Description
Book SynopsisWendy Matsumura examines the history of the colonial projects and violence of interwar Japan while critiquing Japan studies’ participation of the erasure of this history in its study of the formation of the Japanese nation-state.
Trade Review“
Waiting for the Cool Moon is rigorous, invigorating, and consequential for how we read, see, study, research, and understand both the history of Japan in the interwar years and history more generally. This hugely impressive book is a magnificent achievement.” -- Rebecca E. Karl, author of * China’s Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History *
“
Waiting for the Cool Moon is a fierce, passionate book, one that is as suited to these times as it is to the period it explores. Wendy Matsumura brings a powerful theoretical apparatus to bear: the Marxian analysis of her earlier work is transformed by her intense engagement with the theoretical and comparative work of Black and Indigenous women scholars. The effects of this encounter are profound. By attending to revolutionary practice and acknowledging the pain and sadness of absence, Matsumura locates the urgent ethical commitment of a radical historian. An outstanding critical history.” -- Christopher T. Nelson, author of * Dancing with the Dead: Memory, Performance, and Everyday Life in Postwar Okinawa *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Empire and Oikonomia 17
2. Enclosure and the Community of the Commons 37
3. Buraku Women against Tripled Sufferings 60
4. Housewifization, Invisibilization, and the Myth of the New Small Farm Household 83
5. Interimperial Korean Struggle in Fertilizer’s Global Circuit 108
6. Empire Through the Prism of Phosphate 134
7. Water Struggles in a Colonial City 161
Conclusion. Waiting, Witnessing, Withholding 185
Notes 193
Bibliography 241
Index 261
