Black Notes on Asia: Composite Figurations of Asia in the African American Transcultural Imagination, 1923-2013 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Arimitsu, Michio. 2014. Black Notes on Asia: Composite Figurations of Asia in the African American Transcultural Imagination, 1923-2013. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11744421 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Black Notes on Asia: Composite Figurations of Asia in the African American Transcultural Imagination, 1923-2013 A dissertation presented by Michio Arimitsu to The Department of African and African American Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of African American Studies Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts November 2013 © 2013 Michio Arimitsu All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Werner Sollors Michio Arimitsu Black Notes on Asia: Composite Figurations of Asia in the African American Transcultural Imagination, 1923-2013 Abstract Black Notes on Asia: Composite Figurations of Asia in the African American Transcultural Imagination, 1923-2013 sheds new light on the hitherto neglected engagements of African American writers and thinkers with various literary, cultural, and artistic traditions of Asia. Starting with a reevaluation of Lewis G. Alexander’s transcultural remaking of haiku in 1923, this dissertation interrogates and revises the familiar interracial (read as “black-white”) terms of the African American struggle for freedom and equality. While critics have long taken for granted these terms as the sine qua non of the African American literary imagination and practice, this dissertation demonstrates how authors like Alexander defied not only the implicit dichotomy of black-and-white but also the critical bias that represents African American literature as a nationally segregated tradition distinctly cut off from cultural sources beyond the border of the United States and made legible only within its narrowly racialized and racializing contexts. More specifically, Black Notes on Asia argues that the ruling conceptions of the iii so-called “Harlem Renaissance in black and white” and the reductive understanding of the Black Arts Movement as an uncomplicated, propagandistic expression of black nationalism, fail to pay due attention to their underlying multiracial, multicultural, or transnational aesthetics and perspectives. In order to understand the full complexity and heterogeneity of the African American imagination from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, it is necessary to account for cultural ebbs and flows, echoes and reverberations, beyond the United States, Europe, and Africa, to include Asia. Rediscovering the hitherto overlooked traces and reflections of Asia within the African American imagination, this dissertation argues that Asia has provided numerous African American authors and intellectuals, canonized as well as forgotten, with additional or alternative cultural resources that liberated them from, or at least helped them destabilize, what they considered as the constraining racial and nationalist discourse of the United States. iv Contents Introduction: Swinging, Jazzing, and Haiku-ing “Blackness”: The Multi-tonality of African American Haiku and Afro-Asian Literary Encounters in the Twentieth Century 1 1. “If you had not sung/ Then what would I imitate,/ Happy nightingale?”: Imitations of Asia in the Formulations of the New Negro Poetics 19 Introduction: The Birth of African American Haiku II. Beside Blackness: Lewis G. Alexander’s Transcultural Poetics of Hokku III. “Like Buddha—who brown like I am”: Asia in the Transracial Writings of Frances E. W. Harper, Anna Julia Cooper, and Marita Bonner. IV. “Overnight our voice and our hearing have not shrunk into an eye ”: Jean Toomer’s Ambivalence towards Asia and His Quarrel with Imagism V. Alain Locke: The (Dis-) Location of Asia in the New Negro/Harlem Renaissance 2. “Could This Melody/ Be Sung in Other Countries/ By Other Birds?”: Richard Wright’s Transcultural Remaking of Haiku and the Blues 98 I. Introduction: African American Literature Beyond the United States and Richard Wright’s Vision of “De-Occidentalization” Beside the Rhetoric of Violence II. Beyond the “Frog Perspectives” towards a Poetics of De-Occidentalization and Disarmament III. Towards a Poetics of “Complex Simplicity” I: The Transcultural Perspectives of Wright’s Haiku and the Textual Politics of Gender and Race IV. Blackness of Blackness in Wright’s Haiku: The Poetics of Indeterminacy V. Wright’s Poetics of Disarmament and Transcultural Remaking of Haiku v VI. Towards a Poetics of “Complex Simplicity” II: Transnational Diffusion of the Blues VII. Conclusion: “Could this melody/ Be sung in other countries/ By other birds?” 