Black Radical Thought in Japan: An Afro-Asian Intellectual History

A revelatory map of Afro-Asian solidarityThis groundbreaking study traces the resonances of Black radicalism in postwar Japan, charting the surprising and consequential itineraries of Afro-Asian solidarity.In Black Radical Thought in Japan, Yuichiro Onishi follows the routes through which Japanese writers, activists, and intellectuals engaged with the revolutionary Marxism of C.L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Grace Lee Boggs; the anticolonial internationalism of Paul Robeson and W.E. B. Du Bois; and the insurgent creativity of Black Left feminists from Esther Cooper Jackson to Paule Marshall.Attunement toward their commitment to Black struggle, which they cultivated through the study and translation of Black texts, is recast as a complex strand of Black thought found in Japan. At the heart of the story is translation, not as supplement but as method: a generative practice of refraction and reworking, often recursive and introspective, that forged solidarities across languages, geog