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.