| Budget Amount *help |
¥1,350,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,200,000、Indirect Cost: ¥150,000)
Fiscal Year 2007: ¥650,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000、Indirect Cost: ¥150,000)
Fiscal Year 2006: ¥700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥700,000)
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| Research Abstract |
This project is an attempt to stake out a new critical frame of reference that I have termed "black Orientalism. "By situating African American literature of the 1930s in the geopolitical terrain of the Pacific, it retrieves and retraces the trajectory of the transnational alliance of color that African American writers envisioned with Japan in the decade leading to Pearl Harbor. Through analyses of the Japanese-black nexus in the works of James Weldon Johnson and George Samuel Schuyler, this study undertakes to theorize African American accountability in the discourse of imperialism and colonialism in the Pacific and beyond.
Johnson's Along This Way reframes what modern critics call the "black Pacific, "which has been exclusively modeled on, and hence has come to be synonymous with, the Afro-Asian exchange (as if the Pacific is always already Asian, rather than a contact zone of multilateral intercultural exchange). By closely reading the Nicaragua/Japan nexus operating in Johnson's Along This Way, I have examined the way in which Johnson envisioned a more dynamic black circuit that changed both the Pacific and black agency and positionality vis-a-vis imperialism and racism in that region.
Schuyler - and his near-future science fiction Black Empire-offers a lens through which to examine the circuit of a global war fantasy set off by the Italo-Ethiopian War and the role that Japan played in it. Recovering the axis forged between Tokyo, Addis Ababa, and Harlem during the Ethiopian crisis, I have demonstrated the mutually implicated perceptions of race and empire that informed black internationalism.
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