Since before the American Civil War, African American and Japanese encounters produced relationships and discourse of knowledge that transcended Eurocentric conceptions of civilization and hierarchies of personhood. Black Transnationalism and Japan introduces the diverse activity and intellectual movements created, shaped, and led by Japanese and African American people. While some Pan-Asianisms and Pan-Africanisms urged a uniting of colonized spaces against the colonizer, and were often expressed in the form of decolonization movements, this volume introduces various transnational phenomena that transcended such dichotomies. Black American-Japanese transnational encounters often occurred on the non-state level from within the two new competing empires of America and Japan. Such transnational encounters reveal not only heretofore hidden historical actors, friendships, and solidarities, but also innovative cultural productions that challenged hierarchies of race, culture, and imperialism.

Dr. Natalia Doan is the Okinaga Junior Research Fellow in Japanese Studies at Wadham College and the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies, University of Oxford, where she teaches the history of gender and sexuality in Japanese popular culture.

Professor Sho Konishi is a historian of Japan specializing in transnational
discourses on knowledge at the University of Oxford.

List of Contributors
Acknowledgements

Editors’ Introduction. Black Transnationalism and
Japan: Concepts and Contours
Natalia Doan and Sho Konishi

Chapter 1. Solidarity with Samurai : The Antebellum African American Press, Transnational Racial quality, and the 1860 Japanese Embassy to the United States
Natalia Doan

Chapter 2. From Peripheries to Transnational: frican Americans in Japan’s Identity Formation, 1872–1940
Yukiko Koshiro

Chapter 3. Playing Changes: Music as Mediator
between Japanese and Black Americans
E. Taylor Atkins

Chapter 4. Interracial Friendship Across Barbed Wire: Mollie Wilson and Lillian Igasaki
Sonia C. Gomez

Chapter 5. The Transpacific Reworking of Race and Marxist Theory: The Case of Harry Haywood’s Lifework
Yuichiro Onishi and Toru Shinoda

Chapter 6. My Journey into Black/Africana Studies: Knowledge Should Be Power to Unite Us
An Interview with Furukawa Tetsushi

Bibliography
Index