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.