Zoom Registration Link: https://myumi.ch/DJwwy

After the death of George Floyd, practitioners of traditional Asian medicine began to examine some of the racist biases that affected their own field. It quickly became apparent that the contributions of Black communities to both the practice and popularization of Asian medicine were missing from the histories that most practitioners know. Yi-Li Wu, associate professor of history and women's and gender studies and faculty associate at LRCCS, will discuss the role that the Black Panther Party and the Black Acupuncturist Association have played in bringing alternative Asian medical treatments to the United States. She will also discuss the process of self-reflection and study that led the journal, Asian Medicine, to critique its own racialized dynamics and commit to producing a special issue on this subject.
 
Yi-Li Wu is the author of Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China (UC Press). She holds a BA in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in international relations and a PhD in history from Yale University. She was a faculty member at Albion College for thirteen years and subsequently a researcher with the EASTMedicine group at the University of Westminster (UK). Her publications on society, culture, and the body in late imperial China have examined breast cancer, medical iconography, forensics, bone setting, the circulation of Chinese medicine in Korea, and Chinese views of European medicine. She is completing a monograph on the history of medicine for injuries and wounds in China, using this subfield of literate medicine to explore how experiences of the material and structural body shaped the development of Chinese medical thought.