Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production

Two Haiku and a Microphone

Contributions by Crystal S. Anderson, Michio Arimitsu, William H. Bridges, Nina Cornyetz, Kevin Fellezs, Tia-Simone Gardner, Yoshinobu Hakutani, Noriko Manabe, Anne McKnight, Yuichiro Onishi, Shana L. Redmond, Marvin D. Sterling, Dexter Thomas Edited by William H. Bridges, Nina Cornyetz

Publication date:

24 June 2015

Length of book:

302 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

Dimensions:

235x162mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781498505475

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.

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

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.