Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production

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.

Part One: Art and Performance
Chapter 1: Urban Geishas: Reading Race and Gender in iROZEALb’s Paintings, Crystal Anderson
Chapter 2: The Theatrics of Japanese Blackface: Body as Mannequin, Nina Cornyetz
Chapter 3: Abbey Lincoln and Kazuko Shiraishi’s Art-Making as Spiritual Labor, Yuichiro Onishi and Tia-Simone Gardner

Part Two: Poetry and Literature
Chapter 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
Chapter 5: Richard Wright’s Haiku and Modernist Poetics, Yoshinobu Hakutani
Chapter 6: In the Beginning: Blackness and the 1960s Creative Nonfiction of Ôe Kenzaburô, William H. Bridges IV
Chapter 7: Future-Oriented Blackness in Shōwa Robot Culture—1924 to 1963, Anne McKnight

Part Three: Sound, Song, Music
Chapter 8: “This Is Who I Am”: Jero and the Polycultural Politics of Black Enka, Kevin Fellezs
Chapter 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 Manabe
Chapter 11: Can the Japanese Rap?, Dexter Thomas Jr.
Chapter 12: Race, Ethnicity and Affective Community in Japanese Rastafari, Marvin Sterling