Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th-Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa by Yuichiro Onishi (review)

Yuichiro Onishi’s Transpacific Antiracism is a unique and valuable contribution to the scholarship on Afro-Asian relations, an area for which the most representative works are Vijay Prashad’s When Everyone was Kung Fu Fighting (2001) and Bill Mullen’s Afro-Orientalism (2004). While the concept of “Afro-Asia” and its critical repercussions raised scholarly interest and excitement in the early 2000s, the concentration of scholarship in a few predictable topics, such as the Bandung conference of 1955, and the uncertainty of the motif of racial solidarity to provide an effective critique of neoliberal capitalism dampened the critical fervor the concept raised in just about a decade. Onishi’s book offers a reason for us to renew our interest in Afro-Asia with its bold and creative construction of previously unexamined nodes of connection between the tradition of black radical thought and the views of select Japanese Left.

There are several elements of Onishi’s book that will come across as familiar to students and readers of Afro-Asia. For example, he spends two out of four chapters analyzing Du Bois’s views on Japan and Asia. Yet he does what others have done with much more depth and with his own brand of critical acumen. Onishi’s analysis of Du Bois’s misreading of Japan as a country that will lead Asia to challenge white imperialism—something that troubles many students of Du Bois—situates this misreading in what he terms Du Bois’s “Afro-Asian philosophy of world history,” which, despite its utopianism, ended up “reinforc[ing] the very problem and structure of Eurocentrism” Du Bois criticized (56, 72). Onishi is careful not to present this as an individual’s error in judgment but shows that Du Bois’s “pro-Japan provocation” (Onishi’s term for the political imagination of black thinkers who employed Japan as an icon of “race-conscious defiance against the global white polity”) is an important chapter in the intellectual history of Afro-Asia (21).

Then there are things Onishi does that few have done before. His chapter on Kokujin Kenkyu no Kai (Association of Negro Studies), a mid-twentieth century Japanese study group led by extraordinary Japanese progressives, such as Nukina Yoshitaka and Furukawa Hiromi, illuminates what he calls the “echo of black radicalism” in Japan (115). These individuals saw in black radicalism ways of living and thinking that would be helpful for postwar Japan and faithfully translated and studied the literature and culture of black America. As a literary critic, my favorite example from the book that registers the spirit of those involved in Kokujin Kenkyu no Kai is Onishi’s analysis of the various translations Nukina used for the word Black Americans: “Niguro-jin,” “Niguro-America-jin,” “America Koku-jin” and “Koku-jin” (123). He reads this variation not as confusion but as the Japanese intellectuals’ practice of diaspora, as Brent Hayes Edwards would put it. Onishi suggests that these Japanese intellectuals “translate[d] race as a catalyst for resistance amid the constantly shifting grounds of race to help establish ‘the structure of a diasporic ‘racial’ formation’” (123). The diasporic intellectual life of black radicalism Onishi limns in the book is a humble reminder that while translation across languages is neither smooth nor free of problems, we need not, and should not, be limited to imagining human liberation in only one language, literally and figuratively. From this perspective, Afro-Asia still seems to have much potential as a field of intellectual inquiry.