Abstract
The concept, “Japan’s Black Studies,” is not at all an oddity. Far from it, it is a critical paradigm. It has a history of its own, enabled by the translations of the Black intellectual tradition in a place rarely seen as one of the centers of Afrodiasporic political and cultural formations. This anthology introduces this intellectual formation that is at once singular and vibrant to English-speaking readership. The introduction sets the context for Japan’s Black Studies’ grounding in the tradition of historical Black struggles.
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Notes
- 1.
Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Ibram Kendi, The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstruction of Higher Education, 1965–1972 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Tiffany Ruby Peterson and Robin D. G. Kelley, “Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modern World,” African Studies Review 43, no. 1 (2000): 11–45; Michael Hanchard, ed., Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Micol Seigel, Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
- 2.
Yuichiro Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism: 20th-Century Afro-Asian Solidarity in Black America, Japan, and Okinawa (New York: NYU Press, 2013); Tsunehiko Kato, “The History of Black Studies in Japan: Origin and Development,” Journal of Black Studies 44, no. 8 (2013): 829–845; Toru Kiuchi, “Japan Black Studies Association at Sixty: Recent Thirty Years, 1984–2014,” http://home.att.ne.jp/zeta/yorozuya/jbsa/Japan_Black_Studies_Association_at_Sixty%2D%2DRecent_Thirty_Years_1984-2015.pdf (accessed August 30, 2018).
- 3.
Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism, 97–136.
- 4.
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Freedmen’s Bureau” (1901), in The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, edited by Nahum Dimitri Chandler (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 167. This passage opens the chapter “Of the Dawn of Freedom” in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Nahum Dimitri Chandler, “Introduction: Toward a New History of the Centuries: On The Early Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois,” in The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, 1–32.
- 5.
With copious notations, Chandler offers essential contexts, both historical and philosophical, for the “chronological reading of the principal texts” that allowed Du Bois to work out his thoughts on the idea of the color line, particularly in essays published between 1899 and 1903.” In particular, the essay titled “The Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind,” which was published in 1900 in The A. M. E. Church Review in October 1900 and first delivered as a speech at the Third Annual Meeting of the American Negro Academy in December 1899 was the “first place where he actually uses this line and this formulation [that is, the color line],” writes Chandler. Chandler, “Introduction,” 21. See W. E. B. Du Bois “The Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind,” in Chandler, The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, 111–137.
- 6.
Ernest Allen, Jr., “Satokata Takahashi and the Flowering of Black Messianic Nationalism,” The Black Scholar 24, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 23–26; Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Gerald Horne, Facing the Rising Sun: African Americans, Japan, and the Rise of Afro-Asian Solidarity (New York: NYU Press, 2018).
- 7.
Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism, 54–96; on race-making in wartime Japan, see Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley: University of California, 2011).
- 8.
Charles W. Mills, “Decolonizing Western Political Philosophy,” New Political Science 37, no. 1 (2015): 16–17.
- 9.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, with an introduction by Donald B. Gibson (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 3.
- 10.
Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley, with a new preface by the author (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 26–27; Charles W. Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).
- 11.
Chandler , “Introduction,” 8. This argument is foundational in Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism. Closely reading Du Bois’s corpus, Robinson argued that one of the key dynamics that gave form to Western civilization was that of “the appearance and formulation of racial sensibility” (2). Robinson called it “racialism.” This modality acquired shaping power as medieval Europe transitioned into a new era by the mid-fifteenth century. It brought about a whole new system of development, organization, and expansion called “racial capitalism.” Robinson wrote: “The events of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries intervened in the process through which feudalism was ultimately displaced by the several forms of capitalism. The consequences of those events were to determine the species of the modern world: the identities of the bourgeoisies that transformed capitalism into a world system; the sequences of this development; the relative vitalities of the several European economies; and the sources of labor from which economy would draw” (17). Robinson emphasized, “Racialism and its permutations persisted, rooted not in a particular era but in the civilization itself” (28). On “racial capitalism,” see especially, Robinson, Black Marxism, chapters 1–5.
- 12.
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Spirit of Modern Europe” (ca 1900) in Chandler, The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, 144.
- 13.
Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 5.
- 14.
Du Bois, “The Spirit of Modern Europe,” 140.
- 15.
Du Bois, “The Spirit of Modern Europe,” 140. Nahum Dimitri Chandler’s thought is singular. His probing analysis of the Negro Problem guides our analysis, especially insights drawn from his tour de force book X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem of Thought, published by Fordham University Press in 2014.
- 16.
Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism, 97–137; Kokujin Kenkyu 9 (August 1959): 24–25; Petry’s The Street was translated into Japanese in 1950. Richard Wright’s books appeared in Japanese throughout the 1950s, starting with Black Boy in 1952. See Kokujin Kenkyu 16 (September 1961): 36.
- 17.
Cedric J. Robinson, Black Movements in America (New York: Routledge, 1997); Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), especially Chap. 1.
- 18.
Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism, 97–137.
- 19.
See Kokujin Kenkyu 22 (June 1964).
- 20.
Kokujin Kenkyu 56 (1986): 66. See Kiuchi, “Japan Black Studies Association at Sixty: Recent Thirty Years, 1984–2014”; Tsunehiko Kato, Amerika Kokujin Josei Sakka no Sekai: Shōsetsu ni Miru Mōhitotsu no Gendai Amerika [The World of Black Women Writers: Another Aspect of Modern America in Their Novels] (Osaka: Sogensha, 1986); Atsuko Furomoto, Amerika Kokujin Bungaku to Fōkuroa [Afro-American Literature and Folklore] (Kyoto: Yamaguchi Shoten, 1986).
- 21.
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); Nikhil Pal Singh, “A Note on Race and the Left,” Social Text Online, July 31, 2015, https://socialtextjournal.org/a-note-on-race-and-the-left/; Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Sociological Theories: Racism and Colonialism, ed. UNESCO (Paris: UNESCO, 1980), 305–344.
- 22.
Michael Weiner, Japan’s Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity (New York: Routledge, 1997); Kazuyo Tsuchiya, Reinventing Citizenship: Black Los Angeles, Korean Kawasaki, and Community Participation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
- 23.
John Lie, “The ‘Problem’ of Foreign Workers in Contemporary Japan,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 26, no. 3 (1994): 3–12.
- 24.
David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991); James Baldwin, “On Being ‘White’ … and Other Lies,” in Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White, edited and with introduction by David R. Roediger (New York: Schocken Books, 1999), 178.
- 25.
Nahum Dimitri Chandler, “Introduction: On the Virtues of Seeing—At Least, But Never Only—Double,” CR: The New Centennial Review 12, no. 1 (2012), 3.
- 26.
Fumiko Sakashita, “‘Remember Pearl Harbor, But Don’t Forget Sikeston’: Anti-Lynching Discourse and Transnational Politics of Race,” in Building the Black Public Sphere: Lynching, Commemoration, and Anti-Lynching Struggles in the United States, Ph.D. dissertation (Michigan State University, 2012), Chap. 1. The revised version of this chapter, with a new title “Lynching across the Pacific: Japanese Views and African American Responses in the Wartime Anti-lynching Campaign,” was published in Swift to Wrath: Lynching in Global Historical Perspective, ed. by William D. Carrigan and Christopher Waldrep (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 181–214.
- 27.
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 (March 2005): 1233–1263; Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” The Journal of African American History 92, no. 2 (2007): 265–288.
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Onishi, Y., Sakashita, F. (2019). Introduction. In: Onishi, Y., Sakashita, F. (eds) Transpacific Correspondence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05457-1_1
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