GREG ROBINSON

BIO / LINKS TO BOOKS / LINKS TO SELECTED ONLINE PAPERS

CONTACT

Département d’Histoire
Université du Québec À Montréal
Case postale 8888 succursale Centre-Ville
Montréal, Québec Canada H3C 3P8
office telephone : (514)987-3000, ext. 2099
email : robinson.greg@uqam.ca



BIO

Greg Robinson, a native New Yorker, is Associate Professor of History at l'Université du
Québec À Montréal, a French-language institution in Montreal, Canada, and a board
member of that university’s Center for United States Studies. A specialist in North
American Ethnic Studies and U.S. Political History, Robinson teaches courses on African
American history, Twentieth-Century U.S. Foreign Policy, American Immigration History,
and visible minorities/racial groups, among others. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in
American History from New York University, and a B.A. in History and French Civilization
from the University of Pennsylvania.

Robinson's book, A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America,
(Columbia University Press, 2009), winner of the 2009 History Book Prize of the Association
for Asian American Studies, is an ambitious transnational history of the wartime
confinement of people of Japanese ancestry. It not only offers newly uncovered material
that extends existing accounts of the camp experience of West Coast Japanese Americans,
but breaks new ground by studying those events alongside the treatment of ethnic
Japanese in Canada, Mexico, and Latin America. Especially noteworthy is the book’s
discussion of the condition of Japanese Americans under martial law and military
government in Hawaii. Robinson’s first solo book, By Order of the President: FDR and
the Internment of Japanese Americans (Harvard University Press, 2001) is an in-depth
history of the decisions behind the government’s mass removal and confinement of
West Coast Japanese Americans during World War II, one which centers on the role
of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It spent four months on Academia Magazine’s
University Press Bestseller List, and was voted a “Recommended Book for Understanding
Civil Liberties” by the American Association of University Presses.

Greg Robinson is also the lead author, with Elena Tajima Creef, of Miné Okubo: Following
Her Own Road, which was published by University of Washington Press in July 2008.
The book is a wide-ranging anthology on the life and career of the Nisei artist/writer
Miné Okubo, who defied conventional assumptions about women, Japanese Americans
and creative artists during a career that spanned nearly seven decades, and it represents
a companion volume to Okubo’s renowned memoir of her camp experience, Citizen
13660. Miné Okubo includes selections from Okubo’s literary and artistic work in diverse
genres and periods, plus scholarly articles and appreciations. Robinson’s own contribution,
the essay “Birth of a Citizen,” describes the process by which Okubo came to write her
memoir, and details both the author's purposes and the constraints that she faced.
Creef and Robinson also produced a special Miné Okubo tribute issue of Amerasia Journal
in 2004.

Greg Robinson has two new books scheduled to appear in Spring 2012. After Camp
(University of California Press) is the first full-length book to discuss the experience of
Japanese Americans across the continent in the years following World War II. Essays
include topics such as resettlement and dispersal, the nature of assimilation, and relations
with other racial and ethnic minority groups. Pacific Citizens: Larry and Guyo Tajiri and
Japanese Ameircan Journalism in the World War II Era (University of Ilinois Press) is an
anthology of writings by a pair of versatile and insightful Nisei journalists. It features an
extended biographical and historical introduction and headnotes.

In addition to his books, Greg Robinson has distinguished himself as editor. His publications
include Gale Macmillan’s 5-volume Encyclopedia of African American Culture and History
and its supplements (1995-2000), for which he was assistant editor, coeditor and principal
author. He has also rediscovered and introduced new editions of early Asian American
memoirs. The new edition of Ayako Ishigaki’s 1940 book Restless Wave (Feminist Press of
the City University of New York, 2004) that he produced with Yi-Chun Tricia Lin won a
special citation as a “lost classic” from the Association for Asian American Studies. In 2008,
he led a team of scholars who put together a new Rutgers University Press edition of
Kathleen Tamagawa’s 1932 autobiography Holy Prayers in a Horse’s Ear, the first book by
an American Nisei to be published by a commercial press, and enhanced the text by adding
explanatory notes and further material by Tamagawa. He is also responsible for rediscovering
Jenichiro Oyabe’s 1898 memoir A Japanese Robinson Crusoe, among the first Asian
American books. The 2009 University of Hawaii Press edition, coedited with Yujin Yaguchi,
includes a foreward that not only discusses the author’s unusual life history but places
the memoir as a significant forerunner of the work of the “cosmopolitan Issei” of the early
20th century.

In addition to his other scholarly contributions, Professor Robinson writes a regular historical
column, “The Great Unknown and the Unknown Great,” for the San Francisco Japanese
American newspaper Nichi Bei Weekly. His column explores fascinating but lesser-known
people in Japanese American history. He has also been active in the blogsphere. In August
2004, he joined with Eric Muller in a series of 29 widely-discussed posts that rebutted
Michelle Malkin’s book, In Defense of Internment, a book purporting to justify the wartime
removal of Japanese Americans. (link) A year later, he made public his discovery of the
“McCloy memo,” an archival document that presented powerful proof that the
government’s policy towards Japanese Americans was not dictated by military necessity. (link)
He has served as regular contributor to historians’ blogs.

LINKS TO BOOKS

A Tragedy of Democracy:Japanese Confinement_in North America or via COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans

Mine Okubo: Following her Own Road

Kathleen Tamagawa, Holy Prayers in a Horse’s Ear

Ayako Ishigaki, Restless Wave

Jenichiro Oyabe, A Japanese Robinson Crusoe

LINKS TO SELECTED ONLINE PAPERS

“Admission Denied”
A study of Japanese Americans at University of Pennsylvania during World War II and
the scandal that erupted when Naomi Nakano, a Nisei honors student, was excluded from
the University in 1944.

“Korematsu and Beyond: Japanese Americans and the origins of Strict Scrutiny” (with Toni Robinson)
The alliance for civil rights between Japanese Americans and Blacks and the impact of
wartime and postwar Japanese American cases (notably Oyama v. California) on the
Supreme Court’s historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation ruling.

“Paul Robeson and Japanese Americans”
The Celebrated African American singer/activist and his support for the rights of Japanese Americans.

“Parallel Wars : Japanese American and Japanese Canadian Internment Films”
An examination of how dramatic films about the wartime events both use and subvert
the strategy of using white protagonists.

“Defending Nikkei”
African American lawyer Hugh E. Macbeth, Sr.’s outstanding defense of Japanese Americans
during the World War II era.

NICHI BEI WEEKLY columns (search within site)

Website at Université Du Québec À Montréal (in French only)