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"The centuries-long attack on Black history represents a strike against our very worth, brilliance, and value. We re ready to fight back. And when we fight, we win." -Colin KaepernickSince its founding as a discipline, Black Studies has been under relentless attack by social and political forces seeking to discredit and neutralize it.Our History Has Always Been Contrabandwas born out of an urgent need to respond to the latest threat: efforts to remove content from an AP African American Studies course being piloted in high schools across the United States. Edited by Colin Kaepernick, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor,Our History Has Always Been Contrabandbrings together canonical texts and authors in Black Studies, including those excised from or not included in the AP curriculum.Featuring writings by: David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, James Baldwin, June Jordan, Angela Y. Davis, Robert Allen, Barbara Smith, Toni Cade Bambara, bell hooks, Barbara Christian, Patricia Hill Collins, Cathy J. Cohen, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Saidiya Hartman, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and many others.Our History Has Always Been Contrabandexcerpts readings that cut across and between literature, political theory, law, psychology, sociology, gender and sexuality studies, queer and feminist theory, and history. This volume also includes original essays by editors Kaepernick, Kelley, and Taylor, elucidating how we got here, and pieces by Brea Baker, Marlon Williams-Clark, and Roderick A. Ferguson detailing how we can fight back.To readOur History Has Always Been Contrabandis to be an outlaw for liberation. These writings illuminate the ways we can collectively work toward freedom for all-through abolition, feminism, racial justice, economic empowerment, self-determination, desegregation, decolonization, reparations, queer liberation, cultural and artistic expression, and beyond

Introduction to the Special Forum entitled "Charting Transnational Native American Studies: Aesthetics, Politics, Identity," edited by Hsinya Huang, Philip J. Deloria, Laura M. Furlan, and John Gamber

The Epistemological status of their own consciousness is the core contradiction of Marxist thought. This difficulty has not been acknowledged by African Marxists, nor do they explicitly admit to the varieties of radical scholarship which form their intellectual heritage, and which their own worl seeks to modify and elaborate. Marxist scholars have been unable to develop a cogent, persuasive justification for radical theorising as an alternative to positivist social science, largely because of their unwillingness to confront and affir, their own historical specificity. As argued by Bogumil Jewsiewicki:

Historically, Japan has had neither political nor cultural contacts with Africa. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, Japanese scholars took some interest in the European 'scramble for Africa', and some works by explorers and administrators in Africa were translated; the emphasis was placed upon colonial policy, rather than upon Africans themselves. The first Japanese report of a visit to Africa was Afurika isshu by Naokichi Nakamura and Shunro Oshikawa, published in 1910. Soon afterwards, economic development in Japan stimulated the search for new markets, and many fact-finding missions, both official and unofficial, were sent to South and East Africa. A Japanese consulate was opened in Cape Town in 1917; a shipping service to East Africa was inaugurated in 1926, and others to West and North Africa in 1933. During the 1930's further translations were made of European works on African arts, sociology, anthropology, and geography. By this time, there was a professional chair of colonial policy in most Japanese universities.

Abstract
The "material" turn has steadily gained currency in cultural studies and the humanities, with scholars increasingly attentive to theorising things and examining their presence, power, and meaning in any number of fields and disciplines. This essay stems from the keynote lecture given at the conference MatteReality: Historical Trajectories and Conceptual Futures for Material Culture Studies, held on March 23, 2017, at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Freiburg. Focused in particular on the meaning of materiality in American art history and American Studies today, it opens with an examination of the factors of monetisation and mobility and segues to a consideration of more efficacious ways to assess, theorise, and critique the material turn. Two areas that are particularly relevant in terms of rethinking, and mediating, materiality in American art and American Studies are those of technological process and affect: how things are made and how things make us feel.

The year 1976 marked more than the U. S. Bicentennial for those
interested in global studies in America. It represented an auspicious moment
in the evolution of the government's "predisposition" toward support of
language, area, and international studies in the United States. In that year
Phase III of the NDEA Title VI Centers Program took on a revised USOE
outlook upon the concept of outreach and an intensified federal commitment
to the promotion of outreach activities as an integral part of the programs
of the four-score Foreign Area and International Studies Centers around the
nation. The Bicentennial Year was also important for the Congressional
passage of the Education Amendments of 1976, which provided for the Citizen
Education for Cultural Understanding (Section 603) Program. This program,
which would hold promise for the development and/or expansion of global
studies particularly in the elementary and secondary school classrooms of
the nation, commenced in 1979 the award of federal assistance to projects
that sought to "increase the availability to students in the United States
of information about the cultures, actions, and policies of other nations so
that these students might make more informed judgments with respect to the
international policies and actions of the United States."

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The author reflects on her decades of cultural and political activism in the fight for Ethnic Studies—from her role in the 1969 Third World Strike at UC Berkeley, to her community activism after her graduation, to her participation in the fiftieth anniversary of the strike, including a transcription of her speech at the event.