Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production

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 Baraka’s “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 don’t 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