Daryl Maeda

Chair and Associate Professor

Education

B.S., Harvey Mudd College
M.A., San Francisco State University – Ethnic Studies
M.A., Ph.D. University of Michigan – American Culture

Bio

As an interdisciplinary cultural historian, I explore how racial identities and politics are embedded within and expressed through cultural productions. My main interest is the social movements for racial justice of the late 1960s and early 1970s. My newest book, Rethinking the Asian American Movement, which is a synthesis of scholarship on the Asian American movement of the 60s and 70s, argues that the movement was inherently built upon commitments to interracial and transnational solidarities. My first book, Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America, shows how the category of “Asian American,” which encompasses Asians of many ethnicities in the U.S., was created by Asian American movement and thoroughly imbued with anti-racist and anti-imperialist political commitments. I am currently working on a book project that explores the emergence of the trans-Pacific zone of cultural contact through examining the figure of Bruce Lee.

I teach classes in Asian American studies, comparative ethnic studies, racial theory, and sports. As many of my students can attest, I am an avid fan of University of Michigan football and basketball. Go Blue!

Selected Publications

Rethinking the Asian American Movement. American Social and Political Movements of the Twentieth Century series, Routledge, 2011.
Arturo Aldama, Elisa Facio, Daryl Maeda, and Reiland Rabaka, eds. Enduring Legacies: Ethnic Histories and Cultures of Colorado. University Press of Colorado, 2011.
Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America. Critical American Studies series, University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
“The Asian American Movement.” In Speaking Out: Activism and Protest in the 1960s and 1970s, ed. Heather Thompson (New York: Prentice Hall, 2009).
“Black Panthers, Red Guards, and Chinamen: Constructing Asian American Identity through Performing Blackness, 1969-1972.” American Quarterly 57, no. 4 (December 2005): 1079-1103. Winner of the Constance M. Rourke Prize by the American Studies Association for the best article published in American Quarterly in 2005.
“S. I. Hayakawa, Asian American Radicalism, and the Dilemma of American Liberalism.” In The Human Tradition in California, eds. Clark Davis and David Igler (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Books, 2002), 193-208.