American Haiku, Eastern Philosophies, and Modernist Poetics traces the genesis and development of haiku in Japan as it transformed over the years and eventually made its way to the Western world. Yoshinobu Hakutani analyzes the prominent Eastern philosophies expressed through haiku, such as Confucianism and Zen, and the aesthetic principles of yugen, sabi, and wabi. Hakutani discusses several reinventions of haiku, from Matsuo Basho's transformation of the classic haiku, to Masaoka Shiki's modernist perspectives expressing subjective thoughts and feelings, and eventually to Yone Noguchi's introduction of haiku to the Western world through W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. Hakutani argues that the adoption and transformation of haiku is one of the most popular East-West artistic, cultural, and literary exchanges to have taken place in modern and postmodern times.

Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production analyzes the complex conversations taking place in texts of all sorts traveling between Africans, African Diasporas, and Japanese across disciplinary, geographic, racial, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural borders. Be it focused on the make-up of the blackface ganguro or the haiku of Richard Wright, Rastafari communities in Japan or the black enka singer Jero, the volume turns its attention away from questions of representation to ones concerning the generative aspects of transcultural production. The contributors are interested primarily in texts in motion-the contradictory motion within texts, the traveling of texts, and the action that such kinetic energy inspires in readers, viewers, listeners, and travelers. As our texts travel and travail, the originary nodal points that anchor them to set significations loosen and are transformed; the essays trace how, in the process of traveling, the bodies and subjectivities of those working to reimagine the text(s) in new sites moderate, accommodate, and transfigure both the texts and themselves.

Haiku, Other Arts, and Literary Disciplines investigates the genesis and development of haiku in Japan and determines the relationships of haiku with other arts, such as essay, painting, and music, as well as the backgrounds of haiku, such as literary movements, philosophies, and religions that underlie haiku composition. By analyzing the poets who played major roles in the development of haiku and its related geners, these essays illustrate how Japanese haiku poets, and American writers such as Emerson and Whitman, were inspired by nature, especially its beautiful scenes and seasonal changes. Western poets had a demonstrated affinity for Japanese haiku, which bled over into other art mediums, as these chapters discuss.

American Haiku: New Readings explores the history and development of haiku by American writers, examining individual writers. In the late nineteenth century, Japanese poetry influenced through translation the French Symbolist poets, from whom British and American Imagist poets, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, and John Gould Fletcher, received stimulus. Since the first English-language hokku (haiku) written by Yone Noguchi in 1903, one of the Imagist poet Ezra Pound's well-known haiku-like poem, "In A Station of the Metro," published in 1913, is most influential on other Imagist and later American haiku poets. Since the end of World War II many Americans and Canadians tried their hands at writing haiku. Among them, Richard Wright wrote over four thousand haiku in the final eighteen months of his life in exile in France. His Haiku: This Other World, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener (1998), is a posthumous collection of 817 haiku Wright himself had selected. Jack Kerouac, a well-known American novelist like Richard Wright, also wrote numerous haiku. Kerouac's Book of Haikus, ed. Regina Weinreich (Penguin, 2003), collects 667 haiku. In recent decades, many other American writers have written haiku: Lenard Moore, Sonia Sanchez, James A. Emanuel, Burnell Lippy, and Cid Corman. Sonia Sanchez has two collections of haiku: Like the Singing Coming off the Drums (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998) and Morning Haiku (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010). James A. Emanuel's Jazz from the Haiku King (Broadside Press, 1999) is also a unique collection of haiku. Lenard Moore, author of his haiku collections The Open Eye (1985), has been writing and publishing haiku for over 20 years and became the first African American to be elected as President of the Haiku Society of America. Burnell Lippy's haiku appears in the major American haiku journals, Where the River Goes: The Nature Tradition in English-Language Haiku (2013). Cid Corman is well-known not only as a haiku poet but a translator of Japanese ancient and modern haiku poets: Santoka, Walking into the Wind (Cadmus Editions, 1994).

Lynching in American Literature and Journalism consists of twelve essays investigating the history and development of writing about lynching as an American tragedy and the ugliest element of national character. According to the Tuskegee Institute, 4,743 people were lynched between 1882 and 1968 in the United States, including 3,446 African Americans and 1,297 European Americans. More than 73 percent of the lynchings in the Civil War period occurred in the Southern states. The Lynchings increased dramatically in the aftermath of the Reconstruction, after slavery had been abolished and free men gained the right to vote. The peak of lynching occurred in 1882, after Southern white Democrats had regained control of the state legislators. This book is a collection of historical and critical discussions of lynching in America that reflects the shameful, unmoral policies, and explores the topic of lynching within American history, literature, and journalism.

In this minutely detailed, comprehensive chronology, authors Kiuchi and Hakutani document the life in letters of one of the great African American writers of the twentieth century. The author of Black Boy and Native Son, among other works, Wright wrote unflinchingly about the black experience in the United States, where his books still influence discussions of race. Entries are documented by Wright's journals, articles, and other works published and unpublished, as well as his letters to and from friends and associates. Part One covers Wright's life through the year 1946, the period in which he published his best-known work. Part Two covers the final two decades of his life, a prolific period that saw him publish travel writing, novels, and four works of nonfiction. Each part begins with a historical and critical introduction.

Best-Sellers and Their Film Adaptations in Postwar America looks at some of the most popular novels of the 1950s and examines how their representations of gender identity and conflict dispute and re-imagine the dominant constructions of masculinity and femininity in postwar culture. Working with the claim that gender identity emerged as a primary signifier of national identity within Cold War ideology, Jane Hendler provides a detailed, illuminating analysis of how five best-sellers and their film adaptations address a range of intersecting historical issues, including communist containment, corporate culture, family life, and race relations, all of which were integrally linked to gender and key issues of American identity. Each chapter offers compelling, layered readings of the multiple social discourses that fed into the production and reception of these texts that will interest readers in film, gender, and cultural studies.