Toyo Suyemoto (Kawakami) - 1916-2003

From: Susan B. Richardson, richardsons@denison.edu
 
Nisei poet, Toyo Suyemoto (married name Kawakami) died in her home  in Columbus, Ohio on December 30, 2003.  She was 87.  Toyo has been called "our major Camp Poet and Nikkei Poet Laureate" by Lawson Inada.  Here is her poem called "Camp Memories":
 
 I have dredged up
 Hard fragments lost,
 I thought, in years
 Of whirlwind dust.
 
 Exposed to light,
 Silently rough
 And broken shards
 Confront belief.      (February 1978)
 
Through her poetry and her storytelling, Toyo touched the hearts and minds of scores people of all backgrounds and ages.  She spoke to many classes, civic groups, and professional meetings about her experiences as a Japanese American before, during, and after the Second World War.

Whether her audience consisted of children, college students, or colleagues--and despite her diminutive stature (she hovered around five feet tall) and her quiet manner--the attention of every person in the room would be riveted upon her.  Their silence supported her soft voice.  Though her accounts informed people about national injustice and personal tragedy, Toyo delivered the messages with gentleness and humor; at the same time that she devastated her listeners with her story, she declined to harangue her audience and, instead, managed to affirm a joint humanity with them.
 
Toyo was a lady, yet her gentle spirit was also hospitable to a wicked wit.  Once, while waiting for a bus, alone, a group of adolescent boys on bikes began to circle her and harass her with verbal, racial insult;  Toyo quietly ignored them until the bus arrived;  then, stepping up into the bus and turning to face the boys, she gave them the finger.

Toyo also took delight, as the ravages of age encroached ever more on her existence, in inviting visitors to turn around a pillow on her couch to see the underside crocheted with "Screw the Golden Years!"
 
Toyo was born in 1916 near Sacramento, California to Issei parents, Mitsu Hyakusoku and Tsutomu Howard Suyemoto, the first of eleven children.  The family moved to Berkeley when the children reached college age, and Toyo graduated with a bachelor's degree in English from the University of California.  She was interned with her family and her infant son, Kay, first at Tanforan Race Track and then in Topaz Relocation Center in Utah from 1942 to 1945.  During the internment, Toyo and other graduates of Berkeley and (rival) Stanford set up a high school for the children of the camp.  She herself first taught English and Latin, then later managed the camp library, a precursor to her career in library work.
 
After release from the camp, the Suyemotos moved to Cincinnati where Toyo worked in various libraries.  After the death of her son Kay at 16 from complications stemming from his severe allergy to horses (developed while living in the Tanforan horse stall), Toyo earned an M.S. in Library Science from the University of Michigan.  She moved to Columbus, Ohio to take a job at the Ohio State University where she served as Head of the Social Work Library and Assistant Head of the Education/Psychology Library until her retirement as Associate Professor, Emerita of the libraries. Toyo has given some of her writings and journals  to the Ohio State University library to establish a special Suyemoto collection.

Toyo began writing poetry in her teenage years, and before the Second World War, she published poems regularly in the Japanese American newspapers on the West Coast.  During internment she was part of a group of writers and artists from the California Bay area that published the camp journals, "Trek" and "All Aboard."  After the war, her poetry appeared in journals such as The Yale Review, Amerasia Journal, and Common Ground, and in numerous anthologies, including Speaking for Ourselves: American Ethnic Writing (1969), Ayumi: A Japanese American Anthology (1980), Beyond Words: Images from America's Concentration Camps (1987), the Longman Anthology of World Literature by Women, 1875-1975 (1989) and Only What We Could Carry:  The Japanese American Internment Experience (2000).  Her most recent publication was an essay in Last Witnesses: Reflections on the Wartime Internment of Japanese Americans (2001) called "Another Spring," a reminiscence on the life of her family and the Japanese American community in Sacramento in the years before the war and during internment with special consideration of the relationship between herself, a Nisei daughter, and her Issei mother.

