Waiting for the Cool Moon: Anti-imperialist Struggles in the Heart of Japan's Empire [Hardcover]

InWaiting for the Cool MoonWendy 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.USWendy Matsumura examines the history of the colonial projects and violence of interwar Japan while critiquing Japan studies’ participation of the erasure of this history in its study of the formation of the Japanese nation-state.Wendy Matsumura is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego, and author ofThe Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor, and Theorizations of Community, also published by Duke University Press.“Waiting for the Cool Moonis 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,Chinas Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief InterprlS·