Bodies That Work. Tami Miyatsu

away on November 14, 2017. She was the person to whom I owe what I am. Jill was the best host mother one could wish to have. She was a cheerful, lively, and bighearted English lady. Three decades ago, I spent one summer at her house in Oxford just before going to King’s College London (KCL). I fell in love with her as soon as I met her. She was the type of person who would make everybody merry. People always gathered around her. I learned from her how to cook Yorkshire pudding, how to quarrel with (and refute) men, and how to laugh out daily difficulties. Our solid friendship of more than a quarter century began with the copious tears I shed on the day I left Oxford for KCL. I was scared of a new life in London and sad to leave my dear Jill. Oxford has since been my second hometown. We exchanged emails for many years, she welcomed my family and me back in Oxford, and a while ago, I welcomed her to Tokyo when she traveled 6,000 miles from England to visit me. She always encouraged me to pursue an academic career. Several years before her death, I visited her in Oxford on the way to an international conference held in England and had her listen to my presentation. I remember her big smiles while I was practicing my speech. My gratitude to my “English” mum is immeasurable.

      My editor at Peter Lang, Meagan Simpson, helped me through the whole process of preparing the manuscript, which required a tremendous amount of work. Her considerate suggestions motivated, encouraged, and sustained me for several months of my struggle. Without her professional expertise and support, I would not have been able to complete the project in such a short period of time. I also want to thank Liam McLean, who has been unfailingly attentive and thoughtful toward this first-time author.

      Finally, I express special thanks to the librarians and archivists who generously facilitated this foreign scholar’s research: the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Indiana Historical Society, the Chicago Historical Society, the University of Chicago Library, and the Manuscript Departments at the Library of Congress. I sincerely appreciate the warm support I received from the staff at each of these institutions. Valuable historical documents, printed or handwritten, fired my imagination regarding how African American women struggled to thrive under pressure and restrictions a century ago.

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Author’s Note

      When I studied at KCL in the fall of 1987 was when I first came across Toni Morrison’s works. The Bluest Eye and Beloved were a shock to a Japanese international student majoring in English literature—someone who went to England to learn more about romantic but tragic Victorian novels. The discussions about incest and infanticide soon drove Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and George Gissing out of my mind. Some research questions, which remained unanswered in class discussions, haunted me even when I went back to my country. I was probably too immature (or naïve) to confront these “life” problems. When I returned to college as a graduate student after several years, I majored in American literature, instead of English literature, to grapple with the questions that lingered in my mind from in my younger days. I again asked myself what Pecola had died for and wondered whether Sethe’s “thick” love had worked. To seek out answers, I pored over fiction and nonfiction on “modern” American slavery and its tradition—that is, racism in the United States. In the classroom, I still ask my students the same questions about Toni Morrison’s works, letting them realize how different each answer can be.

Born to Japanese parents in Japan, I am not what is called a “native” researcher, but I have felt a mission to explore African American men and women since I read Toni Morrison’s novels at KCL. Some critics—for example, in ←xv | xvi→anthropology—problematize whether a researcher is a “native” in the field of his or her study. They warn that a “native” or “indigenous” scholar will bring an insider’s prejudiced perspective to research because of his or her position of close affinity. However, as anthropologist Kirin Narayan argues, knowledge is what is “situated, negotiated, and part of an ongoing process,” along with personal, professional, and cultural associations: “Writing texts that mix lively narrative and rigorous analysis involves enacting hybridity [personal and professional], regardless of our origin.”¹ Any research, I believe, cannot escape such enacted hybridity.

      Bodies That Work is the product of more than 20 years of a “non-native” scholar’s research. My advisor, also a scholar of African American studies, is likewise not a native researcher. However, in her office, we shared progressive African American women’s joy and pain and lauded their efforts to survive, both literally and metaphorically, despite the difficulties that they faced. As a researcher, I feel that their problems are also our problems. A concerted effort of anyone, native or non-native, academic or nonacademic, is required to challenge the hate and prejudices that remain rife in every part of the world.

      Note

       1. Kirin Narayan, “How Native is a ‘Native’ Anthropologist?” American Anthropologist 95, no. 3 (September, 1993): 682, https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1993.95.3.02a00070 (accessed May 31, 2019).

      This book is part of the Peter Lang Humanities list.

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Introduction

The year of Frederick Douglass’s death, 1895, marked the beginning of a chaotic era in the history of racism against African Americans in U.S. politics.¹ The ostensibly monolithic black discourse of anti-racism collapsed with the loss of this unyielding leader, orator, and statesman. That same year, Ida B. Wells—a possible heir to Douglass’s activism with her uncompromising commitment to social, political, and financial equality, regardless of race or gender—published a pamphlet titled “A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892–1893–1894.”² In this thorough analysis of racial violence, she condemned the prevalence of lynching, stating that “no opportunity [was given to the victimized] to make a lawful defense” in a supposedly “civilized” nation.³ The antagonistic discourse she inspired, however, was soon replaced by the words of a newly emerging leader of African Americans—Booker T. Washington.⁴ In September 1895, Washington, who had a different strategy from Wells for resolving the institutional racism that African Americans had to incur, delivered an obsequious speech to the Cotton States and International Exposition, held in Atlanta, Georgia, that became widely known as the Atlanta Compromise.⁵ In the speech, he proposed a new solution to the problem of racism against African Americans in the United States. Despite criticism from fellow African Americans, such as W. E. B. Du Bois (another emerging black leader and scholar and a more ←1 | 2→aggressive spokesperson for black people), Washington’s speech received immediate national and international attention.⁶

Importantly, Washington’s speech subtly links U.S. prosperity to racial tolerance.⁷