The Politics of Afro-Asian Intimacies in Jim Crow Tokyo

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the intimate encounters between Japanese women and African American servicemen in post–World War II Japan and the ways in which these intimacies challenged American racial politics that were reproduced in Occupied Japan, while at the same time reaffirmed American heterosexual masculine power and the subordination of Japanese women. It interrogates the gendered politics of the historical conception of Afro-Asian solidarity, and contributes to studies of the Black Pacific by considering these interracial intimacies as sites of potent marriage rights discursive production in the postwar years.