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