Aerial Archives of Race: African American Cultural Expressions and the Black Nuclear Pacific Volume 3 - Paperback

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Opening new perspectives 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 names the "Black nuclear Pacific." Following the first dropping of an atom bomb on humans and the subsequent military occupation of Japan by the United States, Black-Japanese encounters happened on a scale unimaginable before World War II. Analyzing texts by a diverse range of artists, writers, and political thinkers who had formative interactions with occupied Japan--including the NAACP's Walter White, lawyer Edith Sampson, Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, and Malcolm X--Taketani uncovers African American cultural expressions that include a quasi-alien abduction narrative, the literary creation of a new tribe in the image of a rainbow, a Black futuristic apocalypse, and a racial fantasy of the Mother Plane. Aerial Archives of Race tracks the Black networks and exchanges with Japan that provoked new ways of thinking about (human) races on planet Earth.