Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production - (New Studies in Modern Japan) by William H Bridges & Nina Cornyetz (Paperback)

About the Book

This book analyzes the complex conversations taking place in texts of all sorts traveling between Africans, African diasporas, and Japanese across disciplinary, geographic, racial, ethnic, and cultural borders.

Book Synopsis

This book analyzes the complex conversations taking place in texts of all sorts traveling between Africans, African diasporas, and Japanese across disciplinary, geographic, racial, ethnic, and cultural borders.

Review Quotes

Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production successfully transgresses these disciplinary boundaries, covering a range of topics as eclectic and syncretic as the encounters themselves. . . . The volume shines valuable light on gender relationships traditionally overlooked in Afro-Japanese research, which until recently has tended towards a phallocentric focus on African American male intellectual, artistic, political, and sociosexual encounters with Japanese. . . . This splendid collection propels the discussion of Afro-Japanese encounters forward in important, new, and unexpected directions that point the way for future multidisciplinary scholarship into the intersections of identity, Negritude and Nihonjinron, cultural studies, critical race studies, and much more.

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.

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.


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 booklistens in on a noisy creolization across the Black Pacific. A brilliant and necessary remix for our times.

About the Author

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.