Event

Abstract: "In the late-1950s, writers and filmmakers in Japan turned their attention to the former Japanese "puppet-state" Manchukuo in new ways suggesting not only certain continuities that persisted following the collapse of the Japanese empire into the postwar, but also resonances between the uncertainties faced by subjects of Manchukuo and those of Japanese citizens in the Cold War order in East Asia. In this talk, I will juxtapose short stories from Manchukuo by Imamura Eiji (dates unknown) and Nogawa Takashi (1901-1944) with Abe Kobo's 1957 novel The Animals Head Home (Kemonotachi wa kokyo o mezasu) and Kobayashi Masaki's epic 1958-1961 film The Human Condition (Ningen no joken) to examine how the imperial subjectivities produced in Manchukuo were foreclosed in the postwar but nevertheless continued to function in cultural production that wrestled with Japan's place in the world. Read complete abstract and bio here...

Stephen Poland is a a postdoctoral fellow at the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies. For more information on this event, visit the link below:

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/ealc/events/impossible-escape-impossible-return-manchukuo-and-indeterminacy-subjectivity-japanese-transwa