A Literary History of African American and Japanese Cultural Exchange (1870 - 2015)

FAIN: FEL-294784-24

William H. Bridges IV
University of Rochester (Rochester, NY 14627-0001)

Research and writing leading to a book on the role of racial discourses in modern Japanese literature from the late nineteenth century to the present. 

This application requests one year of support from the NEH for archival research and the writing of a monograph entitled The Black Pacific: A Poetic History, which has been invited for review by the University of California Press. At its foundation, this monograph is a history of modern Japanese literature from the late-nineteenth century to the present. This history, however, joins the contemporary re-imagining of the disciplinary borders of modern Japanese literary studies and its connections to fields such as Black studies, Asian American studies, and Latinx studies. Spanning from best-selling Japanese translations of Black slave narratives to the haiku Richard Wright wrote on his deathbed, The Black Pacific traces the transoceanic ebb and flow of racial discourses circulating throughout modern Japanese literature.