Toyo's poetic tone was gentle, her forms spare like her beloved poet, Emily Dickinson.  Hers is not an angry voice, her stance is rarely overtly political.  An exception is her recent poem, "Yellow Face," which ends with the quatrain:
 
 No longer interned, I recall
That harsh, forbidding place--
 And know I have yet to outlive
 Years of my yellow face.      (September 1996)

However, most of her many poems are characterized by a lyrical, introspective rendering of her rich personal experience of life, its beauties and sorrows.  A more typical poem is this haiku which in recent years she delighted in repeating to her many friends:
 
 Mortality stares
 At me steadily -- I smile
 And return that gaze.      (May 1993)
 
 Toyo is sorely missed.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Deadline: July 1, 2004

“Buddhism and American Culture”:  The editors invite proposals of essays for a book on Buddhism and American culture.  Aimed at a readership across a wide range of disciplines, Finding the Ox: Buddhism in American Culture will collect essays that test and play with disciplinary boundaries between Literary Studies, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies and Queer Theory. The proposed papers engage theoretical problems, offer close readings of specific texts, or (most fruitfully) ground speculative debates within the practice of mindful reading.  Specific essays in the volume may consider:

• the nature of the “Buddhist text”—what it might be for practicing Buddhists, and what is it for various kinds of western cultural consumers;
• under-investigated chapters in the history of Buddhism in America;
• the role of individual writers (e.g., Emerson, Thoreau,. Eliot, Stevens, Rexroth, Kerouac, Snyder, Kyger, Whalen, DiPrima, Welch, Ginsberg, Matthiessen, Kingston, Charles Johnson, Waldman, Andrew Schelling, and others);
• groups of writers (Transcendentalists, Modernists, Beats, Cyberpunk writers, Environmentalist writers and activists, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets)
• translators or teachers (e.g., Thomas Cleary, Robert Aitken, Chogyam Trungpa, D.T. Suzuki, Shunryu Suzuki, Alan Watts, Kazuaki Tanahashi, and others);
• the Buddha boom in Popular Film (e.g., discussions of Hollywood’s cultural adaptations of Asian religious and philosophical motifs);
• questions of colonialism and orientalism in western cultural representations and appropriates of Asian religions, and also the possibilities of resistance to colonialism and orientalism within western Buddhist and Buddhist-inspired texts;
• discussions of how Buddhist and Hindu terminology (karma, dharma, koan, and so forth) travels west, and how meanings alter or do not alter through travel;
• subdivisions within American Buddhism (e.g., comparative approaches to Theravadan and Mahayanist contributions to American belletristic literature;
• American psychological trends (e.g. Buddhist influences on or parallels with the cognitive psychology research of Aaron Beck, the “positive psychology” of Marvin Levine and Martin Seligman, or the “Flow” of Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi);
• Cultural trends (e.g., New Age spirituality, interfaith dialogue, comparative approaches to Eastern and Western medical and scientific discourses);
• comparative philosophical approaches with an emphasis on American contexts;
• finally, “no self” in relation to American identity politics, 1950-2000.

 The editors conceive of “culture” and “literature” in the widest possible senses and invite proposals for intellectually adventurous, substantial essays. Please submit, in electronic format in MS Word, a 300-word abstract and a two-page CV to (gary.storhoff@uconn.edu) and (elljwb@nus.edu.sg). Deadline for proposals: July 1, 2004. For completed articles: March 30, 2005. Completed articles will be 3,000-6,500 words long, including all notes and bibliographical. The editors are in contact with a major university press and hope to have a contract as soon as possible.

CALL FOR ESSAYS - SPECIAL ISSUE OF MELUS

Deadline: September 1, 2004

Essays are invited for a special issue of MELUS on issues of physical, cognitive, or sensory difference in U.S. multiethnic literatures.  The field of disability studies has created an overdue awareness of disability as a legitimate and necessary category of analysis in the humanities.  The cross-fertilization of disability theory with other modes of inquiry focused on the embodied subject (such as queer theory and feminism) has produced an outpouring of provocative scholarship that has furthered the understanding of those social, political, and cultural practices that have kept seemingly different groups of people in strikingly similar marginalized positions.  This special issue seeks to address the convergences of ethnic studies and disability studies in literary scholarship.  Essays should explicitly locate themselves within a disability studies framework and engage with current debates in the field of disability studies in their analysis of U.S. multiethnic literary texts.

We especially welcome papers pertaining to any of the following issues as they manifest themselves in U.S. multiethnic literatures:  Disability and immigrant, diasporic, border, and/or transnational identities; racial “passing” and hidden disability; immigrants as socially/politically/linguistically disabled; illness; “normalizing” medical procedures; injury, war, veterans; racial/ethnic bodies as congenitally and/or medically defective or diseased; disabled bodies in ethnic folklore; the racial/ethnic grotesque; subjectivity and embodiment; hybrid and/or cyborg bodies; disability and narrative strategies.

