Coming soon from Duke University Press: Waiting for the Cool Moon: Anti-imperialist Struggles in the Heart of Japan's Empire by Wendy Matsumura.
About the book, from the publisher:
In Waiting for the Cool Moon Wendy Matsumura interrogates the erasure of colonial violence at the heart of Japanese nation-state formation. She critiques Japan studies’ role in this effacement and contends that the field must engage with anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity as the grounds on which to understand imperialism, colonialism, fascism, and other forces that shape national consciousness. Drawing on Black radical thinkers’ critique of the erasure of the Middle Passage in universalizing theories of modernity’s imbrication with fascism, Matsumura traces the consequences of the Japanese empire’s categorization of people as human and less-than-human as manifested in the 1920s and 1930s, and the struggles of racialized and colonized people against imperialist violence. She treats the archives safeguarded by racialized, colonized women throughout the empire as traces of these struggles, including the work they performed to keep certain stories out of view. Matsumura demonstrates that tracing colonial sensibility and struggle is central to grappling with their enduring consequences for the present.Wendy Matsumura is associate professor of history at the University of California, San Diego. She is currently working on a project that analyzes the relationship between the formation of an idealized farm household, the creation of surplus populations, and the resolution of crisis in the post-World War II Japanese empire.
--Marshal Zeringue
