Synopses & Reviews
What is Japan's political role in the world? Over the past decade, Japan has been increasingly pressured to assume more financial and political burdens globally. Its foreign policy has thus evolved in a piecemeal manner, around the question of managing foreign pressures. To date, policy has been largely developed by bureaucrats, who are traditionally responsible for public policy in Japan. The lack of a clear set of foreign policy objectives, however, has made it impossible for the bureaucracy to play its previous role as the arbiter of public interests.
Today, there is increased recognition that in a more pluralistic society, nongovernmental public policy specialists are needed to provide a more integrated and longer-term vision of foreign policy goals. This book represents the first private and non- governmental indigenous effort to stimulate public debate of Japanese foreign policy.
Japan's International Agenda makes a distinctive contribution to the foreign policy debate. Its contributors are younger Japanese non-governmental foreign affairs specialists, each with considerable international experience and committed to the belief that significant policy reforms are essential. As a statement of Japan's ability to contribute substantially to international policy debates on such broad questions of security and trade and development, Japan's International Agenda will enable scholars and experts in North America, Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, and elsewhere to engage in substantive dialogue on critical public policy issues with their Japanese counterparts. This book represents the first private, indigenous effort to stimulate public debate of Japanese foreign policy. Its contributors are young Japanese foreign affairs specialists, each with considerable international experience and a commitment to the belief that significant policy reforms are essential.
Review
"The young Japanese academics who produced Japan's International Agenda ... believe Japan is an introverted society that has to change its habits and its self-image now that it has great economic power. ...Unfortunately ... the politicians ... are probably far too busy to read mind- stretching books like Japan's International Agenda." -Far Eastern Economic Review,
Review
“Gerald Horne is one of America's most outstanding and prolific historians. In his latest work, Horne illustrates the extensive involvement of black Americans in Mexico's revolutionary past. Black and Brown provides a powerful and provocative interpretation of the complex connections linking African Americans with Latin American history. Superbly researched and well-crafted, Black and Brown sets a high standard in the writing of modern social history.”
-Manning Marable,Professor of Public Affairs, History and African-American Studies and Director, Center for Contemporary Black History at Columbia University
Review
“This is history plus . . . The road traveled by this expert driver is not an easy straight away but a series of ascending curves, reaching a new mountaintop of understanding.”
-Juan Gómez Quiñones,UCLA
Review
“A masterful, elegant work of history...As the African Diaspora grows in importance, and as the surging Latino presence arrests the attention of the nation—Horne puts the relationship between blacks and Mexicans on center stage...A ‘must read for all interested in the bold new course of American race-relations.”
-Ben Vinson III,Penn State University, author of Flight: The Story of Virgil Richardson, A Tuskegee Airman in Mexico and Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico
Review
“Thought-provoking”
-WTBF,Troy, Alabama
Review
“Black and Brown is a book that shows the sides of Jack Johnson and Henry O. Flipper only a serious, politically astute and socially conscious writer and ovserver like Gerald Horne has the insight to delve into and prompt a reader to truly say ‘I didn't know that about these otherwise popular personalities of their day.”
-Caribbean Life,
Synopsis
Winner of a 2005 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award (Honorable Mention)
The Mexican Revolution was a defining moment in the history of race relations, impacting both Mexican and African Americans. For black Westerners, 19101920 did not represent the clear-cut promise of populist power, but a reordering of the complex social hierarchy which had, since the nineteenth century, granted them greater freedom in the borderlands than in the rest of the United States.
Despite its lasting significance, the story of black Americans along the Mexican border has been sorely underreported in the annals of U.S. history. Gerald Horne brings the tale to life in Black and Brown. Drawing on archives on both sides of the border, a host of cutting-edge studies and oral histories, Horne chronicles the political currents which created and then undermined the Mexican border as a relative safe haven for African Americans. His account addresses blacks' role as “Indian fighters,” the relationship between African Americans and immigrants, and the U.S. government's growing fear of black disloyalty, among other essential concerns of the period: the heavy reliance of the U.S. on black soldiers along the border placed white supremacy and national security on a collision course that was ultimately resolved in favor of the latter.
Mining a forgotten chapter in American history, Black and Brown offers tremendous insight into the past and future of race relations along the Mexican border.
About the Author
Yoichi Funabashi is currently the Washington Bureau Chief of the Asahi Shimbun, a Japanese daily at which he has served as a correspondent in Washington, D.C., and Beijing and as diplomatic correspondent and columnist. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a Ushiba Fellow at the Institute for International Economics.