The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 31 (2020)

English-Language Works by JAAS Members
2018
The following citations and abstracts introduce recent journal publications written in
English by members of the Japanese Association of American Studies on topics
related to American Studies.

ARTICLES IN JOURNALS
Furuya, Kohei. “Melville, Babel, and the Ethics of Translation.” ESQ: A Journal ofNineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture 64, no. 4 (2018): 67–102.
By chronologically reviewing Herman Melville’s works, Furuya attempts to makevisible Melville’s complex ideas about translation that he conceived through learningforeign languages, developed through reading contemporary translations and world
literature theories, and reshaped through observing US language policies in the second
half of the nineteenth century.

Komori, Masaki. “Dead Bodies on Display: Museum Ethics in the History of theMütter Museum,” The Journal of American and Canadian Studies (Institute ofAmerican and Canadian Studies, Sophia University) 35(2018): 49–74.
This paper considers the ethics of displaying the “human being” as an object atmuseums. By analyzing human remain exhibits in the name of science and art education
at Mütter Museum, the first medical museum in America, it demonstrates how it can beproblematic to juggle authenticity and entertainment simultaneously.

Takeda, Okiyoshi. “How Far Have We Come? Asian Pacific Americans inIntroductory American Government Textbooks in Three Different Time Periods,”
Politics, Groups, and Identities 6, no. 3 (2018): 494–505.
Takeda examines whether different editions of college introductory American223

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government textbooks have increased coverage of Asian Pacific Americans over time(1998–99, 2005–6, and 2011–12) and finds that textbooks increased coverage of APAs
only marginally; some textbooks even decreased coverage of APAs. The author
concludes with some recommendations for improvement.

Tatsumi, Takayuki. “Transpacific Cyberpunk: Transgeneric Interactions between
Prose, Cinema, and Manga,” Arts (March 2) 2018, 7 (1), 9, https://doi.org/10.3390/
arts7010009.
Tatsumi meditates on the transpacific imagination of cyberpunk by reconstructing its
literary and cultural heritage. He argues that we should not forget that cyberpunk isderived not only from the cutting edge of technology but also from “Lo Tek” sensibility
cultivated in the Gibsonian picturesque ruins or dark cities such as a major
extraterritorial zone in Hong Kong, Kowloon Walled City.

—, “Allegories of Lying: Arendt, de Man, and McCarthy.” Geibun-Kenkyu(Journal of arts and letters) 113, no. 2 (2018): 95–107.
Paul de Man, the guru of Yale critics, along with his male colleagues Derrida, Bloom,
Miller and Hartman, initiated literary theory into the era of deconstruction in the 1970s.
However, Tatsumi argues that de Man was primarily influenced by Mary McCarthy andHannah Arendt back in the 1940s.

Yamanaka, Mishio. “African American Women and Desegregated Streetcars:
Gender and Race Relations in Postbellum New Orleans,” Nanzan Review ofAmerican Studies (Center for American Studies, Nanzan University) 40 (2018): 41–60.
Yamanaka explores how African American women became the targets of racial
harassment on desegregated streetcars in postbellum New Orleans. She argues thatdesegregated streetcars were far from peaceful and demonstrates that they werecontested spaces of white dominance and African American resistance. Working-class
African American women were at the forefront of the struggle for equal treatment andself-determination.

ARTICLES IN BOOKS
Tatsumi, Takayuki. “Sakyo Komatsu’s Planetary Imagination: Reading Virus andThe Day of Resurrection,” in Lingua Cosmica: Science Fiction from around theWorld, edited by Dale Knickerbocker, 95–106. Champaign: University of Illinois
Press, 2018.

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Although highly influential in Japan’s high growth period, Sakyo Komatsu, adistinguished writer in the first generation of Japanese science fiction, has long been
neglected internationally. It is high time to reconsider the influence of his early
postapocalyptic novel, The Day of Resurrection (1964), on Michael Crichton’stechnothriller The Andromeda Strain (1969).

BOOKS
Kami, Hideaki. Diplomacy Meets Migration: US Relations with Cuba during theCold War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Kami explains why it took so long for the United States to restore its diplomatic
relations with Cuba — despite the end of the Cold War two decades earlier. Drawing on
multi-archival research, the author shows how Cuba-to-US migration transformed themaking of U.S. foreign policy during the last decades of the Cold War.

Tatsumi, Takayuki. Young Americans in Literature: The Post-Romantic Turn in theAge of Poe, Hawthorne and Melville. Tokyo: Sairyusha, 2018.
Tatsumi employs a transnational and transhistorical approach to American Renaissancewriters. Starting with the trans-Atlantic impacts of Kant’s philosophy on Coleridge’s
Romanticism and Emerson’s transcendentalism, the author investigates not only thetrans-Pacific negotiations between Edgar Allan Poe and Rampo Edogawa but also thetranschronological interactions between Emily Dickinson, Joseph Cornell, and William
Gibson.

DISSERTATIONHattori, Masako. “Across War and Peace: Youth, Higher Education, and National
Security in the United States, 1917–1945.” Ph.D. diss, Columbia University, 2018.
Hattori analyzes how “youth” as a political category was defined and redefined in theUnited States in response to global crises such as the Great Depression and the two
World Wars and demonstrates that national security concerns determined the purview offederal-state jurisdiction over American people in presumed peacetime as well aswartime.

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Yamanaka, Mishio. “‘Separation Is Not Equality’: The Racial Desegregation
Movement of Creoles of Color in New Orleans, 1862–1900.” Ph.D. diss.,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2018.
Yamanaka examines how Creoles of color advocated for racial equality in postbellum
New Orleans. Despite their identity as francophone free people of color, Creoles of color
developed their desegregation ideology as a common cause for all people and built
interracial coalitions that became the foundation for their anti-segregation campaigns.