Celebrate Asia Pasifika 2026

This talk is, more than anything, an exercise in probing, in hopes of delineating contours of struggle to respond to the crisis of our time. It introduces a deep well of commitment suffused with political defeats but also yearning to learn, evolve, and advance found within the intervening space between Black radicalism and Japanese intellectual and creative activities in the twentieth century. In Japanese, such an interstice is called ma (間). Can the ma of Afro-Asian radicalism, its intellectual history,  be conceived as the antidote to paralyzing violence?  The details will be culled from the forthcoming book Black Radical Thought in Japan.

• Yuichiro Onishi is Associate Professor of African American & African Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He is also Faculty Director of the Liberal Arts Engagement Hub in the College of Liberal Arts. He is the author of Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in Twentieth-Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa (NYU Press, 2013) and co-editor of Transpacific Correspondence; Dispatches from Japan’s Black Studies (Palgrave, 2019).  
• Made possible through the generous support of the Leraas Fund and the Associate Dean of Interdisciplinary and General Studies.