Biography
I am a historian of the United States with an emphasis on the nineteenth century, imperialism, race, gender, and sexuality. Trained in U.S. and Japanese institutions, I have always taken comparative and transnational approaches in my study of history.
Research Interests
Race, gender, and sexuality in U.S. empire; nineteenth-century U.S.; racialized labor; Pacific/Atlantic world; settler colonialism
Research Description
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. These languages not only underpinned legal, political, and ideological initiatives to exclude free blacks from settler colonial privileges but also suffused free black politics against them.
I am currently working on two projects: tracing the origins of U.S. engagements with islands in the Pacific and Caribbean and investigating the impact of U.S. expansion into East Asia on domestic racial formations and on the development of Japanese racial identity.
Education
PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Gender and Women's History Program, 2010
MA, Doshisha University, American Studies
BA, Doshisha University, Political Science
Awards and Honors
Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professors Award, 2016-18
American Council of Learned Societies, New Faculty Fellowship, Women's and Gender Studies, Rutgers-The State University of New Jersey, 2012-13
Courses Taught
HIST275 African American History to 1877
HIST285 History of Gender in the United States
HIST385 Transnational Sexualities
HIST482 Slavery in the United States
HIST570 Race, Gender, and Sexuality in North American Colonialisms
Additional Campus Affiliations
Associate Professor, Gender and Women's Studies
Associate Professor, Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies
Highlighted Publications
Asaka, I. (2017). Tropical Freedom: Climate, Settler Colonialism, and Black Exclusion in the Age of Emancipation. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372752
Recent Publications
BOOK
Tropical Freedom: Climate, Settler Colonialism, and Black Exclusion in the Age of Emancipation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017
JOURNAL ARTICLES
“Lucretia Mott and the Underground Railroad: The Transatlantic World of a Radical American Woman.” Journal of the Early Republic Volume 38, no 4 (Winter 2018): 613-642
“Different Tales of John Glasgow: John Brown’s Evolution to Slave Life in Georgia.” Journal of Black Studies 49, no. 3 (April 2018): 212-234
“‘Colored Men of the East’: African Americans and the Instability of Race in US-Japan Relations.” American Quarterly 66, no. 4 (December 2014): 971-997
“‘Our Brethren in the West Indies’: Self Emancipated People in Canada and the Antebellum Politics of Diaspora and Empire.” Journal of African American History 97, no.3 (Summer 2012): 219-239
BOOK CONTRIBUTIONS
“African-American Migration and the Climatic Language of Anglophone Settler Colonialism.” In Crossing Empires: Taking U.S. History into Transimperial Terrain, edited by Kristin Hoganson and Jay Sexton. Durham: Duke University Press (forthcoming)
“Exiles in America: Canadian Anti-Black Racism and the Meaning of Nation in the Age of the 1848 Revolutions.” In Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations, ed. Whitney Nell Stewart and John Garrison Marks, 53-68. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018.
