Dartmouth Events

In this talk, Professor Kim discusses her new book, Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World, which is a sweeping historical examination of how Asian Americans have been positioned relative to white people and Black people in the U.S. racial order, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.  Asian American Studies scholarship conventionally focuses on white supremacy, or what whites do to hold down Asian Americans and other not-white groups.  But what happens if we bring structural anti-Blackness—or the organization of collective life around the phobic avoidance of Blackness—back into the picture from which it has been redacted?

Claire Jean Kim is Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine, where she teaches classes on comparative race studies and human-animal studies. She received her B.A. in Government from Harvard College and her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University.  Her first book, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (Yale University Press 2000) won two awards from the American Political Science Association. Her recent book, Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World, was published by Cambridge University Press in September 2023.