Aerial Archives of Race

Opening new archives and narratives that emerge when we take an aerial turn in transpacific studies, Etsuko Taketani examines the genealogy and contours of the aerial imaginary and the corollary shifting planetary imaginary that evolved in a transnational space she terms the "black nuclear Pacific." Following the first aerial drop of an atom bomb on humans and the subsequent military occupation of Japan by the United States, African American–Japanese encounters happened on a scale unimaginable before the war. Through texts from a diverse range of artists, writers, and political thinkers—such as the NAACP's Walter White, lawyer Edith Sampson, Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, and Malcolm X—who had formative interactions with occupied Japan, Taketani uncovers and analyzes African American cultural expressions that include a quasi-alien abduction narrative, a creation of a new tribe in the image of a rainbow on Earth, a black futuristic apocalypse, and a racial fantasy of the Mother Plane. Through these cultural expressions, Aerial Archives of Race tracks the black networks and exchanges with Japan from above that provoked new ways of thinking about (human) races on planet Earth.

Etsuko Taketani is Professor of American Literature at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. She is author of U.S. Women Writers and the Discourses of Colonialism, 1825–1861 and The Black Pacific Narrative: Geographic Imaginings of Race and Empire between the World Wars.