Playing in the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature

William Bridges, IV
East Asian Languages and Literatures
UC Irvine

My current book project, Playing in the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature, is the first book-length manuscript to explore the body of literature engendered by post-World War II Japanese authors’ robust cultural exchanges with African Americans and African Americana. By tracing the history of Afro-Japanese cultural and political exchange as it is written into Japanese literature, I argue that Japanese fictions of race provide visions of the way that postwar, “post-Occupied,” post-imperial Japanese authors reimagine the ascription of race to bodies—be they bodies of literature, the body politic, or the human body itself.