Not Yo' Butterfly

My Long Song of Relocation, Race, Love, and Revolution
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-0-520-38064-6
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 344 Seiten, Cloth Over Boards, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 544 g

Reihe: American Crossroads

A mold-breaking memoir of Asian American identity, political activism, community, and purpose.

Not Yo’ Butterfly is the intimate and unflinching life story of Nobuko Miyamoto—artist, activist, and mother. Beginning with the harrowing early years of her life as a Japanese American child navigating a fearful west coast during World War II, Miyamoto leads readers into the landscapes that defined the experiences of twentieth-century America and also foregrounds the struggles of people of color who reclaimed their histories, identities, and power through activism and art.
 
Miyamoto vividly describes her early life in the racialized atmosphere of Hollywood musicals and then her turn toward activism as an Asian American troubadour with the release of A Grain of Sand—considered to be the first Asian American folk album. Her narrative intersects with the stories of Yuri Kochiyama and Grace Lee Boggs, influential in both Asian and Black liberation movements. She tells how her experience of motherhood with an Afro-Asian son, as well as a marriage that intertwined Black and Japanese families and communities, placed her at the nexus of the 1992 Rodney King riots—and how she used art to create interracial solidarity and conciliation.
 
Through it all, Miyamoto has embraced her identity as an Asian American woman to create an antiracist body of work and a blueprint for empathy and praxis through community art. Her sometimes barbed, often provocative, and always steadfast story is now told.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Miyamoto, Nobuko

Wong, Deborah

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Musikgattungen Weltmusik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein Biographien & Autobiographien: Historisch, Politisch, Militärisch
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Minderheiten, Interkulturelle & Multikulturelle Fragen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations

Intro 

First Movement
1 • A Travelin' Girl
2 • Don’t Fence Me In
3 • A Tisket, a Tasket, a Brown and Yellow Basket 
4 • From a Broken Past into the Future 
5 • Twice as Good
6 • Shall We Dance!
7 • School Daze
8 • Chop Suey
9 • There's a Place for Us
10 • We Shall Overcome

Second Movement
11 • Power to the People
12 • A Single Stone, Many Ripples
13 • Something About Me Today
14 • The People's Beat
15 • A Song for Ourselves
16 • Somos Asiáticos
17 • Foster Children of the Pepsi Generation
18 • A Grain of Sand 
19 • Free the Land 
20 • What Will People Think?
21 • Some Things Live a Moment 
22 • How to Mend What's Broken

Third Movement
23 • Women Hold Up Half the Sky
24 • Our Own Chop Suey 
25 • What Is the Color of Love? 
26 • Talk Story 
27 • Yuiyo, Just Dance
28 • Float Hands Like Clouds 
29 • Deep Is the Chasm 
30 • To All Relations 
31 • Bismillah Ir Rahman Ir Rahim
32 • The Seed of the Dandelion
33 • I Dream a Garden
34 • Mottainai—Waste Nothing
35 • Black Lives Matter 
36 • Bambutsu—All Things Connected

Epilogue 

Acknowledgments 
Notes
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Nobuko Miyamoto is a third-generation Japanese American songwriter, dance and theater artist, and activist, and is the Artistic Director of Great Leap. Her work has explored ways to reclaim and decolonize our minds, bodies, histories, and communities, using the arts to create social change and solidarity across cultural borders. Two of Nobuko’s albums are part of the Smithsonian Folkways catalog: A Grain of Sand, with Chris Iijima and Charlie Chin, produced by Paredon Records in 1973, and 120,000 Stories, released by Smithsonian Folkways in 2021.