she's like, who?
Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the
founder of this university.
No.
Don't have a clue.
All right.
So then we went inside,
and we saw a cemetery
at the back of the university
grounds, and so we went there
and there was a guy
there mowing the lawn.
But it looked definitely like
a military, an army cemetery
because of the
tombstones I noted.
They're standard
throughout the world, OK?
And we asked the guy, do you
know another graveyard maybe
in this place?
And he's began to, uh, oh,
you mean that all abandoned
graveyard back that way.
So we went back that
way, and sure enough,
we found old Samuel lying there
with a rock at his head, lava
rock, from Hawaii.
And at his feet a granite
rock from Williamstown.
He went to Williams College.
He was born in Hawaii.
He was the son of
missionaries in Hawaii.
He was the one who started
at Hampton Institute.
Hampton Institute
educated recently
freed slaves or
African-Americans
to make them teachers, so
they can teach the masses
of African-Americans.
Not teach them science,
mathematics, philosophy no
to teach them how to
work with their hands,
not with their minds.
A manual education.
That idea of subjection,
of servitude,
of staying in your
place, was what
Booker T. Washington--
the Atalanta compromise
agreed to, all right?
Now that's the genealogy
of Robert Park.
Robert Park took those
ideas to Chicago,
and he and others, colleagues at
Chicago started race relations.
Race relations,
Robert Park said,
exists because there are
race problems in this world.
Like for example, he
says, in South Africa
there are these Africans
who are rising up
against the colonial
masters there.
They are a problem.
That's how we study
problems, you see?
To contain them.
His famous-- Robert Park's--
two problems in the US was
the Negro problem and
the oriental problem,
because these two
races were visible.
Physically they could
be distinguished
and thus, they pose a
problem for assimilation.
All right?
Race relations was
a major paradigm
for the founders of sociology
in the United States
in the late 19th century,
and race relations
argued that segregation was
a means by which to contain
racial conflict and problems.
As long as people, the
subordinated group,
remained contentedly
in their places, cool.
Cool.
But if they started to try
to gain equality and rights,
then they become a
problem and we're
going to have to figure
out how to solve that.
So race relations,
that's it, all right?
Now, Boas, the anthropologist
at Columbia, Franz Boas,
separated race from ethnicity.
He said culture, or ethnicity,
is not coterminous with race.
They used to believe that race
and culture were coterminous,
you see?
That is that if you're a
particular racial group,
you have a particular culture.
He said that's false.
All right?
So ethnicity became
another category,
and ethnicity came to be defined
at Chicago as ethnic studies.
Ethnic studies was a means by
which to study US diversity.
Late 19th century,
unprecedented immigration,
very different from the previous
immigrations from Southern
and Eastern Europe.
Different cultures,
religions, languages.
How do we assimilate
these immigrants is
the problem of ethnic studies.
Think about that now.
You see?
The students of the Third
World Liberation Front
were given that subject matter,
that title, ethnic studies.
And it's interesting
that in their discussions
of the faculty and
the administration,
they referred to
African-Americans
as race relations and Asians,
Latinx, American Indians,
as ethnic studies.
They were considered
ethnic groups.
Hispanics in the US census
today are considered
a cultural group, not a race.
Well, so this is about
third world studies.
It involves the subject
matter, which is power,
and the locations and
articulations of power.
It involves the
idea of nationalism
from Frantz Fanon's Wretched
of the Earth, his chapter
on national culture,
how national culture
was means of liberation,
which is what the third world
students believed in.
Those nationalisms,
in turn, I think
led us to these dead
ends of separate cells--
African-Americans
Asian-Americans, Latinx,
American Indians.
They're not crossing.
That's our own.
We speak to our own
communities, and our own people.
Even here at Brown, I'm sure.
Asian-American Studies
classes are populated mainly
by Asian-American students.
Latinx classes by Latinos,
and American Indian
and African-Americans.
Rarely, even under the rubric
of third world studies,
are the students moving
into those classrooms
of all the groups.
We still I think fall under
those racialize categories.
It's empowering, that
is those categories,
like black power was
an amazing concept.
But it also separated people.
That's the problem.
