Ikuko Asaka
· Associate ProfessorUniversity of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · History
Active 2004–2024
About
Ikuko Asaka is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Illinois College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. Her research focuses on the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, with particular emphasis on the formation of U.S. empire and the history of gender and race. She is especially interested in how race, gender, sexuality, and climate have shaped imperial relations, as well as the racial construction of 'Asian difference' and its relation to binarized categories. Asaka earned her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2010, specializing in Gender and Women's History. Her scholarly work includes a book titled 'Tropical Freedom: Climate, Settler Colonialism, and Black Exclusion in the Age of Emancipation,' published by Duke University Press in 2017. She has received several grants and awards, including a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society, and the Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professors Award. Her teaching includes courses on U.S. history to 1877, U.S. gender history, global histories of gender, and the birth of U.S. empire. She is also affiliated with the Gender and Women's Studies Center, the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies, and the Center for the Study of Global Gender Equity.
Research topics
- Sociology
- Political Science
- Archaeology
- Gender studies
- History
- Art
- Literature
- Geography
- Anthropology
- Ethnology
- Law
Selected publications
The endurance and expanse of settler colonial history
Settler Colonial Studies · 2024
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- History
- Gender studies
Women’s Labor in Empire and Diaspora
Diplomatic History · 2024-01-26
article1st authorCorrespondingJournal Article Women's Labor in Empire and Diaspora Get access Joan Flores-Villalobos. The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023. 296 pp. $39.95 (hardcover). Ikuko Asaka Ikuko Asaka iasaka@illinois.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Diplomatic History, dhae003, https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhae003 Published: 07 February 2024
Guerilla Women And Men In Silk Dresses: Diplomacy and Orientalism during the 1860 Japanese Mission
The Journal of the Civil War Era · 2023
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Political Science
- Gender studies
Abstract: In the summer of 1860, seventy-seven samurai conducted a month-long tour of Eastern Seaboard cities during a diplomatic mission to advance the fledgling US–Japan relations. The delegation became an instant sensation. News coverage of the visit revolved around a few motifs: feminized representations of the Japanese diplomats; white women's enthusiastic receptions; and castigations of white women's autonomous participation in formal and informal diplomatic arenas. This article interprets the press's feminizing discourse as an instantiation of American orientalism and argues that diplomacy, due to its inherent and historically specific workings, undercut and subverted the press's feminization of Japanese men and devaluation of white women's political capacity and that white women's interracial sexual desire was imagined in such a way that disconnected the organization of sexuality from a rigid male–female gender binary.
African American Migration and the Climatic Language of Anglophone Settler Colonialism
2020-01-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThe American Historical Review · 2020-09-19
article1st authorCorrespondingMarilyn Lake’s Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform is a fascinating story of exchanges and collaborations between reformers in the United States and Australasia (Australia and New Zealand, but mostly the former) who embarked on creating a new social order based on progressive ideals. What they envisioned was a more expanded democracy in which the state promoted social, political, and economic justice. The self-governing Australasian colonies’ state initiatives inspired American reformers to work for an active state, electoral reform, women’s suffrage, workers’ rights, mothers’ pensions, and children’s services. What bound the reformers across the Pacific was a sense of themselves as frontier pioneers in charge of planting “novel kinds of democratic societies” in the New World that were superior to the Old World class system they morally abhorred (6). But this is only half of the story. What makes Progressive New World stand out...
9. African American Migration and the Climatic Language of Anglophone Settler Colonia
2020-09-09
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAFRICAN AMERICAN MIGRATION AND THE CLIMATIC LANGUAGE OF ANGLOPHONE SETTLER COLONIALISM
Duke University Press eBooks · 2020
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Geography
- Ethnology
2020-10-14
article1st authorCorrespondingThe Journal of Southern History · 2019-01-01
article1st authorCorrespondingReviewed by: Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America by Michael A. Schoeppner Ikuko Asaka Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America. By Michael A. Schoeppner. Studies in Legal History. (New York and other cities: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 252. $59.99, ISBN 978-1-108-46999-9.) The uneven progress of emancipation along the Atlantic coast created a world variegated by societies diverse in their attitudes toward slavery. This polarized world prompted efforts by defenders of slavery to safeguard their local institutions against influences from nonslaveholding societies not so distant from their shores and borders. As Michael A. Schoeppner brilliantly illuminates, U.S. southern states instituted bulwarks to protect the slavery-based racial order: the “Negro Seamen Acts.” Seafarers of African descent were vital to the transatlantic and U.S. coastal trade, which shipped southern crops to Atlantic markets. The presence of free black mariners on British and northern vessels—poignant embodiments of the experience and ideal of freedom—led South Carolina in 1822 and subsequently seven other southern states to enact the Seamen Acts, a series of laws that controlled the ingress of free black seamen from any nation by subjecting them to such measures as imprisonment and quarantine. Schoeppner starts the book by providing the context and significance of South Carolina’s Seamen Act. What the author reveals is a hitherto overlooked emphasis that white South Carolinians placed on the foreign elements of the Denmark Vesey uprising, a major catalyst to the institution of the law. The concern of the white residents centered on free black mariners’ importation of revolutionary ideals circulating in the Atlantic world into an otherwise racially harmonic society. Such fear of revolutionary sentiment revealed that the state’s Seamen Act constituted a direct answer to black men’s aspirations for liberty and equality characteristic of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. Schoeppner provides a detailed and thorough examination of the enactment and enforcement of Seamen Acts in different states. He pays attention to changing political situations, including British abolition and growing antislavery agitation in the North, which hardened white southerners’ resolve to bar free black sailors from their ports. The book’s purview goes beyond the local workings of the Seamen Acts. Its main contribution lies in connecting the Seamen Acts to debates on citizenship and federalism during the antebellum era. As opponents and advocates of the Seamen Acts made their cases, they debated the meaning of citizenship, the relationship between federal commercial authority and state police powers, and the contours of federal protection of citizenship rights. In this way, the Seamen Acts constituted the fulcrum around which American constitutional development unfolded. The book ends with a chapter on the reactions to the laws by African American communities, their allies, and the sailors themselves, a discussion that feels somewhat disjointed from the rest of the book. Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America successfully Atlanticizes “the legal and political history of the United States” (p. 13). Yet it fails to contextualize the central rhetoric of the Seamen Acts: the language of “contagion,” signifying the ominous infiltration [End Page 906] by free black sailors, and the “quarantine” measure that some states took to keep free black sailors offshore for a certain number of days. Why did white southerners use disease rhetoric to describe moral threat? Apparently, such language did not convince the British Foreign Office, which doubted the legitimacy of Georgia’s quarantine requirement because the law’s purpose was “totally disconnected with the preservation of public health” (p. 69). What was the discursive environment in the South that caused this distinctive rhetoric? I wish the author had investigated this question. Nevertheless, the book is a rigorous study of law, citizenship, and diplomacy and makes a welcome addition to the literature of southern history, Atlantic history, and antebellum political and legal history. Ikuko Asaka University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association
2018-01-01
article1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 1 shared
育子 浅香
- 1 shared
イクコ アサカ
Awards & honors
- Conrad Humanities Scholar, 2021-2026
- Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professors Award, 2016-18
- New Faculty Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societie…
- Summer Stipend, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2020
- Franklin Research Grant, American Philosophical Society, 202…
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