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Studies in “Japanese Dream”: A Transpacific Inquiry into Afrodiasporic Feminist Thought

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Abstract

The chapter introduces writer Paule Marshall’s dream of going to Japan as an opening to engage in the study of Afrodiasporic feminist thought. It presents “Japanese dream” as a wellspring of distinct Black feminist artistry, which was shared by Toni Cade Bambara, Abbey Lincoln, and Atsuko Furomoto, the Japanese translator of Marshall’s novel, The Praisesong for the Widow. Specifically, it approaches “Japanese dream” as metaphysics to help articulate the richness and complexity of Black life.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Paule Marshall, Triangular Road: A Memoir (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2009), 85.

  2. 2.

    Paule Marshall published five novels, which include Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959); The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969); Praisesong for the Widow (1983); Daughters (1991); The Fisher King (2000). She also published two collections of short stories, Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961) and Reena and Other Stories (1983). Her most recent publication is the memoir called Triangular Road (2009). Finally, for the collection of interviews with Paule Marshall, see Conversations with Paule Marshall, edited by James C. Hall and Heather Hathaway (University Press of Mississippi, 2010).

  3. 3.

    Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones (Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc., 2009), 2, 6.

  4. 4.

    Mary Helen Washington, “Afterword,” Brown Girl, Brownstones (New York: Feminist Press, 1981), 313.

  5. 5.

    Fred Moten, “Not In Between: Lyric Paining, Visual History, and the Postcolonial Future,” TDR: The Drama Review 47, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 134.

  6. 6.

    Washington, “Afterword,” 313.

  7. 7.

    Washington, “Afterword,” 313.

  8. 8.

    Roi Ottley, New World A-Coming: Inside Black America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1943); for a “dancer” reference, see Courtney Thorsson, Women: Nationalism and Contemporary African American Women’s Novels (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013).

  9. 9.

    “Messages from Abroad,” Kokujin Kenkyu (Black Studies) 59 (1989): 40.

  10. 10.

    Barbara Christian, “Ritualistic Process and the Structure of Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow,” Callaloo 18 (Spring-Summer 1983): 74–84; Barbara Frey Waxman, “The Widow’s Journey to Self and Roots: Aging and Society in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 9, no. 3 (1987): 94–99; Abena P. A. Busina, “What Is Your Nation? Reconnecting Africa and Her Diaspora through Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow,” in Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, edited by Cheryl A. Wall (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 196–211; Cheryl A. Wall, Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Toni Cade Bambara, “Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye,” Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations, edited and with a preface by Toni Morrison (New York: Random House, 1996), 89–138; Mary Helen Washington, ed., Black-Eyed Susans/Midnight Birds: Stories by and about Black Women (New York: Anchor Books, 1989); Mary Helen Washington, “New Lives and New Letters: Black Women Writers at the End of the Seventies,” College English 43, no. 1 (1981): 1–11; Madhu Dubey, Black Women Novelists and the Nationalistic Aesthetic (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994); Cheryl Higashida, Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945–1995 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013).

  11. 11.

    Paule Marshall, “The Making of a Writer: From the Poets in the Kitchen,” in Reena and Other Stories (New York: Feminist Press, 1983), 5.

  12. 12.

    Marshall, “From the Poets in the Kitchen,” 5–6.

  13. 13.

    Marshall, “From the Poets in the Kitchen,” 4.

  14. 14.

    Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 67.

  15. 15.

    Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67.

  16. 16.

    Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 76. Investigating this scene of racial exploitation and gendered violence by going undercover, then, were two leading Black women intellectual activists: Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke. They occupied a central place in the mid-twentieth century formation of Black radicalism. Their exposé was published in The Crisis. See Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke, The Crisis in November 1935 under the title “The Bronx Slave Market,” The Crisis (November 1935): 330–331, 340.

  17. 17.

    Marshall, “From the Poets in the Kitchen,” 9.

  18. 18.

    Marshall, “From the Poets in the Kitchen,” 6.

  19. 19.

    Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 3–97; Sterling Stuckey, Going Through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Sterling Stuckey, African Culture and Melville’s Art: The Creative Process in Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  20. 20.

    Marshall, Triangular Road, 85; Marshall, “From the Poets in the Kitchen,” 9.

  21. 21.

    Marshall, “From the Poets in the Kitchen,” 10; Marshall, Triangular Road, 85–86.

  22. 22.

    Marshall, “From the Poets in the Kitchen,” 10.

  23. 23.

    Marshall, Triangular Road, 72.

