Waiting for the Cool Moon: Anti-imperialist Struggles in the Heart of Japan's Empire

by Wendy Matsumura

Overview

In Waiting for the Cool Moon Wendy Matsumura interrogates the erasure of colonial violence at the heart of Japanese nation-state formation. She critiques Japan studies’ role in this effacement and contends that the field must engage with anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity as the grounds on which to understand imperialism, colonialism, fascism, and other forces that shape national consciousness. Drawing on Black radical thinkers’ critique of the erasure of the Middle Passage in universalizing theories of modernity’s imbrication with fascism, Matsumura traces the consequences of the Japanese empire’s categorization of people as human and less-than-human as manifested in the 1920s and 1930s, and the struggles of racialized and colonized people against imperialist violence. She treats the archives safeguarded by racialized, colonized women throughout the empire as traces of these struggles, including the work they performed to keep certain stories out of view. Matsumura demonstrates that tracing colonial sensibility and struggle is central to grappling with their enduring consequences for the present.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478027829
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	12/22/2023
Series:	Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	12 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Wendy Matsumura is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego, and author of The Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor, and Theorizations of Community, also published by Duke University Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  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

Editorial Reviews

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.

China’s Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History - Rebecca E. Karl

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.

Dancing with the Dead: Memory, Performance, and Everyday Life in  Postwar Okinawa - Christopher T. Nelson

"In the scope, method, and the author’s critical reflection on her positionality as a US researcher, Waiting for the Cool Moon reaches out to a wider audience than Japanese studies and offers a blueprint of historiography aimed toward collective liberation."

Japan Forum - Nozomi Nakaganeku Saito