Ikuko Asaka

I am currently working on two projects. One examines U.S. expansion into Pacific islands through the lens of race, gender, sexuality, labor, and anthropocentrism. It traces the formation of the U.S. insular empire back to the early nineteenth century, paying attention to its sustenance and promotion through human and nonhuman production of energy. The other investigates how U.S. encounter with East Asians--what nineteenth-century contemporaries called "Orientals" or "Asiatics"--led to complex systems of race, gender, and sexuality that went beyond a black-white binary.  

My first book, Tropical Freedom: Climate, Settler Colonialism, and Black Exclusion in the Age of Emancipation (Duke, 2017), argues that during the late eighteenth and mid nineteenth centuries British and American expansionists and free Black activists produced different imaginings of an Atlantic world that variously and often contrastingly mapped Black freedom within its geographic bounds and that these conflicting geographies of race and freedom became inseparably intertwined with U.S. and British North American settler colonial formations.  Importantly, both promoters and protesters of geographic management of race employed tropes of domesticity and intra-racial reproduction as well as climatic idioms born of the centuries-long development of the plantation economies in the Americas. 

I have also published articles on fugitive slave narratives, women's antislavery activism, and self-emancipated people in Canada, all set in transatlantic settings, and on the intersectional articulations of race, gender, and class among white and American Americans in the context of U.S. expansion into Japan.