  24. 24.

    Judith Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (New York: NYU Press, 2016); Beryl Satter, “Marcus Garvey, Father Divine, and the Gender Politics of Race Difference and Race Neutrality,” American Quarterly 48, no. 1 (March 1996): 43–76.

  25. 25.

    Marshall, Triangular Road, 91–92.

  26. 26.

    Marshall, “From the Poets in the Kitchen,” 11.

  27. 27.

    Marshall, Triangular Road, 148.

  28. 28.

    Marshall, Triangular Road, 143–144.

  29. 29.

    Stuckey, “Through the Prism of Folklore: The Black Ethos in Slavery,” in Going Through the Storm, 4.

  30. 30.

    Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow (New York: A Plume Book, 1983), 39.

  31. 31.

    Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow, 39–40.

  32. 32.

    Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley, with a new preface by the author (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 171.

  33. 33.

    See Toni Cade Bambara, “Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye” and “Deep Sigh and Rescue Missions,” in Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, 89–138; 146–178.

  34. 34.

    Paule Marshall, “The Triangular Journey Toward the Black Womanist Self in My Work,” Kokujin Kenkyu 64 (1994): 27.

  35. 35.

    The living room has been central to the formation of Black feminist thought and practice. See Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Make Our Way Home: Radical Legacies of a Black Feminist Living Room,” HuffPost 4 February 2017, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/radical-legacies-black-feminist-living-room_us_58949e91e4b0c1284f25734c (accessed September 12, 2018). Gumbs introduces June Jordan and Alexis De Veaux’s works.

  36. 36.

    Marshall, “The Triangular Journey Toward the Black Womanist Self in My Work,” 23.

  37. 37.

    Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow, 122.

  38. 38.

    Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow, 123.

  39. 39.

    Marshall, “Reena,” in Reena and Other Stories, 71.

  40. 40.

    Marshall, “Reena,” 73.

  41. 41.

    Marshall, “Reena,” 90.

  42. 42.

    Marshall, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, 111.

  43. 43.

    Bambara, “Deep Sight and Rescue Mission,” 150.

  44. 44.

    Marshall, Triangular Road, 148.

  45. 45.

    Paule Marshall, The Negro Woman in American Literature,” Freedomways 6, no. 1 (Winter 1966): 25. In 1965, Marshall appeared on the panel “The Negro Woman in American Literature” at the conference called The Negro Writer’s Vision of America, which was held at the New School for Social Research. This three-day conference was co-sponsored by the Harlem Writers Guild, the collective, established in 1950, by Rosa Guy, John Oliver Killens, and John Henrik Clarke, the meeting place of creative and politically conscious artists and writers of the Black Left. Marshall was active in this space throughout the Civil Rights era. Other panelists were Abbey Lincoln, Sarah E. Wright, and Alice Childress. Higashida, Black Internationalist Feminism, 53.

  46. 46.

    Marshall, The Negro Woman in American Literature,” 25.

  47. 47.

    Bambara, “Deep Sight and Rescue Missions,” 150–151.

  48. 48.

    Stuckey, “Through the Prism of Folklore: The Black Ethos in Slavery,” in Going Through the Storm.

  49. 49.

    Toru Kiuchi, “Japan Black Studies Association at Sixty: Recent Thirty Years, 1984–2004,” http://home.att.ne.jp/zeta/yorozuya/jbsa/Japan_Black_Studies_Association_at_Sixty%2D%2DRecent_Thirty_Years_1984-2015.pdf (accessed September 12, 2018).

  50. 50.

    Atsuko Furomoto, “The Trend of African-American Studies in Japan since the 1960s,” Joseigaku Hyōron 7 (March 1993): 101–114. Kiuchi’s essay contains a partial list of books translated and published in Japan: “Maya Angelou’s Gather Together in My Name, in 1980; Nikki Giovanni’s The Women and the Men, in 1980; Rosa Guy’s Ruby, in 1980, Edith Jackson, in 1981, My Love, My Love or the Peasant Girl, in 1989; Virginia Hamilton’s M.C. Higgins, the Great, in 1980, Arilla Sun Down, in 1985, The Planet of Junior Brown, in 1988; Alexis De Veaux’s Don’t Explain: A Song of Billie Holiday, in 1986, Remember Him a[sic.] Outlaw, in 1982, and The Riddles of Egypt Brownstone, in 1982; Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, in 1980 and Tar Baby, in 1985; Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, in 1985, In Love & Trouble, in 1985, Meridian, in 1982, and You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down, in 1986” (3).

