nd d The 42n Japan Seminar of Montreal

presents

The Ethnographic Avant-Garde: Hanada Kiyoteru and Movements of Culture in Postwar Japan
by

Toshiya UENO
Professor Wako University Friday, February 11, 2011 17:00 19:00 Leacock 738

McGill University

Abstract: Japanese dissident leftist critic, Hanada Kiyoteru (1909-74) was central to the organization of social and cultural movements in 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Here I wish to consider Hanada not merely as an instance of left-wing (or even right-wing) conversion but a potential precursor of cultural studies in Japan. As such, I will examine his motivations in organizing different avant-garde art and literature circles or groups. And I will explore some of the concepts that he deployed, such as dialect without synthesis, collaboration (or group mind), transformative epoch, overcoming modernity, association and inhumanity, as crystallization of the social, as well as such tropes as metamorphosis, the mask, and the desert. My aim is to take seriously the theoretical implications of statements like this one: Reality is what dialectically integrates the necessity of the past and the possibility of the future based on the contingency of the present.