This 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, geographies, and struggles. Drawing inspiration from Du Bois’s invocation of the Greek word for race, phylon, which he made in 1940 to rethink his own formulation “the problem of the color line” for the emerging new world order, Onishi names this conceptual sphere the “transpacific phylon,” a dense archive of Afro-Asian radicalism.
Essential for scholars of American studies, Japanese studies, Black intellectual history, and global Asias, Black Radical Thought in Japan is an inventive and revelatory account of freedom remade across the Pacific.
