Vince Schleitwiler

b. 1974

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A fourth-generation Japanese American, Vince Schleitwiler grew up in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood, and has lived in South London, Brooklyn, Seattle, and the boondocks of Western Massachusetts before returning to the homeland—Southern California. After receiving the greater part of his education from student-of-color organizers at Oberlin College and the University of Washington, he now teaches and writes in comparative ethnic studies. His first book, Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific: Imperialism’s Racial Justice and Its Fugitives, explores the intersecting migrations of African Americans, Japanese Americans, and Filipinos across US imperial domains from the 1890s to the 1940s, and is under contract at NYU Press. His writing has appeared in African American Review, Amerasia Journal, and the Village Voice.

Click here for his scholar-in-residence blog, "City of Refuge."

“Lost Afro-Asian Worlds: Black/Filipino Speculative Histories” is an experimental public humanities project, focusing on the radical imagination of black and Filipino transpacific imagination across the 20th century. Its work, centered on a blog (“City of Refuge”), is guided by three broad questions: How did these migrants—black soldiers, educators, and intellectuals in the colony; Filipino students, laborers, and radicals in the metropole—imagine the future? What relationship did the worlds they imagine have to those groups who might be imagined as their legatees, including Afro-Filipinos on both sides of the Pacific and later waves of Filipino transpacific migration? What might blackness and Filipino-ness come to mean in a world beyond white supremacy?