Diane C. Fujino

Professor
fujino@ucsb.edu

Office Location: 

HSSB 5034

Specialization: 

Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles

Asian American social movement history, Japanese American radical history 1940s-1970s, Black Power studies and the Black Radical Tradition, Afro-Asian solidarities, political history, activist-scholarship research and pedagogies.

Bio: 

Diane C. Fujino is professor of Asian American Studies at UC Santa Barbara, and immediate past co-editor of the Journal of Asian American Studies, with Lisa Park.  She studies Asian American activist histories, influenced by Black Liberation and Third World anti-imperialist internationalism.
 
Recent publications include: “Political Asian America,” which shows how the very term “Asian American” was formulated as a term of resistance that was at once anti-racist and anti-imperialist, pan-Asian and Third Worldist, thus defying conventional Asian American racialization. Another article examines the “rhizomatic” and collective leadership of the Asian American Political Alliance and of Yuri Kochiyama. Other publications counter the trope of Nisei assimilationism to reveal a legacy of Japanese American radicalism (Nisei Radicals). She is co-editor of a special issue of Amerasia Journal on Asian American activism studies and Contemporary Asian American Activism: Building Movements for Liberation, both with Robyn Rodriguez.
 
Her biography, Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama, was included in Esquire magazine’s “The 50 Best Biographies of All Times,” an indication of its impact to broader publics.
 
Her co-edited book, Black Power Afterlives: The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party, examines the continuing impact of the Black Panthers on today’s activist struggles, and includes her writings on Emory Douglas, Akinsanya Kambon, and Hank Jones and interviews with Ericka Huggins and Mary Hooks.
 
Her current book project examines Japanese American activism in the early Cold War, arguing that alternative pathways existed to the rise of the model minority trope that disciplined Black militancy and decolonial movements abroad—activist struggles that created possibilities for "deep solidarities" and radical democracy.  Based in this project, her articles on the Nisei Progressives appear in the Journal of Asian American Studies and on the Japanese American struggle around the McCarran-Walter Act in Pacific Historical Review.
 
Fujino was awarded the inaugural “Faculty Diversity Award” from the UCSB Academic Senate in 2019. She serves as Associate Dean and Faculty Equity Advisor in the Division of Social Sciences.
 
She has long been interested in questions of how we transform communities and create the world we want to live in. Towards this end, she is developing collaborative models of liberatory focused scholar-organizer projects. She is Director of the Community Studies Pathway Program and co-PI of the Organizing Knowledge Project. She is working to develop K12-university ethnic studies partnerships in ÉXITO, a UCSB program to develop future and current ethnic studies educators; as co-author of chapters in Foundations and Futures, the Asian American Studies digital textbook, hosted by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center; and as a core organizer of the Ethnic Studies Now! Santa Barbara Coalition, which won ethnic studies as a high school graduation requirement in the SBUSD in 2018. She is the Chair of the Steering Committee of the Cedric J. and Elizabeth P. Robinson Archives Project at UCSB. These projects continue the Community Engaged and Black Radicalism projects she co-developed as Director of the Center for Black Studies Research (2013-18; see CBSR annual reports). As a founding member and initiator of Cooperation Santa Barbara, she serves on the Blum Center’s Cooperative Economics advisory committee and formerly on the steering committee of the Central Coast Regional Equity Study.
 
Fujino teaches courses on Race and Resistance, the Asian American Movement, US Third World social movements, Japanese American history, and Community and Social Justice Studies.  As Chair of Asian American Studies (2008-13), she initiated the department’s Community Studies and Peer Advising programs.  She also taught an experimental joint university-high school course on Puerto Rican History and Revolution, in conjunction with the international art exhibit, “Not Enough Space,” exhibited at La Casa de la Raza in Santa Barbara in February 2008.  Her work has been featured in media outlets, including NPR, Democracy Now!, KCSB, NBC Asian America, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle,  Al Jazeera Plus, Hypen magazine, Rafu Shimpo, and Discover Nikkei.

Publications: 

Books

Contemporary Asian American Activism: Building Movements for Liberation (University of Washington Press, 2022), as co-editor

Nisei Radicals: The Feminist Poetics and Transformative Ministry of Mitsuye Yamada and Michael Yasutake (University of Washington Press, 2020).

Black Power Afterlives: The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2020), as co-editor.

Samurai among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

Wicked Theory, Naked Practice: A Fred Ho Reader, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), as editor

Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Practice of Yuri Kochiyama (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2005).

Editorial Board, Legacy to Liberation: Politics and Culture of Revolutionary Asian Pacific America, edited by Fred Ho, with Carolyn Antonio, Diane Fujino and Steve Yip (San Francisco: AK Press, 2000).

         

              

 

Amerasia Journal: Special Issue

“Asian American and Pacific Islander Activism: Commemorating 50 Years of Asian American Studies,” Amerasia Journal, 45 (2019). Guest Editors Diane C. Fujino and Robyn Rodriguez

This special issue focuses new attention on research studies of Asian American activism. With this issue, Diane Fujino and Robyn Rodriquez help to make legible Asian American activism studies. In Part I on immigration studies, Monisha Das Gupta examines the political pedagogy of Khmer Girls in Action, Elizabeth Rubio asks “What does immigration justice work look like when legalization is not its central goal?”, and Wendy Cheng studies the transnational activism of Taiwanese student immigrants. In Part II on gender and sexuality studies, Karen Hanna examines how radical motherwork intersects with the transnational activism of Filipina women in Chicago, and Kong Phen Pha examines the complicated activism of queer Hmong Americans in Minnesota.  In Part III on Black-Asian politics, Jeanelle Hope and May Fu et al explore Asian American solidarities with Black Lives Matter, while Yuanyuan Feng and Mark Tseng-Putterman examine the uses of social media to mobilize the Chinese right, relying on “colorblind” race rhetoric, while claiming a struggle for racial equality.  Altogether, this special issue presents cutting edge research on Asian American activism. 

 

Academic Articles and Book Chapters (Select)

“Political Asian America: Afro-Asian Solidarity, Third World Internationalism, and the Origins of the Asian American Movement,” Ethnic Studies Review 47 (2024): 60-97

“Rhizomatic Organizing, Collective leadership and Community-centered Pedagogy in the Early Asian American Movement,” Journal of American Studies, September 2024, open access.

“Circles of Organizing: Collective Leadership, Social Relations, and Intergenerational Activism in Ethnic Studies Now! Santa Barbara,” Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies 6 (2019): 73-86.

“The Indivisibility of Freedom:  The Nisei Progressives, Deep Solidarities, and Cold War Alternatives,” Journal of Asian American Studies, 21 (2018): 171-208.

“Cold War Activism and Japanese American Exceptionalism: Contested Solidarities and Decolonial Alternatives to Freedom,” Pacific Historical Review, 87 (2018): 264-304.

“A Transformative Pedagogy for a Decolonial World,” The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 40 (2018): 69-95, by Diane C. Fujino, Jonathan D. Gomez, Esther Lezra, George Lipsitz, Jordan Mitchell, and James Fonseca.

“Writing against the Grain: Biography, History, and the Long Freedom Movements,” American Quarterly 69 (Dec 2017): 935-945.

“Taking Risks, or the Question of Palestine Solidarity and Asian American Studies,” American Quarterly 67 (2015): 1027-1037, with Junaid Rana.

“Grassroots Leadership and Afro-Asian Solidarities: Yuri Kochiyama’s Humanizing Radicalism,” in Want to Start a Revolution: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, ed. Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

“Who Studies the Asian American Movement?: A Historiographical Analysis,” Journal of Asian American Studies 11 (2008): 127-169.