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- Convenor:
-
Ruselle Meade
(Cardiff University)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Yuichiro Onishi
(University of Minnesota, Twin Cities)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- History
- Location:
- Lokaal 1.12
- Sessions:
- Saturday 19 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This panel will explore Japan's encounter with the black Americas through a focus on slave narratives, newspaper reports, and women's writing. It will explore how representations of black Americans in these media informed Japanese debates about nation, race and gender.
Long Abstract:
Japan's encounter with Europeans has, from the beginning, been intertwined with its encounter with Africans. Japanese contact with Iberian Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and with Dutch merchants throughout the Tokugawa period, brought contact with enslaved Africans. Then, in the mid-nineteenth century, when Japan and the United States came into contact, African Americans were also a part of that encounter, with black sailors and bodyguards playing a prominent role in Commodore Perry's missions to Japan.
Although Africans and their descendants have been present in Japan since the sixteenth century, most Japanese people's encounters were not firsthand, but instead mediated through various representations. While these representations included picture scrolls, woodblock prints, and book illustrations in the early modern period, by the late-nineteenth century, new media such as newspapers, music, and novels, came to play an important role in shaping Japanese perceptions of the African diaspora.
This panel examines representations of the 'black Americas' from the late-nineteenth century onward. Through an exploration of media, including newspapers, slave narratives, and women's writing, the panel will discuss how these representations informed Japanese domestic debates about nation, race and gender.
Here 'black Americas' is used in a capacious sense to refer to people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere, while acknowledging the towering economic, political and cultural influence of the United States in this relationship. Japan's encounter with the black Americas from the late-nineteenth century was characterized by deeper and more multidirectional engagement and was shaped by factors such as the abolition of slavery, increased overseas Japanese migration, and Japan's increasing geopolitical power. In this more globally interconnected environment, the status of black Americans came to hold greater salience to Japanese. Through its exploration, this panel will demonstrate the complex, fluctuating, and sometimes contradictory nature of these representations, and will reveal how they shaped understandings, not just of black Americans, but of Japanese themselves.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Saturday 19 August, 2023, -Ruselle Meade (Cardiff University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses a late-nineteenth century Japanese translation of the biography of the Haitian revolutionary hero Toussaint Louverture, exploring why the work was such a potent salvo against the predominant racial discourse in Meiji Japan.
Paper long abstract:
The Haitian revolutionary hero Toussaint Louverture (1743-1803) was introduced to a Japanese reading public in 1890 through the pages of the juvenile magazine Shōnen’en (Youth’s Garden). Louverture, whose army defeated those of the French, British and Spanish to secure liberation of the enslaved people of Haiti and the country’s independence, was the subject of a biography entitled ‘A Black Hero’ (kuro-ijin). The Japanese version of the biography was published with the intention of challenging racial hierarchies posited by the new human sciences introduced to Japan in the late-nineteenth century Though focused ‘a black hero’, the implications for Japanese readers was clear: they too could transcend this contrived pecking order.
This Japanese translation was but one step in the transnational journey of Louverture’s biography, which saw transformations at every stage. The source of the Japanese translation was "Toussaint Louverture, The Negro Patriot of Hayti" by Rev. John R. Beard. This US publication was a heavily edited version of an earlier British publication, which was itself based on sources “found chiefly in the French language.” Like previous versions, the Japanese text was heavily revised: not only was it considerably abridged as it moved from book to magazine format, but it was also reshaped to appeal to Shōnen’en’s juvenile audience. The American version, published to argue for the abolition of slavery in the United States, was revised to promote aspiration among Japanese youth.
This paper will explore the biography’s position in the Japanese context, first by examining the racial discourse circulating in Japan in the late-nineteenth century. The translator of Louverture’s biography, Yamagata Teisaburō, was himself embedded in this discourse having previously translated works by the evolutionary theorists Ernst Haeckel and Charles Darwin. This paper will then discuss the factors that made Louverture’s biography such a potent salvo against the predominant Meiji-era racial discourse. Finally, by exploring how Louverture’s story was reshaped for its new readership, the paper will question whether this translation contributed to what the historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot has described as the global silencing of the Haitian revolution.
