University of Washington Press
Exiled to Motown: A Community History of Japanese Americans in Detroit
Key Metrics
- Scott Kurashige
- University of Washington Press
- Paperback
- 9780295749020
- -
- -
- Social Science > Ethnic Studies - American - Asian American Studies
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
During World War II, Detroit emerged as a relative space of freedom for Nisei permitted by the War Relocation Authority to leave sites of incarceration but banned from returning to their homes in the exclusion zones. These Nisei connected with an existing Japanese American community that had been formed by immigrant trailblazers who came to Detroit in the early twentieth century to be part of the booming auto industry. While many of the wartime migrants later returned to the West Coast, those who stayed in Detroit negotiated living and raising families in a region torn apart by Black-white conflict and then scarred by Japan-bashing in the face of economic decline.
Drawing from a community-based oral history and archiving project, Exiled to Motown captures the compelling stories of Japanese Americans in the Midwest, filling in overlooked aspects of the Asian American experience. It serves as a model for collaboration on projects between scholars, elders, and community activists.
Author Bio
Scott Kurashige is a professor of American and ethnic studies in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell. He is president of the American Studies Association, 2019-20.
From 2000 to 2014, he was assistant, associate, and full professor of American culture and history at the University of Michigan. He has held fellowships at Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
He is the author or co-author of four books: The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (2008, winner of the American Historical Association’s Beveridge Award for distinguished book on the history of the United States, Latin America, or Canada, from 1492 to the present and the History Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies), The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (with Grace Lee Boggs, 2011), Exiled to Motown: A History of Japanese Americans in Detroit (with the Detroit JACL, 2015), and The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit (2017).
He received his MA in Asian American studies (1996) and PhD in history (2000) from UCLA.
Research Interests
Scott Kurashige studies race in a comparative, intersectional, and transnational framework with a focus on urbanism and social movements. His work has especially focused on the relationship between Asian Americans and African Americans and on the cities of Los Angeles and Detroit.
From 1998 to 2015, he was a close collaborator with Grace Lee Boggs, a radical philosopher/activist based in Detroit. His current book project book project, Neighbors in the Hood, probes how Asians, since the neoliberal turn of the 1970s, have become a convenient scapegoat for the multi-faceted problems and intersecting crises tied to deindustrialization, corporate globalization, and the devastation of predominantly African American cities and urban communities.
It further addresses how Asian American activists have responded to this scapegoating by developing structural analyses that critique anti blackness while fostering a multiracial vision of social justice and coalition
Source: University of Michigan - National Center for Institutional Diversity
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