Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production: Two Haiku and a Microphone

by Crystal S. Anderson (Contribution by), William H. Bridges IV (Editor), Douglas Slaymaker (Editor), Michio Arimitsu (Contribution by), Nina Cornyetz (Editor)

Overview

Traveling 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 motion—the 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 those working to reimagine the text(s) in new sites moderate, accommodate, and transfigure both the texts and themselves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781498505475
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	06/24/2015
Series:	New Studies in Modern Japan
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	302
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

William H. Bridges is assistant professor of Japanese and Asian studies at St. Olaf College.
Nina Cornyetz is associate professor of interdisciplinary studies at the Gallatin School for Individualized Study, New York University.

Table of Contents

Part One: Art and Performance
Chapter1: 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

Editorial Reviews

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

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

Traveling 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 booklistens in on a noisy creolization across the Black Pacific. A brilliant and necessary remix for our times.

Bill V. Mullen

Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production successfully transgresses these disciplinary boundaries, covering a range of topics as eclectic and syncretic as the encounters themselves.. .. The volume shines valuable light on gender relationships traditionally overlooked in Afro-Japanese research, which until recently has tended towards a phallocentric focus on African American male intellectual, artistic, political, and sociosexual encounters with Japanese.. .. This splendid collection propels the discussion of Afro-Japanese encounters forward in important, new, and unexpected directions that point the way for future multidisciplinary scholarship into the intersections of identity, Negritude and Nihonjinron, cultural studies, critical race studies, and much more.

Journal Of The Royal Anthropological Institute