  51. 51.

    Furomoto, “The Trend of African-American Studies in Japan since the 1960s,” 107.

  52. 52.

    Furomoto, “The Trend of African-American Studies in Japan since the 1960s,” 107.

  53. 53.

    Furomoto, “The Trend of African-American Studies in Japan since the 1960s,” 107.

  54. 54.

    “Nakajima Takeshi-teki Ajia Taidan: Tankō to Sākuru-mura no Kioku—Morisaki Kazue-san,” Mainichi Shimbun 22 September 2008, http://www.arsvi.com/2000/080922.htm (accessed September 12, 2018).

  55. 55.

    Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 117–118.

  56. 56.

    Tsunehiko Kato, “The History of Black Studies in Japan: Origin and Development,” Journal of Black Studies 44, no. 8 (2013): 829–845; Yuichiro Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism: 20th-century Afro-Asian Solidarity in Black America, Japan and Okinawa (New York: NYU Press, 2013).

  57. 57.

    Atsuko Furomoto, “Kokujin Kenkyu to Watashi,” Kokujin Kenkyu 79 (2010): 16–18.

  58. 58.

    Atsuko Furomoto, Amerika Kokujin Bungaku to Fōkuroa [African American Literature and Folklore] (Kyoto: Yamaguchi Shoten, 1986), i–ii.

  59. 59.

    Furomoto, “Kokujin Kenkyu to Watashi,” 14–15.

  60. 60.

    Furomoto, Amerika Kokujin Bungaku to Fōkuroa, iii.

  61. 61.

    Furomoto, Amerika Kokujin bungaku to Fōkuroa, iii.

  62. 62.

    Furomoto, Amerika Kokujin bungaku to Fōkuroa, 255.

  63. 63.

    Furomoto, Amerika Kokujin bungaku to Fōkuroa, iii–iv.

  64. 64.

    Furomoto’s recollection of meeting queer Black feminist writer and activist Alexis De Veaux at the United Nation’s Third World Conference on Women, which was held in Nairobi, Kenya, in July 1985, makes explicit the importance of listening. Upon completing the Japanese translation of Alexis De Veaux’s book Don’t Explain: A Song of Billie Holiday, she penned the following note to convey her practice of diaspora: “I met De Veaux in Nairobi, Kenya, where the UN’s Third World Conference on Women was held in July 1985. Sitting on a campus lawn at Nairobi University, she said to me with much enthusiasm inside of her tiny body, ‘There are no women-only issues, because everything is related to politics. What I am going to do from now on after I return to my country will eventually change the United States, as well as the world.’ On the following day of our conversation, African, Caribbean, and American poets got together and held a poetry reading in the peace tent for 300 people set up on campus. It made me vividly realize a strong bond that black sisters tied across the oceans. As soon as she published Blue Heat that included the poem she had recited at this poetry reading, she sent it to me. Judging from its cover that printed the image of herself raising her fist high in the blue background … the book reminded me of her powerful ‘what I am going to do’ remark in Nairobi. In the times when a sense of helplessness tends to prevail, it is this positive attitude of trying to find a proof of one’s life in historical and social changes that we should learn from Womanists like De Veaux.” Atsuko Furomoto “Arekushisu Devō ni tsuite” (On Alexis De Veaux), in Iiwake Shinaide: Biri Horidei no Uta, trans. Atsuko Furomoto and Hiroyasu Yamada (Tokyo: Kokubunsha, 1986), 171–172.

  65. 65.

    Clifford Jordan, Down through the Years, Milestone Records MCD-9197-2; Max Roach, Pictures in a Frame, Soul Note, 121003; Abbey Lincoln, People in Me, Verve Records CD 314 514 626-2, 1993; Abbey Lincoln, Abbey Lincoln in Misty, recorded live June 18 and 25, 1973, Elec Records KV 101, 1973.

  66. 66.

