Job Talk: Ethan Caldwell, "Blackness at the Margins of Empire"

February 21, 3:00pm - 4:30pm
Mānoa Campus, Crawford 115

How do African American soldiers come to terms with the paradox of being both the colonizer and the colonized in a racialized and gendered neo-colonial space? Drawing on visual and ethnographic sources, this talk examines the historical and contemporary relationship between African American soldiers, Okinawans, and dynamic constructions of race, gender, and coloniality outside of U.S. military installations in Okinawa, Japan. This talk is framed by three central questions: 1) How do African American soldiers' relations with the Okinawan community influence a colonial understanding of themselves, their place in the United States, and their role in a larger, neo-colonial regime? 2) How do African American soldiers, Okinawans, and Japanese represent these relations through cultural productions? 3) How do Japanese and Okinawans' interactions with African American soldiers stationed abroad reify and reconstruct notions of race, gender, nation, and diaspora? This research increases the existing historical purview surrounding relations between African American soldiers, Okinawans, and Japanese civilians post-World War to complicate non-white subjectivity, oppression, power, and privilege through military service in Okinawa. It recontextualizes U.S. based racial norms through diasporic Black bodies and their interactions in globally occupied, militarized spaces.

Ethan Caldwell is a doctoral candidate in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University. He is also a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a professional photographer. Caldwell studies how post-World War II Black-Asian relations, militarism, and empire in East Asia impacts constructions of race, gender, empire, and Blackness abroad. His dissertation, "Blackness at the Margins of Empire: The Colonized-Colonizer Paradox and African American Soldier-Okinawan Relations," analyzes how dynamic constructions of race, gender, and empire are historically and visually formed, challenged, and impacted through interactions between African American soldiers and Okinawan civilians.`


Event Sponsor
Department of Ethnic Studies, Mānoa Campus

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