Tarik Geber-Mérida (Freie Universität Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims at highlighting the Japanese view of African Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. By using newspaper articles and books from the Meiji period, it will give a more nuanced account of the hitherto common depiction of Japanese and Black American relations.
Paper long abstract:
The topic of Japanese and African American interactions has enjoyed a growing popularity in recent years. Much has been written on the meaning of modern Japan for Black Americans, with terms such as “model,” “ally,” or “fellow victims of racism” used to point at the importance of the Japanese presence inside Black history. However, much less has been produced on the other side of the story and the research on the Japanese view of Black Americans is relatively scarce. This is surprising, as the time Japan “modernized” itself along Western lines coincided with what historians dubbed the “nadir of Black American history.” Meiji Japanese were therefore bound to encounter the American race problem.
Indeed, the earliest Japanese newspapers from the Meiji period already contain many references to issues surrounding African Americans. When the end of the Russo-Japanese War saw a surge in Japanese emigration to the United States, thereby fueling an already domestic race problem, Japanese immigrants became confronted to the same situation: relegated to the fringes of society as undesirable “colored” people. Accordingly, the Japanese interest in the Black population grew, with numerous authors investigating what was described as the “Black problem.”
It would be mistaken, however, to interpret this as genuine concern for racial equality. Despite the similar situation, both groups came with different standpoints: Black Americans were discriminated by their own government, while Japanese immigrants had a strong state willing to back them up. And this state saw the mistreatment of its citizen as hurtful to national prestige. In this sense, African Americans offered the Japanese an example of what to avoid in order to be respected not only as individuals but also as a nation. Any interest in the plight of African Americans should therefore be seen as highly pragmatic.
The aim of this paper is to nuance the one-sided account of the history of Japanese and African American interactions as well as to introduce new sources that enable us to better comprehend that history.
Dan Shao (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)
Paper short abstract:
This article argues that the constellation of Japanese women involved in the editorial and translating project of Representative Works by Contemporary North American Black Women Writers, 1981-1982, demonstrates the significance of contextuality and intertextuality in feminist translation.
Paper long abstract:
From the mid-1970s through the early-1990s, a total of 37 translations of black women writers were published in Japan, compared to only 2 book translations prior to 1974. Among them, the publication of the 7-volume Representative Works by Contemporary North American Black Women Writers in the early 1980s was a turning point, as racial and gender issues were intertwined for the first time. The series reveals a mode of reading that explores the intersectionality of gender, race, and class with emphasis on the specific historical, social, and cultural contexts of each work. This article argues that the constellation of Japanese women involved in the editorial and translating project of the series demonstrates the significance of contextuality and intertextuality in feminist translation.
The series consists of 5 novels by Toni Morrison, Ellease Southerland, Ntozake Shange, Michele Wallace and Alice Walker, and 2 anthologies, edited respectively by Mary Helen Washington and Kazuko Fujimoto, the series editor. This article reviews the origins of the series by tracing the trajectory of Fujimoto’s rising reputation as a literary translator/editor with a strong background in the underground drama movement. It traces how Fujimoto endeavors to provide a panoramic view of African American women’s writing at the time by choosing and paying personal calls to the above-mentioned authors; and how Fujimoto’s belief in collective wisdom rallied the all-female troops of translators and commentators from different academic and artistic disciplines in Japan to participate in this project.
Overall, the series registers the dissonances and heterogeneity entailed in the local contexts of women reading women in Japan and America, as well as documenting the transnational communication networks forged through the efforts of translation and dialogue to create hypothetical “actual” encounters between black female writers and their Japanese counterparts while conveying a sense of synchronicity/solidarity among women readers.