3. The Globe-Fish and the Watermelon: Amiri Baraka’s Journey from a “Pre-Black” Bohemian Outsider to a “Post-American Low Coup” Poet 199 I. The Taste of a Globe-Fish: Avant-Garde Poetics and Ambivalent Figures of Asia in the Early Texts of Amiri Baraka II. The Taboo of the Watermelon and the Decolonization of the Black Mind III. The Invention of “Low Coup” Conclusion: “Color of Your Song”: The Continuing Diversification of Cosmopolitan Blackness 241 Bibliography 252 vi Acknowledgments During the long voyage to the completion of this dissertation, Werner Sollors has been for me a beacon of hope and encouragement. As all his former and current graduate students will unanimously agree, his generosity, patience, and wit are unparalleled. Unmatched also is his indefatigable passion for exhaustive, imaginative, and innovative intellectual inquiry into the culture and literature of the United States. As anyone who has been blessed to know him or his work will attest, his staggeringly encyclopedic knowledge (only to be matched by JSTORE) is awe-inspiring. I still remember the day when I told him (out of the blue) that I wanted to change the subject of my dissertation. Within seconds upon hearing my sudden announcement, he gave me an amazing list of books and articles to read and people to contact. Without his support and guidance, this project would surely have never seen the shore of completion. Biodun Jeyifo has taught me virtually everything I know about postcolonial literatures and various Marxist traditions. Glenda Carpio, who has profoundly shaped my understanding of African American literary canons, showed me the serious business and the joy of close-reading. Karen Thornber has read all the drafts (even those that did not make it into the final version). Her swift, detailed, and always helpful feedback is the stuff of legends. On countless occasions, her insights and critical advice helped me see the complexity of the Asian literary and cultural traditions, and prevented me from making obvious factual errors and unwarranted claims. Needless to say, however, I am ultimately responsible vii for all that appears in the pages that follow. In addition to my committee members, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Tommie Shelby have all enriched my understanding of the cultural, literary, and philosophical traditions of African Americans. As the DGS, Jacob Olupona has shown me generosity and support over the years, for which I will be indebted forever. I also wish to express my gratitude to our departmental staff, Kathleen Cloutier, Melissa Huser, Gisele Jackson, as well as to Bob LaPointe of the GSAS financial aid office, who have done everything they could to get me where I am. For making my years at Harvard intellectually stimulating and fun, I would like to thank Susan and Julia Napier, Steve Coit, Aleksey Berg, Laura Murphy, Peter Geller, Cameron Leader-Picone, Linda Chavers, Ashley Farmer, Chérie Rivers Ndaliko, Christina Knight, Jacqueline Rivers, Fumitaka Wakamatsu, Clinton Williams, Carla Martin, Meghan Healy-Clancy, Amber Moulton, Lisanne Norman, Giovanna Micconi, Erin Mosely, Stephanie Bosch, Jody Benjamin, Carolyn Roberts, Ernie Mitchell, Armin Fardis, Shirley Sun, Grete Viddal, Lyndon Gill, Wendy Grant, Omar Wasow, Lowell Brower, Satoru Hashimoto, Funlayo Wood, and Kyrah Daniels. Special thanks go to the fellow members of my trans-Pacific dissertation workshop group, who helped me enormously at an early stage of writing in Cambridge and in Tokyo: May-yi Shaw, Nick Kapur, Chinghsin Wu, Jennie Miller, Craig Colbeck, Annie Manion, Izumi Nakajima, Mika Yoshitake, Kristin Williams, Josh Hill, Jeremy Yellen, Andrea Murray, and Konrad Lawson. As I was finishing up, I also greatly benefited viii from the feedback provided by Yukari Kato, Kohei Saito, Naoko Sato, Ryoichi Yamane, Kazuma Matsui, Nina Cornyetz, William Bridges, and Rosemary Morrison. I have been blessed over the years with continued guidance and encouragement from my former mentors and friends in Japan: Takayuki Tatsumi, Masashi Orishima, Mary Knighton, Yuji Kato, Yoshiko Uzawa, Shitsuyo Masui, Yuko Matsukawa, Kyoko Hirano, Fumika Nagano, Hideo Tsuji, Koichi Nakagaki, and Keiko Shirakawa. My new colleagues at Keio have been incredibly supportive as I wrote up this dissertation: Toru Suzuki, Akiyo Okuda, and Toshiyuki Ohwada. Last but not