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

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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 motionthe 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.

Reviews

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 Barakas low coup poems to Japanese rastafari, the book listens in on a noisy creolization across the Black Pacific. A brilliant and necessary remix for our times. -- Bill V. Mullen, Purdue University
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 dont 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, University of California, Irvine
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, Author of Beyond the Metropolis: Second Cities and Modern Life in Interwar Japan

Author Bio

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.