Waiting for the Cool Moon

In Waiting for the Cool Moon Wendy 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 it must engage with anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity as the grounds upon 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 into Human and less-than-human as they manifested in the 1920s and 1930s and the struggles of racialized and colonized people against imperialist violence. She treats the archives that racialized, colonized women throughout the empire safeguarded 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 to the present.

“Waiting for the Cool Moon is 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.”, “Waiting for the Cool Moon is a fierce, passionate book, one that is as suited to these times as it is to the period it explores. Wendy Matsumura brings a powerful theoretical apparatus to bear: the Marxian analysis of her earlier work transformed by her intense engagement with the theoretical and comparative work of Black and Indigenous women scholars. The effects of this encounter are profound. By attending to revolutionary practice and acknowledging the pain and sadness of absence, Matsumura locates the urgent, ethical commitment of a radical historian. An outstanding critical history.”

Wendy Matsumura is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego, and author of The Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor, and Theorizations of Community, also published by Duke University Press.