Mixed Race Studies

An Interview with UW’s Lynet Uttal: Making the Asian American experience visible through learning

Asian Wisconzine
Volume 7, Number 9 (September 2011)

Heidi M. Pascual

Part 1 of 2

It was “quite an accident of fate” that Lynet Uttal became the director of the  University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Asian American Studies Program. Although Uttal has been a faculty affiliate of Asian American Studies since 2003, she never considered being in that position.

“I was in Mexico on sabbatical when I received an email from then director Leslie  Bow asking me if I would consider being the next director,” Uttal said in an interview with Asian Wisconzine. “Although I teach about Asian Americans in my courses, yet I never considered myself as doing research about Asian Americans or being part of the field of Asian American Studies.”

Four years into her position, Uttal has loved her work as she learned the importance of the program in terms of education offering and how it also helps her grow professionally.

“I love being the director of the Asian American Studies Program because the program is very important for the mission of the University as well as for my own professional growth as a race scholar,” she explained. “I have grown in the last four years to believe that the Asian American Studies Program is important because Asian Americans are a racialized group in the United States that is invisible in the practices and understanding of race in the the United States. For example, although it was Asian American graduate students who were extremely active in creating all of the ethnic studies programs and ethnic studies requirement at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, very little has been done to acknowledge their activism and contributions.  Yet, Asian Americans have a history in U.S. society parallel to African Americans in terms of having experienced legal exclusions and discrimination on the basis of race.”

Uttal has a mixed racial, cultural and national background, with a Japanese American mother and a Russian American Jewish father, but according to her, neither of these cultures (which were not mainstream Euro-American) was used to create a sense of ethnic identity in her parents’ home.

“My mother is a Japanese American who grew up in Japan from age 9-23 years and returned to the U.S., almost as if she were a Japanese immigrant,” Uttal said.  “She raised my two sisters and me to think of ourselves as American, because according to Japanese standards we certainly were not Japanese.  But we also were not Japanese American.  The cultural and socialization values in the home I grew up in reflected my Japanese grandparents’ values as well as my mother’s transnational identity ideas, and also father’s upbringing as a Russian American Jewish father.”…

Read the entire article here.