Playing in the Shadows

Will Bridges

"Playing in the Shadows explores the body of literature arising from post-World War II Japanese authors' robust cultural exchanges with African Americans and African Americana. Rather than solely focusing on representations of African Americans in Japanese literature, this manuscript argues that the black characters who rise to the textual surface are just the tip of the signifying iceberg. Beneath those representations -- or, as Professor Bridges argues, even in the absence of overt representations of black characters, there runs a rich history of Afro-Japanese literary and cultural exchange, as well as a history characterized by cross-cultural-pollination and creative experimentation that spans the Pacific. By tracing how blackness is written in and into Japanese literature, this book argues that fictions of race provide visions of the way that postwar Japanese authors reimagine the ascription of race to bodies: in bodies of literature, the body politic, or the human body itself"--