Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production: Two Haiku and a Microphone
2017; Penn State University Press; Volume: 54; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/complitstudies.54.1.0267
ISSN1528-4212
Autores ResumoAfro-Asian has become a term that scholars use to study the contradictions and like-mindedness of two distinctive regions across a south–south forum. And yet, scholars often refrain from including Japan in categorizations of the global south precisely because of its contemporary inclusion in world politics and economy as a G8 nation. Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production: Two Haiku and a Microphone, edited by William H. Bridges IV and Nina Cornyetz, however, expands upon Japan's industrialized positionality to one that engages and explores cultural productions from an Afro-Asian perspective. Including chapters on aesthetical forms, this edited volume is a wonderful addition to existing scholarly collections in Afro-Asian studies, Japanese studies, Africana studies, and cultural studies. The authors employ diverse methodologies to examine these interdisciplinary topics in ways that both build upon readers' knowledges of canonical topics. Chapters on well-known authors exist alongside other chapters on newer topics, such as “black” robots, Japanese hip-hop, and ganguro (顔黒, literally black face) girls to consider the flows of cultural exchange in an Afro-Asian context. Finally, the editors have compiled the volume to captivate an interdisciplinary reader, including chapters on Japanese studies alongside that of Africana studies. In short, the volume is dynamic, insightful, and engrossing for most readers.Part I of the anthology, “Art and Performance,” includes three contributions that engage in modes of transculturation from the specific vantage point of African American studies. The highlights of this section include Anderson and Cornyetz's chapters. Crystal S. Anderson's “Urban Geishas: Reading Race and Gender in iROZEALb's Paintings” examines how iROZEALb's reflects the interplay between African American culture, blackface, and ukiyo-e prints and iconography. Anderson locates the Afro-Japanese in the aesthetics of visual culture, ultimately suggesting that iROZEALb's paintings critique black stereotypes while also incorporating Japan into black politics, suggesting that these representations that engage race, culture, politics, gender, and sexuality traverse national borders, embodying the global from a very specific vantage point. This example of Afro-Japanese aesthetics from the point of view of an African American artist is followed by Nina Cornyetz's “The Theatrics of Japanese Blackface: Body as Mannequin.” In this fascinating essay, she expands upon blackface and blackness by examining if gyaru (girl) subculture appropriates African American culture. More specifically, she questions if blackness is a sign or a symbol, attempting to understand its origin in contemporary Japanese culture. Finally, Yuichiro Onishi and Tia-Simone Gardner's chapter, “Abbey Lincoln and Kazuko Shiraishi's Art-Making as Spiritual Labor,” considers the correspondence and collaboration between Abbey Lincoln, an African American jazz musician and Kazuko Shiraishi, a Japanese poet. These three chapters allow the reader to understand that Afro-Japanese cultural productions produce meaning not in the confines of area studies but through a transnational framework that transcends disciplines.Part II of the anthology, “Poetry and Literature,” moves from African American poetry to Japanese literature and cultural productions. The reader approaches Amiri Baraka and Richard Wright alongside Ōe Kenzaburō's literature and depictions of “future-oriented” black robots in Shōwa (1924–1963) Japan. While seemingly disparate topics, each of these chapters focuses on how Afro-Japanese connections formed and influenced canonical writers. Michio Arimitsu examines Amiri Baraka's later poetry while Yoshinobu Hakutani's chapter on Richard Wright's haiku depicts the modernist techniques he showcased in his poetry. The latter part of this section, with chapters by Bridges and McKnight are especially interesting. William H. Bridges IV shifts to Japan in his chapter, “In the Beginning: Blackness and the 1960s Creative Nonfiction of Ōe Kenzaburō.” He introduces and analyzes Ōe's essays and literary works, such as A Personal Matter (Kojinteki na taiken, 1964) and The Cry (Sakebigoe, 1963) through “the dialectics of the racial gaze” (121). Bridges argues that this racial gaze places Japanese citizens in postwar Japan as analogous to African Americans; both emerge with a recognition that is formed fearfully under the power of a white gaze. This racial gaze allows Ōe to pursue “full membership in a transnational [black] community” while challenging the hegemonic racial assumptions of the United States as a white nation (134). Bridges' challenge against former readings of Ōe's blackness, when read in conjunction with Anne McKnight's “Future-Oriented Blackness in Shōwa Robot Culture—1924 to 1963,” is vital for framing the field of Afro-Japanese within Japanese studies. The content of these chapters, collectively, expands upon the conceptual framework of blackness in Japan by considering canonical texts as black texts even if they were not previously considered as such. McKnight's analysis of robots in Shōwa challenges the reader to consider representations of robots in translations of a Czech play, Karel Čapek's R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), early Japanese manga and anime, such as Adventures of Dankichi, Momotarō's Sea Eagle, and Astro Boy, and proletarian literature alongside launch of the first Japanese robot, Gakutensoku. Through this breadth of examples, she weaves her reader through her analysis of robots as examples of blackness in Japan. Together, this section provides readers with concrete case studies of how literary studies can examine how blackness and Japaneseness expand and influence each other.Part III, “Sound, Music, Song,” is comprised of five chapters that examine the role of traditionally African-American and Jamaican music in Japanese culture. Following Kevin Fellezs's lead (through Stuart Hall's influence), the authors in this section ask “What is this ‘Black’ in Japanese [Popular] Music” and examine Jero's enka, Japanese translations of “Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing,” the use of hip-hop and reggae in Japanese social movements, Japanese rap music, and the role of community among the Japanese Rastafarians. Using performativity, blackness, and affective theories, this section is interesting for readers who wish to pursue understanding Japanese subcultures and, more specifically, youth culture. Here, the authors, such as Noriko Manabe in her chapter on Japanese social movements, explore the history and implications of these subcultures as they perform blackness in Japan, asking how these specific case studies can become theoretical interjections into the field of Afro-Japanese studies. This section is particularly useful as a pedagogical tool in courses on Japanese subculture whose number has been increasing in the United States.In conclusion, the publication of this volume expands upon many interdisciplinary fields but is especially important for those in Africana and Japanese studies as it highlights moments of integration and collaboration between the two fields. Moreover, the performativity of blackness in Japan and the adoption of Japanese aesthetics in African American aesthetics embody the history, negotiation, and transnational community formation of the field of Afro-Japanese studies.
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