Description
Lexington Books Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production Two Haiku and a Microphone 2015 Edition by Crystal S. Anderson, Michio Arimitsu, IV William H. Bridges
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 PerformanceChapter 1: Urban Geishas: Reading Race and Gender in iROZEALb's Paintings, Crystal AndersonChapter 2: The Theatrics of Japanese Blackface: Body as Mannequin, Nina CornyetzChapter 3: Abbey Lincoln and Kazuko Shiraishi's Art-Making as Spiritual Labor, Yuichiro Onishi and Tia-Simone GardnerPart Two: Poetry and LiteratureChapter 4: Playing the Dozens on Zen: Amiri Baraka's Journey from a "Pre-Black" Bohemian Outsider to a "Post-American Low Coup" Poet, Michio ArimitsuChapter 5: Richard Wright's Haiku and Modernist Poetics, Yoshinobu Hakutani Chapter 6: In the Beginning: Blackness and the 1960s Creative Nonfiction of Oe Kenzaburo, William H. Bridges IVChapter 7: Future-Oriented Blackness in Showa Robot Culture-1924 to 1963, Anne McKnightPart Three: Sound, Song, MusicChapter 8: "This Is Who I Am": Jero and the Polycultural Politics of Black Enka, Kevin FellezsChapter 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 ManabeChapter 11: Can the Japanese Rap?, Dexter Thomas Jr.Chapter 12: Race, Ethnicity and Affective Community in Japanese Rastafari, Marvin Sterling