Following the ongoing assault on Palestine, the war on Iran and Lebanon has exposed both the moral degeneracy of U.S. imperialism and the structural decline of American power. How should engaged scholars and activists in the fields of Asian American and American Studies respond to this moment of incredible danger and historic openings for movement breakthroughs? 

Drawing from his new book American Peril, Dr. Kurashige’s talk responds to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s imperative to recognize that “the greatest acts of anti-Asian violence are carried out in America’s wars in Asia.” Through a Zinn-styled people’s history of racism and U.S. war crimes, Dr. Kurashige seeks to provide grounding for comparative, transnational, intersectional analyses that point toward the wider forms of solidarity necessary to survive the fascist upsurge and create a more humane system.

 Participants are invited to read Scott Kurashige’s short essay, “Dispatches from a Dying Empire” (2021): https://amst.winter-verlag.de/article/amst/2021/1/28/display/html

Dr. Kurashige also invites attendees to continue the conversation he engaged with Grace Lee Boggs and Immanuel Wallerstein on creating revolutionary alternatives to the collapsing liberal order. With the paradigm of limited reform displaced by an era of stark choices, our current debates and struggles symbolize the long-range trends toward participatory democracy or plutocratic authoritarianism.