Etsuko Taketani (竹谷悦子), Aerial Archives of Race: African American Cultural Expressions and the Black Nuclear Pacific. U of California P, 2025. 227頁, $34.95

概要

Opening new archives as well as new narratives that emerge when we take an aerial turn in transpacific studies, Etsuko Taketani examines the genealogy and contours of the aerial imaginary and the corollary shifting planetary imaginary that evolved in relation to each other in a transnational space that she terms the black nuclear Pacific. Following the first aerial drop of an atom bomb on humans and the subsequent military occupation of Japan by the United States, African American–Japanese encounters happened on a scale unimaginable before the war. Through readings of texts from a diverse range of artists, writers, and political thinkers—such as the NAACP’s Walter White, lawyer Edith Sampson, entertainer Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, and Malcolm X—who had formative interactions with occupied Japan, Taketani uncovers and analyzes African American cultural expressions that include a quasi-alien abduction narrative, a creation of a new tribe in the image of a rainbow on earth, a black futuristic apocalypse, and a racial fantasy of the Mother Plane. Through these cultural expressions, Aerial Archives of Race tracks the traces of black networks and exchanges with Japan from above that provoke new ways of thinking about (human) races on planet Earth.

Introduction

1. Aerial Mapping: Walter White, the Black Pacific, Occupied Japan

2. Prison Planet: Edith S. Sampson, the Alien Other Race, Abduction

3. The Aerial Fairy Tale: Josephine Baker, the Rainbow, Occupation Babies

4. The Black Nuclear Pacific: Langston Hughes, Hajime Kijima, Lorraine Hansberry, “All the Little Bombs—and the Big Bombs”

5. Futuristic Remains of a Found-Lost Nation: Malcolm X, Mother Planes, Japanese Speculative Fiction

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

PAGETOP