MIXED-RACE BLACK IDENTITIES IN POST-WAR JAPAN AND OKINAWA

WEDNESDAY, MAY 19, 2021 - 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM - ONLINE

Presented by the East Asia Center

Lily Anne Welty, professor of Asian American studies at UCLA, will present a talk on mixed-race black identities in Japan post World War II.

Mixed-race people born at the end of World War II made history quietly with their families and their communities. Wars and the military occupations that followed, coupled with increased migration across the Pacific, created a surge of interracial relationships, resulting in a mid-century multiracial baby boom. Easily identifiable by their mixed-race features, they were the children of the enemy: in Japan they symbolized defeat and racial impurity. In the U.S., they represented an extension of America’s democratic intervention abroad and for mixed-race adoptees in particular, they embodied the salvation that the U.S. offered Japan during the postwar occupation. Interracial communities, families, and mixed-race individuals challenged the default narrative of White normativity in the U.S. military and in the post-war period, while also expanding our understanding of the transnational Black Pacific, or the diaspora of Blacks in the Pacific Rim. While Black soldiers migrated west across the Pacific, some of their mixed-race children migrated east to the U.S. in the decades following World War II. This presentation with center the voices of mixed-race Black Japanese in post-war Japan and within the militarized borderland of Okinawa to examine the tropes of hybrid degeneracy and hybrid vigor as these individuals navigated their lives between invisibility and hyper-recognition.

This event is free and takes place on Zoom.