    “Doug Watkins Killed in Crash,” Pittsburgh Courier, 17 February 1962; Clifford Jordan, Down through the Years; Doug Watkins, Soulnik, New Jazz, NJLP 8238. The title, Soulnik, was taken from Yusef Lateef’s composition. It riffs on the Soviet satellite Sputnik, showing, like Marshall, the fascination with space travel. This central preoccupation had been the undercurrent of Lateef’s work, and it dovetailed around his creative process guided by spiritual devotion to Islam (converted in 1948) and concrete engagement with Middle Eastern and Asian instruments in such albums Prayer to the East (1957) and Eastern Sounds (1961). A certain kind of ecumenicalism dictated Lateef’s approach to music. Bryan Marquard, “Dr. Yusef Lateef, 93; UMass Professor Embraced World Music,” Boston Globe 27 December 2013, https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/12/27/yusef-lateef-shutesbury-multi-instrumentalist-professor-umass-amherst-incorporated-world-influences-into-jazz/sDsCs4X2Ydq4ODxQsQLvmK/story.html. On trumpeter Hardman, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/08/obituaries/bill-hardman-57-trumpeter-known-for-improvisations.html. On saxophonist Alexander see http://www.allmusic.com/artist/roland-alexander-mn0000837531.

  67. 67.

    Other musicians participating in the Soulnik recording session that attended the Lewis Cass Technical High School were Hugh Lawson and Herman Wright.

  68. 68.

    Anthony Marcías, “‘Detroit was Heavy’: Modern Jazz, Bebop, and African American Expressive Culture,” The Journal of African American History 95, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 57.

  69. 69.

    About Clifford Jordan, see http://www.jazzdisco.org/clifford-jordan/discography/; Peter Watrous, “Clifford Jordan, 61, Saxophonist Acclaimed for His Improvisations,” The New York Times 30 March 1993, http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/30/obituaries/clifford-jordan-61-saxophonist-acclaimed-for-his-improvisations.html; Marcías, “‘Detroit was Heavy.’”

  70. 70.

    Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 13–14; Fred Moten, “Not In Between: Lyric Painting, Visual History, and the Postcolonial Future,” The Drama Review 47, no. 1 (Spring 2003), 21, 133–135; Marshall, “The Triangular Journey Toward the Black Womanist Self in My Work”; Abbey Lincoln, “The Negro Woman in American Literature,” Freedomways 6, no. 1 (Winter 1966): 11, 13; Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (New York: Verso, 1998).

  71. 71.

    Yuichiro Onishi, “Abbey Lincoln and Kazuko Shiraishi’s Art-Making as Spiritual Labor,” co-authored with Tia-Simone Gardner, in Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production: Two Haiku and a Microphone, ed., William Bridges and Nina Cornyetz (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015), 57–75.

  72. 72.

    Abbey Lincoln, Abbey Lincoln in Misty.

  73. 73.

    Moten, In the Break, 21. For Moten’s analysis of Lincoln’s music, see In the Break, 1–24.

  74. 74.

    Toni Cade Bambara, “On the Issues of Role,” in The Black Woman: An Anthology, ed. Toni Cade Bambara (New York: A Mentor Book, 1970), 102; on Lincoln’s career and music, see Farah Jasmine Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001); Eric Porter, What is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Scott Saul, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Ingrid Monson, Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  75. 75.

    Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery, 182. Also see Terrion L. Williamson, Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).

  76. 76.

    Abbey Lincoln, “Who Will Revere the Black Woman?” in The Black Woman: An Anthology, ed. Toni Cade Bambara (New York: A Mentor Book, 1970), 83.

  77. 77.

    Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery, 190–191.

  78. 78.

    Griffin, 190–191; Moten, In the Break, 23.

  79. 79.

    Becca Pulliam, “Abbey Lincoln on JazzSet,” National Public Radio audio, 57:58, January 11, 2011, http://www.npr.org/2011/01/13/132886932/abbey-lincoln-on-jazzset; Nate Chinen, “Abbey Lincoln, Jazz Singer and Writer, Dies at 80,” The New York Times 14 August 2010.

  80. 80.

    On Max Roach’s It’s Time, see http://www.allmusic.com/album/r146387; Moten, In the Break, 23.

  81. 81.

    Lincoln, “The Negro Woman in American Literature.”

  82. 82.

    “Messages from Abroad,” Kokujin Kenkyu 59 (1989): 40.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of African American & African Studies, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN, USA

    Yuichiro Onishi

  2. College of Letters, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan

    Fumiko Sakashita

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  1. Yuichiro Onishi
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  2. Fumiko Sakashita
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Correspondence to Yuichiro Onishi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of African American & African Studies, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN, USA

    Yuichiro Onishi

  2. College of Letters, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan

    Fumiko Sakashita

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Onishi, Y., Sakashita, F. (2019). Studies in “Japanese Dream”: A Transpacific Inquiry into Afrodiasporic Feminist Thought. In: Onishi, Y., Sakashita, F. (eds) Transpacific Correspondence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05457-1_2

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