Nonencounters ‘in the wake’: re-inscribing a Black Transpacific in Tanin no kao and La Muerte de Artemio Cruz

Abstract

This article draws from Black critical theory and critical race studies to explore how the relationship between the wound, the body, and the role of trauma in literary text can be reposed as a relationship to racial inscription in two novels, Abe Kōbō’s Tanin no kao (The face of Another, 1964) and Carlos Fuentes’s La Muerte de Artemio Cruz (The Death of Artemio Cruz, 1962). In these terms, the article explores the function of injury in these literary texts as it relates to their representations, or fictionalizations, of Blackness. The article deploys a critical approach to transpacific literary comparison that does not draw from naturalized connections – termed a framework of ‘nonencounter’ – to discuss how the questions of race and Blackness in both novels re-inscribes the particular histories of colonialism and the transpacific entanglements of antiblackness that shaped dominant discourses on the national subject and cultural identity in Mexico and Japan.¹

Keywords:

• critical race studies
• trauma
• Latin American literature
• transpacific studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I would like to thank my graduate research assistant, Jess Silbaugh-Cowdin, my colleagues, Jin Kyung Lee and Wendy Matsumura, and two anonymous peer reviewers for their invaluable feedback throughout the revision of this article.

2 I have made two re-translations. In the 1966 translation of The Face of Another (Knopf, 1966), E. Dale Saunders translates, ‘Like the Negroes, could we arise resolutely against prejudice…?’ Yet the Japanese term 「黒人」(kokujin) does not formally translate as such. Historically, the term ‘Negro’ was applied in conditions under which Black people were subjected to processes of ‘differentiation, classification, and hierarchization aimed at exclusion, expulsion, and even eradication’ (Mbembe 2017, 24). While the term was used predominantly in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries to refer to people of African descent (including by Black intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington), after the Black Power movement of the 1960s, the term ‘Black’ has become favored unless citing historical references or the names of older organizations. According to the Oxford Dictionary, ‘It is now regarded as old-fashioned or even offensive in both British and US English.’ Recognizing that the word ‘Negro’ is a translator choice rather than a direct translation of 「黒人」(kokujin), I will be re-translating the term when not used to refer to historical context or official terminology. The translation of 「黒人」into ‘Black Americans’ here is more precise to the context that Abe addresses in the passage. In the second, re-translation, I have chosen to attend to the gendered inflection of the word ぼくら (bokura), which Saunders translates as a genderless ‘we,’ by translating it as ‘we, the brotherhood of the faceless.’

3 The record of the protest and police brutality appears in a 1964 WNBC/WNYC episode from July 26, ‘Who Speaks for Harlem?’ The episode is available in full here: https://www.wnyc.org/story/who-speaks-for-harlem/

4 The word that Abe’s character uses to refer to the waitress as ‘Korean’ is chōsenjin: 「ちゃん、おまえ朝鮮人の田舎人の者みたいな顔だな。本当に朝鮮人の田舎者とそっくりだぞ。」(Abe 1964, 134). It is helpful to note, as the zainichi scholar Choi Jinseok (2015 [2008]) highlights, that the term chōsenjin is a title given to a Korean identity that is neither migrant, as zainichi may be, nor part of a partitioned Korea, as kankokujin (South Korean) or kitachōsenjin (North Korean) may be. Chōsenjin, Choi argues, is a spectral figure that haunts postcolonial East Asia to elucidate the violence of the modern nation state.

5 The term ‘cruzado,’ meaning to ‘cross’ or ‘go across,’ is often used in the pejorative, referring to an intermixing of race or species. The verb ‘cruzar,’ ‘to cross,’ however can also refer to the act of giving someone the sign of the cross, as a way to give blessing, in Catholic ritual.

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Andrea Mendoza

Andrea Mendoza is an Assistant Professor Japanese and Comparative Literatures at UC San Diego, where she is affiliated with the Critical Gender Studies, Latin American Studies, Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies, and Japanese Studies Programs. She may be contacted at [email protected]