Solidarity and Contradiction
Book Review
Lim, Seonghee
http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/4206
Date Written: 2014-07-01
Publisher: Against the Current
Year Published: 2014
Resource Type: Article
A book review of "Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa" by Yuichiro Onishi.
Abstract:
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Excerpt:
Yuichiro Onishi's Transpacific Antiracism discovers the voices and actions of what Nikhil Pal Singh calls in his Black is a Country the "worldliness" of Black Radicalism. By studying anti-imperialist movements since World War I in three different places -- the United States, Japan, and Okinawa -- Onishi examines the underlying aspirations of various oppressed peoples, and their efforts to develop emancipatory ideas and connect themselves in their struggles for freedom, regardless of their nationality or ethnicity.
In so doing, Onishi contributes to the study of Black Radicalism developed by scholars such as Cedric J. Robinson, George Lipsitz, and Robin D. G. Kelley, who have often used the term "Blackness" as a political commitment, rather than indicating a skin color, to challenge the existing racist-patriarchal capitalist system. Their idea of Black Radicalism thus embraces multi-ethnic solidarity of the oppressed in their struggle against various forms of domination and in their search for an alternative, more democratic, society.
In his first two chapters Onishi examines how and why the rise of Japan as a world power during WWI and in the 1930s inspired many Black leaders in the United States, including W. E. B. Du Bois, in their attempt to challenge global white supremacy.
Onishi recognizes the existence of diverse reactions to imperial Japan's determination to compete with Western rivals. For example, Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association, which globally galvanized the idea of Black pride among millions in the African Diaspora, saw it as proof of the power of "non-whites," while Hubert Henry Harrison and Cyril Briggs evoked Japan in order to "bring the vision and aim of New Negro radicalism into sharper focus" and mobilize coalitions among oppressed people internationally.
In other words, Japan was an "index" to show their concern with "the lives of the restless Black masses in the United States and darker people under colonial domination." (40) Onishi refers to this kind of political imagination of Black leaders as "pro-Japan provocation."
