Diane Fujino is professor of Asian American Studies and director of the Center for Black Studies Research at UC Santa Barbara.  Her study of renowned activist Yuri Kochiyama situates her politics in the context of Malcolm X and Black radicalism in Harlem, Third World anti-colonial movements, and Asian American organizing, while also providing a racialized gendered analysis of leadership.  In Samurai Among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance and a Paradoxical Life, Fujino examines the impact of wartime incarceration, the early Cold War, Black Panther Party, Third Worldism, and Asian American Movement on Richard Aoki’s political ideology and practice.  Her edited volume, Wicked Theory, Naked Practice, examines the provocative ideas and Afro-Asian music of Fred Ho. 

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Her current book project examines Japanese American activism in the early Cold War, arguing that alternative pathways existed to the model minority trope that disciplined Black militancy and decolonial movements abroad—struggles that created possibilities for “deep solidarities” and radical democracy.  She continues to study the Asian American Movement of the 1960s-70s. 

On the Center for Black Studies Research and its work on engaged scholarship within the Black radical tradition, see http://www.research.ucsb.edu/cbs/.

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Fujino teaches courses on the Asian American Movement, US Third World social movements, Japanese American history, Community Studies/Social Justice, Asian American gender and sexuality, and Asian Americans and the Black radical imagination.