Description
Book SynopsisTraveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production analyzes the complex conversations taking place in texts of all sorts traveling between Africans, African Diasporas, and Japanese across disciplinary, geographic, racial, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural borders. Be it focused on the make-up of the blackface ganguro or the haiku of Richard Wright, Rastafari communities in Japan or the black enka singer Jero, the volume turns its attention away from questions of representation to ones concerning the generative aspects of transcultural production. The contributors are interested primarily in texts in motionthe contradictory motion within texts, the traveling of texts, and the action that such kinetic energy inspires in readers, viewers, listeners, and travelers. As our texts travel and travail, the originary nodal points that anchor them to set significations loosen and are transformed; the essays trace how, in the process of traveling, the bodies and subjectivities of tho
Trade ReviewTraveling Texts is the best book published to date on Afro-Japanese hybridity. The book brims with critical insights into a history of collaboration, exchange, borrowing, and homage perfectly pitched to its subject. From Amiri Baraka’s “low coup” poems to Japanese rastafari, the book listens in on a noisy creolization across the Black Pacific. A brilliant and necessary remix for our times. -- Bill V. Mullen, Purdue University
In addressing what many readers may initially view as a “minor key” of Afro-Japanese encounters, Traveling Texts will quickly convince you of their centrality as phenomena while helping us theorize, understand, and discover intersections that don’t simply yield to regnant and often obscuring frameworks like globalization. Thinking through hip hop and haiku to ganguro black face, enka and rap, Richard Wright, Oe and polycultural explorations of race and identity, this collection explores the incommensurable in rigorous, amusing, sometimes breathtaking, and deeply touching ways. -- James A. Fujii, University of California, Irvine
Focusing on African-American and Japanese cultural exchange, Traveling Texts provides a refreshing antidote to the ongoing fixation with Japan and the West/ Japan and Asia as the twin poles by which humanities scholars have approached “Japan in the world.” From W.E.B. Du Bois’ meditations on the Japanese victory over Russia in 1905 to the embrace of hip hop a century later, these essays engage critical race studies in order to push readers to rethink the social networks, cultural engagements, and traveling texts that constitute transnational Japan. A provocative and path breaking book. -- Louise Young, Author of Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan
Table of ContentsPart One: Art and Performance Chapter 1: Urban Geishas: Reading Race and Gender in iROZEALb’s Paintings, Crystal Anderson Chapter 2: The Theatrics of Japanese Blackface: Body as Mannequin, Nina Cornyetz Chapter 3: Abbey Lincoln and Kazuko Shiraishi’s Art-Making as Spiritual Labor, Yuichiro Onishi and Tia-Simone Gardner Part Two: Poetry and Literature Chapter 4: Playing the Dozens on Zen: Amiri Baraka’s Journey from a “Pre-Black” Bohemian Outsider to a “Post-American Low Coup” Poet, Michio Arimitsu Chapter 5: Richard Wright’s Haiku and Modernist Poetics, Yoshinobu Hakutani Chapter 6: In the Beginning: Blackness and the 1960s Creative Nonfiction of Ôe Kenzaburô, William H. Bridges IV Chapter 7: Future-Oriented Blackness in Shōwa Robot Culture—1924 to 1963, Anne McKnight Part Three: Sound, Song, Music Chapter 8: “This Is Who I Am”: Jero and the Polycultural Politics of Black Enka, Kevin Fellezs Chapter 9: Extending Diaspora: The NAACP and Up-“Lift” Cultures in the Interwar Black Pacific, Shana Redmond Chapter 10: Hip-Hop and Reggae in Recent Japanese Social Movements, Noriko Manabe Chapter 11: Can the Japanese Rap?, Dexter Thomas Jr. Chapter 12: Race, Ethnicity and Affective Community in Japanese Rastafari, Marvin Sterling
