Due to unexpected last-minute technical difficulties, the talk is rescheduled for 4:00pm PT on Tuesday, April 20. We sincerely apologize again for the inconvenience caused and do hope that you will be able to join us next Tuesday.
Speaker: Will Bridges (University of Rochester)
Moderator: Christina Yi (UBC)
Date: 4:00pm – 5:15pm PDT on April 20, 2021
Registration: https://ubc.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5UoceCsrD8qEtKC7po6O7I7EAHXXudFhpgS
Co-sponsored by CJR and the Department of Asian Studies
Abstract: This talk is interested in the formation of what we might call an epistemology of the violets, or a way of seeing and being in the world at the intersection of the blues and the reds. The “blues” here refers to that musical form born in the freedom found in the wake of American slavery. They are characterized by the expressive deviations of the blue note and the transformation of memories of the sounds of the plantation (field hollers, wailings, and so on) into something more mellifluous. In Development Drowned and Reborn, Clyde Woods contends that the modes of listening and sounding out afforded by the blues unfurl into a larger epistemology, one which helps us sense and make sense of the possibility of new worlds “more egalitarian and democratic” and more committed to “sustainability” and “justice” than the old world.
“Red” here serves as a chromatic stand in for the epistemological and sensorial insights embedded in Japanese creative works. To date, Afro-Japanese scholarship has been framed primarily by concepts such as representation and reception. While informative in their own way, such frameworks prime us to think about transferences from one culture (“blues”) to another (“reds”). This talk is a “between the books talk:” it synthesizes lessons learned in the writing of Playing in the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature with content from the upcoming The Black Pacific: A Poetic History. The aim of this synthesis is to provide general heuristics for those interested in the study of the epistemological possibilities of purple, or a way of seeing and creating possible worlds that is neither red nor blue—neither African American nor Japanese—but both red and blue, the emergence upon their coalescence.
About the Speaker:
Will Bridges is an Associate Professor of Japanese at the University of Rochester. His scholarship has been recognized by the Fulbright Program, the Japan Foundation, the Association for Asian Studies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His first monograph, Playing in the Shadows: Fictions of Race and Blackness in Postwar Japanese Literature, was published in 2020 by the University of Michigan Press. He is currently working on two manuscripts. The first is The Futurist Turn: The Japanese Humanities and the Re-imagining of the Unwelfare State. The second is The Black Pacific: A Poetic History. He is also an author of creative nonfiction.