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Waiting for the Cool Moon
Anti-imperialist Struggles in the Heart of Japan's Empire
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2024
About this book
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.
Author / Editor information
Wendy Matsumura is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego, and author of The Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor, and Theorizations of Community, also published by Duke University Press.
Reviews
“Waiting for the Cool Moon is rigorous, invigorating, and consequential for how we read, see, study, research, and understand both the history of Japan in the interwar years and history more generally. This hugely impressive book is a magnificent achievement.”
-- Rebecca E. Karl, author of China’s Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History
“Waiting for the Cool Moon is a fierce, passionate book, one that is as suited to these times as it is to the period it explores. Wendy Matsumura brings a powerful theoretical apparatus to bear: the Marxian analysis of her earlier work is transformed by her intense engagement with the theoretical and comparative work of Black and Indigenous women scholars. The effects of this encounter are profound. By attending to revolutionary practice and acknowledging the pain and sadness of absence, Matsumura locates the urgent ethical commitment of a radical historian. An outstanding critical history.”
-- Christopher T. Nelson, author of Dancing with the Dead: Memory, Performance, and Everyday Life in Postwar Okinawa
"In the scope, method, and the author’s critical reflection on her positionality as a US researcher, Waiting for the Cool Moon reaches out to a wider audience than Japanese studies and offers a blueprint of historiography aimed toward collective liberation."
-- Nozomi Nakaganeku Saito Japan Forum
-- Nozomi Nakaganeku Saito Japan Forum
"A must read for anyone interested in anti-imperialist struggles in the heart of Japan’s empire and beyond."
-- Ken Kawashima Pacific Affairs
-- Ken Kawashima Pacific Affairs
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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contents
vii -
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acknowledgments
ix -
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Introduction
1 -
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Chapter One Empire and Oikonomia
17 -
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Chapter Two Enclosure and the Community of the Commons
37 -
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Chapter Three Buraku Women against Tripled Sufferings
60 -
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Chapter Four Housewifization, Invisibilization, and the Myth of the New Small Farm Household
83 -
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Chapter Five I nterimperial Korean Struggle in Fertilizer’s Global Circuit
108 -
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Chapter Six Empire through the Prism of Phosphate
134 -
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Chapter Seven Water Struggles in a Colonial City
161 -
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Conclusion Waiting, Witnessing, Withholding
185 -
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Notes
193 -
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Bibliography
241 -
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Index
261
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
January 23, 2024
eBook ISBN:
9781478027829
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook ISBN:
9781478027829
Keywords for this book
Paul Sweezy Marxist Sociology Book Prize winner; American Sociological Association book award winners; American Sociological Association book awards; American Sociological Association Marxist Sociology section
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
