Description

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.

Table of Contents

Part 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 Showa 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 Re

Product details

Published 12 Apr 2019
Format Paperback
Edition 1st
Extent 302
ISBN 9781498505499
Imprint Lexington Books
Illustrations 3 b/w illustrations;
Dimensions 221 x 152 mm
Series New Studies in Modern Japan
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

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Environment: Staging