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

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. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Work It: Traveling Texts and the Work of Reading Afro-Japanese Cultural Exchange • William H. Bridges IV and Nina Cornyetz Part I: Art and Performance 1 Urban Geishas: Reading Race and Gender in iROZEALb’s Paintings • Crystal S. Anderson 2 The Theatrics of Japanese Blackface: Body as Mannequin • Nina Cornyetz 3 Abbey Lincoln and Kazuko Shiraishi’s Art-Making as Spiritual Labor • Yuichiro Onishi and Tia-Simone Gardner Part II: Poetry and Literature 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 5 Richard Wright’s Haiku and Modernist Poetics • Yoshinobu Hakutani 6 In the Beginning: Blackness and the 1960s Creative Nonfiction of Ōe Kenzaburō • William H. Bridges IV 7 Future-Oriented Blackness in Shōwa Robot Culture—1924 to 1963 • Anne McKnight Part III: Sound, Song, Music 8 What Is This “Black” in Japanese Popular Music? (Re)Imagining Race in a Transnational Polycultural Context • Kevin Fellezs 9 Extending Diaspora: The NAACP and Up-“Lift” Cultures in the Interwar Black Pacific • Shana Redmond 10 Hip-Hop and Reggae in Recent Japanese Social Movements • Noriko Manabe 11 Can the Japanese Rap? • Dexter Thomas Jr. 12 Race, Ethnicity and Affective Community in Japanese Rastafari • Marvin Sterling Works Cited Index About the Contributors