Journal of American History

Asian American History

Scott Kurashige

University of Wisconsin, Madsion

Teaching Philosophy

Personal Background

My research and teaching have both been profoundly shaped by my personal experiences. I grew up in an inner-ring suburb of Los Angeles called Culver City and attended public school there during the 1970s and 1980s. In retrospect, I can now see that the Culver City school system was at the forefront of racial integration in Southern California during that period. My classmates and friends came from diverse backgrounds and spoke many different languages at home. When I attended my niece’s graduation from Culver High in 2005, it appeared that the school’s demographics had somehow miraculously become equal proportions African American, Asian American, Latino, and white.

But when I attended Culver High, nearly all the teachers and administrators were white. History was probably my least favorite class. On the verge of retirement, the AP teacher sat in front of the class and talked at students nonstop, expecting them to regurgitate his words in essay form or memorize dates and facts for multiple-choice exams. His classes never offered more than a cursory nod in the direction of the types of questions posed by ethnic studies scholars. I got bored, my performance was mediocre, and the AP teacher ultimately banned me from taking his classes. This proved to be a blessing in disguise.

Feeling a need to address my knowledge deficiency, I was reintroduced to the study of history in college by some great teachers at the University of Pennsylvania. Nothing like Los Angeles, Philadelphia was then still essentially half-black and half-white. Because I had a pressing desire to make sense of the stark urban segregation I witnessed I was especially drawn to African American history. My advisor was Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, whose seminar on West Philadelphia first aroused my inspiration for the place-based local/community/urban history that has been at the core of my research and teaching ever since.

As a scholar, I am particularly interested in rethinking the meaning of racial integration and its relationship to national identity. The transformation of Los Angeles from a “white city” characterized by its racially homogenous neighborhoods into a cosmopolitan “world city” defined by diversity and globalization frames the narrative of my forthcoming book, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Fall 2007), which will by published by Princeton University Press in the “Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America” series.

Teaching philosophy

My teaching is driven by three interrelated efforts to break down intellectual and institutional boundaries. First, I teach interdisciplinary courses, drawing upon fields such as urban studies, geography, and cultural studies to enhance curricula based upon my formal training in U.S. history and ethnic studies. Second, I seek to break down rigid racial/ethnic boundaries in my courses by offering comparative perspectives on race and ethnicity even in courses whose topic is nominally “Asian American history.” My courses attract a healthy mix of students from different racial/ethnic backgrounds and generate an environment where cross-cultural dialogue can occur. Third, I am constantly working to develop, implement and improve pedagogical methods that challenge students to see the relationship between academic study/research and social practice.

2007

Diverse Surveys in American History

Introduction

Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser