On Japanese Reception of Francophone Caribbean Thought

By Takeshi Morisato

In search of constructive and creative conversations beyond Trans-Atlantic thought, I want to introduce the work of a notable scholar in the field of Caribbean philosophy and literature in Japan: Nakamura Takayuki, a professor of Francophone Black & Caribbean Literature at Waseda University in Tokyo. Since 2011, he has published several monographs and translations in Francophone Caribbean and Africana literature. He is undoubtedly the leading figure in the field of Caribbean and the Black studies in Japan.

Importantly, many of the works published by scholars in Japan are also accessible to the general audience: hence, the titles on Caribbean philosophy are often widely read among public intellectuals, thus receiving wider recognition beyond the walls of academia. I would like to show in the following how Nakamura frames their understanding of Caribbean thought and to spark a conversation so that Caribbeanists can collaborate with researchers from this East Asian archipelago. [1] In this article, I will mainly talk about Nakamura’s work and the interesting comparative insight that he brings to the table through his engagement with Francophone Caribbean thought.

Decolonial Caribbean Philosophy in Japan 

Nakamura began his academic career as a Glissant scholar under the supervision of a famous Japanese philosopher, Nishitani Osamu (1950–), a leading specialist of contemporary French philosophy and literature. Nakamura’s first small booklet on the history of Caribbean Literature, A Short History of Francophone Caribbean Literature: from Négritude to Créolité, was published right after his visit to Martinique in 2009–10. Behind this small but informative text, with no more than sixty-six pages, is a burning passion of a young scholar. This passion led him to be invited to the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane by Jean Bernabé, where he listened to Raphaël Confiant’s lectures. He also bumped into Patrick Chamoiseau and Daniel Boukman in the streets of Fort-de-France, and attended “LaKouZémi” organized by the poet Monchoachi, where he became friends with old revolutionaries who read La Lézarde together. Nakamura points out that in the 1990s, Japanese intellectuals knew almost nothing about Francophone Caribbean literatures. But a number of Japanese translations continuously introduced these writers to figures such as Césaire, Glissant, and Condé at the turn of this century.

While this small text only provided a neat “chronological” introduction to the categories of négritude, antillais, and créolité, it became the basis of his scholarly debut, A Theory of the Caribbean-World: On Places of Rebellion Against Colonialism (2013). This thick monograph presents a wide range of Caribbean philosophies, literatures, and art (including music) while introducing the social-political contexts in which they were forged. Its focus is a comprehensive introduction to Francophone Caribbean writers. But what interests me about this monograph is a sign of evolution from the booklet—a kind of Caribbeanisation—moving from the neat chronological introduction to Caribbean thought to an adaptation of the Caribbean thought-process. It gives a distinct framework of thinking, designed to disrupt any liner approach to an intellectual history, thereby allowing a thinker to (re-)visit things of the past in and as the present.

Nakamura starts this monograph with a reflection on the French Caribbean general strikes which were taking place during his research visit to Martinique in 2009. Here the islands economic dependence on France is explained against the complicated history of colonialism, postcolonial integrationism, and continuous resistance. Despite its image of perfect tropical vacances for Europeans, Martinican life is morphed into a kind of disposable serviceability, both in the Caribbean and the mainland. The book then covers the wide range of topics, including French colonialism, Black liberation movements (their subsequent social, political, philosophical and artistic influences on Caribbean writers), the failure of independence, and the rise of neo-colonialism. While this alone should draw more attention to this work, Nakamura does not stop here. Its ending makes an unexpected leap.

[Hiroshi Sugimoto, “Caribbean Sea, Jamaica,” 1980]

The final chapter on Glissant’s theory of the “Caribbean-world” returns to the 2009 general strike to analyze how workers stopped public transportation and severed themselves from the commercial infrastructure of France. The general strike, especially in the context of neocolonialism and contemporary slavery, “monetarily releases human beings from the endless structure of production and consumption” and “what we can see in that fleeting moment,” Nakamura argues, is the “possibility of building the basis of de-economic society” (398). The strike—as the act of shutting down the island’s connection to the European economy and politics—may not be sustainable under the reign of global capitalism, but we can hear in its struggle a kind of promise. It signifies that we can and should live beyond the machinery of capitalism. Or as Nakamura notes, we can be grounded in collective movements of Caribbean intellectuals as they are envisioned in the Manifestation for the Products of High Necessity. [2]

In the same manner, A Theory of the Caribbean-World distances itself from the chronological description of Caribbean thought and literature. By adopting the spiral structure of the antillais world-view, the author dives into the Caribbean whirlpool of self-consciousness where we hardly make any straightforward progress towards our freedom in the way western philosophy often envisions itself to be doing in the manner of Enlightenment. In other words, the specific social phenomenon of general strike, which is stuck in its ongoing failure of true independence from France, is conceived as a particular manifestation of the world as overdetermined chaos, a creative life energy that runs through the history of French Caribbean islands. This movement away from the logocentric universe in which we impose a linear model of a cultural progress—from slavery to revolutionary freedom (i.e., créolité) through “reactionary” négritude—towards the “vision of chaos” that embraces circular self-understanding where different literary and philosophical movements are radically different variants of the same movement away from western colonialism and globalizing capitalism. [3]

It is not that we move on from one perspective to another, but rather that we must fight against Anti-Blackness chaotically. At times, this means being a true supporter of négritude, and other times this means recognizing its failures. Négritude, antillais, and créolité are irreducibly different responses to the condition of colonialism in the region. But they are also profoundly similar because each recognizes the other’s ultimate failure. This circular structure of creative repetitions captures Caribbean space-and-time accurately but also demands that foreign authors take up this framework of thinking. In other words, this thought process must also be manifested in the space-and-time of Japan.

Japanese-Francophone Decolonial Reflections on Caribbean Thought

Over the last ten years, Nakamura has published four translations on primary sources in Francophone Caribbean thought and five monographs on relevant topics, including A Discourse on Barbarism: The Intellectual History of Prejudices and Exclusion (2020), The Cartography of the Second World (2022), The Black Culture: Trans-Atlantic Voices and Sounds(2025), and Revolutionaries of Knowledge: Édouard Glissant and Philosophical Poetics of Relations (2026). What makes his scholarship on the Caribbean thought interesting is that he articulates a space where Japanese readers can learn from his reflections on the historical experience of French Caribbeans. Nakamura describes this space of reading Caribbean literature with Chamoiseau’s term, naming it the “second world.” He, then, shows how to dwell in this place by internalizing Glissant’s language of “trembling” (tremblement) as someone who lives in the nation with a living memory of great earthquakes.

Here we can speculate pace Nakamura and say that while Glissant might have been unfamiliar with the history of natural disasters in Japan, he did know that disasters and subsequent problems are not caused by nature alone but almost always exacerbated by human actions. For instance, Nakamura argues in The Cartography of the Second World that the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, including the Fukushima nuclear disaster, was the consequence of our blind faith in globalization—the “worst unification, normalization, and secret but obvious control of multinational corporation, and barbaric liberalism” (193). [4] Japanese government and society immediately responded to the disaster with words of prayer and compassion, wishing for the reconstruction of ruined rural communities. Government policies followed this language of reconstruction.

[カリブ-世界論、2013年]

[第二世界のカルトグラフィ、2022年]

But none of these things, despite their inherent inability to grasp the true extent of damage done, suggest acting differently. The same actions that led to the disaster are meant to save us under the name of barbaric globalism. We are sorry for the people who lost their homes, but we also need the power plants back online for our economic growth. Japanese philosophers discussed in the 20th century how we learned nothing from the failure of modernization after the second world war. But now, in the 21st century, we repeat the same mistake in post 3.11 Japanese society.

What is needed to respond properly to the consequence of natural-and-man-made disasters is the “large scale uprising in the world of imagination” (194). Nakamura echoes Glissant by saying that we need to stop using language of the “first world” that is lucid, accessible, and useful. This first world always promises us a brighter future but is also designed for us to forget what happened and what caused great sufferings in the past. Rather, we must recollect the past to “relive what happened as the now” and shake up our imagination to come up with the “new science of the Word.” [5] In this way, Japan may come to live in a radically different order of things.

Towards Afro-Asian Philosophy through Caribbean Thought 

Our literary and intellectual movement towards this imaginary “place” of the “second world” releases us from the overarching system of (neo-)colonialism, or nationalism, or any other types of -ism’s that makes it impossible for us to imagine the future of otherwise. These hidden pockets of imagination demand us to understand the existential intent of Caribbean authors. When exposing ourselves to their histories then, Nakamura argues in The Cartography of the Second World that “it is necessary especially for modern Japanese society, where we are surrounded by nationalistic discourse based on the intentional obliviousness of the past, to read their [Africana] histories as the histories of Korean and Chinese people and their disenfranchisement through Japanese invasion in the 20th century” (40).

Yet, comparing the consequences of colonialism in the Caribbean and East Asia does not easily take place in western academic discourse. Area studies or social-political theories tend to focus on each of these two regions as geopolitically having almost nothing to do with the other. Japanese academia is not foreign to this structural problem. However, because the “second world” as the conceptual device cuts through any temporal, spatial, or academic disciplinary boundaries, Nakamura is saying that we should be able to find ourselves thrown into the Caribbean analysis of coloniality hitting home in the past and the present of Japan’s colonial invasions, as well as relevant economic policies in East Asia. In this sense, he writes:

The ways of Japanese society in 2020 are surprisingly similar to how things were in Martinique in the 1970s. It should not only me who feels that the memory of devastating war has been conveniently erased and an empty phrase of “Japan prosper” (banzai) is permeating through the air. I am from a generation that does not know war but terrified by the feeling that the state structure that wages it is formed in the ways that we see today in Japan (60).

To bring this terror and possibility to light, poetry becomes critical. As Nakamura, borrowing Glissant words, notes: “because it is always that which will come, the poetic is waiting for it to become our trembling” (197). Nakamura had to travel to the Caribbean to see that without this trembling, we cannot understand Caribbean literatures and philosophies in Japan even if we accumulate the knowledge of the specific historical time-and-space through critical translations and scholarly monographs. Moreover, without this “trembling,” Japan cannot begin to deal with the existential, socio-historical, and political quakes it faces today. 

So, to understand Caribbean thinkers’ existential attitude in the complex history of colonialism and racism, Japanese scholars like Nakamura had to search for the “second world” of (Caribbean) poetry through their own time and place in Japan. As Japanese intellectuals, we must constantly think about the consequence of colonialism, racial or ethno-national normativity and alienation, as well as the leading role Japan plays in global capitalism. These Japanese works on Caribbean philosophies and literatures, therefore, can help internalize the Caribbean insight for a “large scale uprising.” In this way, we can send out shock waves against the global-scale tyranny of new imperialism and persistent colonialism. This is the only way in which our scholarship can do justice to its content and build the association of Caribbean thought beyond the walls of western academy.

---

Notes

This blog post is Part II of a multi-series engagement on the linkages between Japanese and Caribbean thought. To read more, please see Part I (“Beyond the Trans-Atlantic: On Japanese Reception of Caribbean Thought”).

[1] There are certainly other scholars that are working in the area of Hispanophone Caribbean Literature in Japan, but as far as I know their major books are still in the making.

[2] See Ernest Breleur, Patrick Chamoiseau, Serge Domi, Gérard Delver, Édouard Glissant, Guillaume Pigeard de Gurbert, Olivier Portecop, Olivier Pulvar, and Jean-Claude William. "Manifeste pour les ‘produits’ de haute nécessité." France-Antilles Martinique 16 (2009): 1-9.

[3] From the perspective of créolité, negritude is thought to have failed in capturing the unique position of the Caribbean thought as a hybrid of multiple cultural currents. Its singular focus on providing a collective response to anti-Blackness cannot be completely dissociated from the white supremacy of colonial statecraft. In that sense, the position of créolité would hold that negritude was not yet revolutionary or truly liberating Caribbean thinkers from the binary of colonizer/colonized.  

[4] The line is quoted from Glissant without citation (as it is written for the general audience in Japan).

[5] See Sylvia Wynter. “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is Like to Be ‘Black.’” National Identities and Sociopolitical Changes in Latin America. Eds. Antonio Gomez-Moriana and Mercedes Duran-Cogan. London: Routledge, 2013: 29.

References

• Nakamura, Takayuki. A Theory of the Caribbean–World: Places and Histories of Anti-Colonial Resistance. Kyoto: Jimbunshoin, 2013.

• Nakamura, Takayuki. The Cartography of the Second World. Tokyo: Editorial Republica, 2022.

Takeshi Morisato is a Lecturer in non-Western philosophy at the University of Edinburgh where he teaches Japanese philosophy, Buddhist philosophy and Africana philosophy. He is currently serving as the editor of the European Journal of Japanese Philosophy and of the book series, “Thinking World Philosophies" (Edinburgh University Press) among others. He generally publishes books on Japanese philosophy in English and Africana Philosophy in Japanese but there has been some crossover in the area of Afro-Asian philosophy.