Playing in the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature: 88 (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies) - Softcover

Will Bridges (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0472054422 ISBN 13: 9780472054428

Publisher: University of Michigan Press, 2020

Synopsis

Playing in the Shadows considers the literature engendered by postwar Japanese authors’ robust cultural exchanges with African Americans and African American literature. The Allied Occupation brought an influx of African American soldiers and culture to Japan, which catalyzed the writing of black characters into postwar Japanese literature. This same influx fostered the creation of organizations such as the Kokujin kenkyū no kai (The Japanese Association for Negro Studies) and literary endeavors such as the Kokujin bungaku zenshū (The Complete Anthology of Black Literature). This rich milieu sparked Japanese authors’—Nakagami Kenji and Ōe Kenzaburō are two notable examples—interest in reading, interpreting, critiquing, and, ultimately, incorporating the tropes and techniques of African American literature and jazz performance into their own literary works. Such incorporation leads to literary works that are “black” not by virtue of their representations of black characters, but due to their investment in the possibility of technically and intertextually black Japanese literature. Will Bridges argues that these “fictions of race” provide visions of the way that postwar Japanese authors reimagine the ascription of race to bodies—be they bodies of literature, the body politic, or the human body itself.

About this title

About the Author

Will Bridges is Assistant Professor of Japanese at the University of Rochester.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0472054422
• ISBN 13: 9780472054428
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 312