Essays (5000-6000 words, MLA style) may be directed to either of the following by September 1, 2004: Jennifer C. James, jcj@gwu.edu or Cynthia Wu, cynthiaw@umich.edu. 

CALL FOR SPECIAL ISSUE PROPOSALS

American Indian Culture and Research Journal invites proposals for special thematic issues, including topics on literary and related themes.

From the journal's web page: AICRJ, the foremost refereed research journal of American Indian Studies, is released quarterly by the UCLA American Indian Studies Center Publications Unit. AICRJ welcomes the submission of academic articles, poetry, and commentary, so long as they pertain to American Indian issues. For detailed contribution guidelines, please consult the journal web page: http://www.books.aisc.ucla.edu/aicrj.html

For more information on proposing/editing special issues:

Pamela Grieman
American Indian Culture and Research Journal
UCLA American Indian Studies Center
3220 Campbell Hall
Los Angeles, California 90095-1548
e-mail: grieman@ucla.edu

Heike Raphael-Hernandez,ed. Blackening Europe: The African American Presence. New York: Routledge, 2003. Pp. 314. ISBN 0-415-94398-1

Foreword by Paul Gilroy

Traditional scholars have often looked at African American studies through the lens of European theories, resulting in the secondarization of the African American presence in Europe and its contributions to European culture. Blackening Europe reverses this pattern by using African American culture as the starting point for a discussion of its influences over traditional European structures. Evidence of Europe’s blackening abound, from French ministers of hip-hop to slavery memorials in the Netherlands and German youth sporting dreadlocks. Collecting essays by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic and fields as diverse as history, literature, politics, social studies, art, film, and music, Blackening Europe explores the implications of these cultural hybrids and extends the growing dialogue about Europe’s fascination with African America.

Table of Contents:

• Paul Gilroy, Foreword: “Migrancy, Culture, and a New Map of Europe” - xi

• Heike Raphael-Hernandez, Introduction: “Making the African American Experience Primary” - 1

Part I: Creating a Foundation

• Jed Rasula, “Jazz as Decal for the European Avant-Garde” - 13

• Samir Dayal, “Blackness as Symptom: Josephine Baker and European Identity” - 35

• Dorothea Fischer-Hornung, “’Jungle in the Spotlight’? Primitivism and Esteem: Katherine Dunham’s 1954 German Tour” - 53

• Irina Novikova, “Black Music, White Freedom: Times and Spaces of Jazz Countercultures in the USSR” - 73

Part II: Accompanying Europe into the Twenty-first Century

• Johanna C. Kardux, “Monuments of the Black Atlantic: Slavery Memorials in the United States and The Netherlands” - 87

• P.A. Skantze, “Dancing Away toward Home: An Interview with Bill T. Jones about Dancing in Contemporary Europe” - 153

• André Lepecki, “The Melancholic Influence of the Postcolonial Spectral: Vera Mantero Summoning Josephine Baker” - 121

• María Frías, “Nights of Flamenco and Blues in Spain: From Sorrow Songs to Soleá and Back” - 141

• Felicia McCarren, “Monsieur Hip-Hop“ - 157

• Cathy Covell Waegner, “Rap, Rebounds, and Rocawear: The ‘Darkening’ of  German Youth Culture” - 171

• Éva Miklódy, “A.R.T., Klikk, K.A.O.S. and the Rest: Hungarian Youth Rapping” - 187

• Ch. Didier Gondola, “’But I Ain’t African, I’m American!’ Black American Exiles and the Construction of Racial Identities in Twentieth-Century France” - 201

• Alan Rice, “’Heroes across the Sea’: Black and White British Fascination with African Americans in Contemporary Black British Fiction by Caryl Phillips and Jackie Kay” - 217

Part III: Turning into Theory for Europe

• Sabine Broeck, “Never Shall We Be Slaves – Locke’s Treatises, Slavery and Early European Modernity” - 235

• Peter Gardner, “Make Capital Out of Their Sympathy: Rhetoric and Reality of U.S. Slavery and Italian Immigrant Prostitution along the Color Line from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-first Century” - 249

• Mihaela Mudure, “Blackening Gypsy Slavery: The Romanian Case” - 263

• Heike Raphael-Hernandez, “’Niggas’ and ‘Skins’: Nihilism among African American Youth in Low-Income Urban Communities and East German Youth in Satellite Cities, Small Towns, and Rural Areas” - 285