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This essay connects recent academic debates over antiblackness and the rise of new theories and methods of comparison to the movements against police violence that are gaining visibility after the protests in Ferguson, MO, arguing that they all demonstrate the fracturing of “multiculturalism” as the governing sociopolitical imagination of racial justice sponsored by U.S. global power. It reads the production of blackness and antiblackness in the Ferguson protests through a concept of “imperialism's racial justice” and reviews W.E.B. Du Bois's 1899 development of a theory and method of comparison (the “color line”) in response to lynching and imperial conquest. Arguing that the question of comparison in the present must be resolved by collective action rather than scholarship, it tentatively suggests a few possible lines of study attuned to the local and geopolitical dynamics of race and conquest.

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This roundtable grew out of conversations between filmmaker Rea Tajiri, programmer Abby Sun, and scholar Vince Schleitwiler about a misunderstood chapter in the history of Asian American film and media: New York City in the eighties, a vibrant capital of Asian American filmmaking with a distinctively experimental edge. To tell this story, Rea Tajiri contacted her artist contemporaries Shu Lea Cheang and Roddy Bogawa as well as writer and critic Daryl Chin. Daryl had been a fixture in New York City art circles since the sixties, his presence central to Asian American film from the beginning. The scope of this discussion extends loosely from the mid-seventies through the late nineties, with Tajiri, Abby Sun, and Vince Schleitwiler initiating topics, compiling responses, and finalizing its form as a collage-style conversation.