Event

In her presentation at the CEAS Humanities Colloquium at Penn, Horiguchi will demonstrate how women’s actions and representations of women’s bodies redrew the border and expanded, rather than transcended, the empire of Japan.

Based on a chapter from her book, Women Adrift: The Literature of Japan’s Imperial Body (forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press, December 2011), Horiguchi specifically analyzes the boundary-crossing writings of a prominent female author Hayashi Fumiko (1904–1951). In Hayashi’s writings—and in Naruse Mikio’s postwar film adaptations of Hayashi’s novels—Horiguchi reveals how women asserted their own agency by transgressing the borders of nation and gender. At the same time, we see how Hayashi’s work, conducted under various colonial conditions, ended up reinforcing Japanese nationalism, racialism, and imperial expansion. In her reappraisal of the paradoxical positions of Hayashi and her female characters, Horiguchi complicates narratives of Japanese empire and of women’s role in its expansion.

* CEAS Humanities Colloquium Series