Transpacific Correspondence

Since 1954, Japan has become home to a vibrant but little-known tradition of Black Studies. Transpacific Correspondence introduces this intellectual tradition to English-speaking audiences, placing it in the context of a long history of Afro-Asian solidarity and affirming its commitments to transnational inquiry and cosmopolitan exchange. More than six decades in the making, Japan-s Black Studies continues to shake up commonly held knowledge of Black history, culture, and literature and build a truly globalized field of Black Studies.

Yuichiro Onishi teaches in the Department of African American & African Studies and Asian American Studies Program at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, USA. He is the author of Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th-Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa (2013). Fumiko Sakashita is Associate Professor in the College of Letters at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan. Her work appears in Swift to Wrath: Lynching in Global Historical Perspective (2013) and Gender and Lynching: Politics of Memory (Palgrave Macmillan 2011).

1. Introduction.- Part I A Primer for Transpacific Correspondence.- 2. Studies in "Japanese Dream": A Transpacific Inquiry into Afrodiasporic Feminist Thought.- 3. When and Where We Entered: Intellectual Autobiographies of Japan's Black Studies Scholars.- Part II Crossing Over.- 4. You're My Pin-up Girl!: The Politics of Jazz Fandom and the Making of Mary Lou Williams in the 1940s.- 5. Caribbean Haiku of Wisdom: Reading Elis Juliana's Haiku in Papiamentu Translated into English.- 6. From Localized Marxism to Americanized Sophistication and Beyond: Studies of Black History in Postwar Japan.- Part III Transpacific Black Freedom Studies.- 7. African American Women in Japan under U.S. Military Occupation, 1945-1952.- 8. S. I. Hayakawa and the Civil Rights Era.- 9. Yoriko Nakajima and Robert F. Williams: Reasoning with the Long Civil Rights Movement Thesis.