Tanaka, Motoko. Apocalypse in Contemporary Japanese Science Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print.
"Apocalyptic themes in Japanese culture can be observed not only in the Buddhist notion of cyclical life but also in premodern legends which describe natural disasters such as major earthquakes and the subsequent recreation of communities. Japanese new religious movements in the Bakumatsu and Meiji periods (from the 1860s to the 1900s) featured strong apocalyptic beliefs and advocated for radical social reform in the modern era" (2).
Same paragraph as above, cont: "The Japanese apocalyptic imagination, however, underwent drastic changes following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombings continue to be among the most prominent tropes in Japanese postwar culture, with science fiction anime (animation) and manga (comic books) depicting future cities devastated by nuclear wars. Japanese postwar fiction in various genres deals with the total destruction of the self, the community, the nation, the Earth, or the universe caused by the misuse of advanced technologies. The traumatic experience of defeat in World War II has shaped Japanese contemporary culture by destroying the traditional identity of Japan and the Japanese people."
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
American Pacificism
Lyons, Paul. American Pacificism: Oceania in the U.S. Imagination. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.
"This book critiques the massive senses in which, in U.S. cultural production about Oceania, both the responsibility to understand and learn and the willingness to imagine U.S. history as bound-together with Oceanian history in a way that is "managed from both ends" have been rudely abrogated. Even when the aim is a critique of imperialism, U.S. artists and scholars narrating stories of intercultural relation in Oceania have for the most part misperceived, misrepresented, disrespected, or ignored Oceanian institutions, perspectives, humor, and ways of knowing (and narrating), attempting to subsume indigenous categories into their own" (2).
Investigate: Toni Morrison 1992, Playing in the Dark. page xi
"My sense is that even fantasmic representations of Oceania -- invented images 'whose inventor is unaware of his act of invention' (Owens 1992: 4) -- are routed through an archive imbricated at the base in material relations" (3).
In particular, work which attempts to destabilize the exceptionalism of "America" "as a category with a rhizomatic approach "paradoxically seem to be transnationalizing American studies by expanding their reach into each point of local conjuncture" (3-4).
"Asia and Asia/Pacific" constructions
Debate: "Within the national narrative, the U.S. disavows having colonies in the sense of overseas territoris that are administered, generally with dual institional systems (legal, educational) that segregate colonizers and colonized" (6) citing Flores 2002, Kiste 1994: 228. Kiste: Tides of History
Chapter 1:
Where 'cannibalism' has been, tourism will be: Forms and funtions of American Pacificism
"Since the days of the early Republic, two fundamental conceptions of Oceania-coterminous, contradictory, synergetic -- have been entwined in the U.S. imagination. On the one hand, 'Pacific' islands are envisioned, economically and geopolitically, not as ends in themselves, but as stepping stones (provisioning and refueling stations, colonial outposts, communication centers, military bases) or passages (shipping lane protectors) toward the wealth of the Orient and the Indies. Such a vision shaped the U.S. relation to Oceania first in the China trade, in which private interests conflated with economic nationalism, and later in colonial ventures framed int erms of geostrategic needs. On the other hand, Pacific islands are imagined as ends-of-the-earth, cultural limit-cases unencumbered by notions of sin, antitheses to the industrial worlds of economic and political modernity, whose unfamiliar natives are compared for a variety of purposes to African and Native Americans" (24).
writers and regional planners "shared a tendency to recall selectively the scope of nineteenth-century U.S. involvement in Oceania and read it backwards and forwards as legacy of connection and prophecy of possession" (29).
"This book critiques the massive senses in which, in U.S. cultural production about Oceania, both the responsibility to understand and learn and the willingness to imagine U.S. history as bound-together with Oceanian history in a way that is "managed from both ends" have been rudely abrogated. Even when the aim is a critique of imperialism, U.S. artists and scholars narrating stories of intercultural relation in Oceania have for the most part misperceived, misrepresented, disrespected, or ignored Oceanian institutions, perspectives, humor, and ways of knowing (and narrating), attempting to subsume indigenous categories into their own" (2).
Investigate: Toni Morrison 1992, Playing in the Dark. page xi
"My sense is that even fantasmic representations of Oceania -- invented images 'whose inventor is unaware of his act of invention' (Owens 1992: 4) -- are routed through an archive imbricated at the base in material relations" (3).
In particular, work which attempts to destabilize the exceptionalism of "America" "as a category with a rhizomatic approach "paradoxically seem to be transnationalizing American studies by expanding their reach into each point of local conjuncture" (3-4).
"Asia and Asia/Pacific" constructions
Debate: "Within the national narrative, the U.S. disavows having colonies in the sense of overseas territoris that are administered, generally with dual institional systems (legal, educational) that segregate colonizers and colonized" (6) citing Flores 2002, Kiste 1994: 228. Kiste: Tides of History
Chapter 1:
Where 'cannibalism' has been, tourism will be: Forms and funtions of American Pacificism
"Since the days of the early Republic, two fundamental conceptions of Oceania-coterminous, contradictory, synergetic -- have been entwined in the U.S. imagination. On the one hand, 'Pacific' islands are envisioned, economically and geopolitically, not as ends in themselves, but as stepping stones (provisioning and refueling stations, colonial outposts, communication centers, military bases) or passages (shipping lane protectors) toward the wealth of the Orient and the Indies. Such a vision shaped the U.S. relation to Oceania first in the China trade, in which private interests conflated with economic nationalism, and later in colonial ventures framed int erms of geostrategic needs. On the other hand, Pacific islands are imagined as ends-of-the-earth, cultural limit-cases unencumbered by notions of sin, antitheses to the industrial worlds of economic and political modernity, whose unfamiliar natives are compared for a variety of purposes to African and Native Americans" (24).
writers and regional planners "shared a tendency to recall selectively the scope of nineteenth-century U.S. involvement in Oceania and read it backwards and forwards as legacy of connection and prophecy of possession" (29).
Monday, August 3, 2015
Kristeva: The Abject
"The abject has only one quality of the object--that of being opposed to I" (1).
The abject elicits a revolt. It feels as though it is a threat. It is not an object; it is unnameable. It is not even what Kristeva calls an "ob-jest," or "an otherness ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest for desire" (1). It is not defined through the quest to define it; it is not the Holy Grail; it is not a zombie, exactly, but it is perhaps apocalyptic. If it is acknowledged it annihilates. In its purest form at least.
Yet the corpse is one of Kristeva's first examples of the upsetting: the corpse "upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance" (3). The problem is that the elements of a corpse which produce an affect (that is, blood and pus, the smell of decay) do "not signify death" (3). Instead they "show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live" (3). A flat encephalograph, by contrast, can be anticipated and accepted--if death is totally signified, it is comprehensible. It is in decay that abjection appears.
The abject is embodied in Auschwitz when "I see a heap of children's shoes, or something like that" and so the "abjection of Nazi crime reaches its apex when death, which, in any case , kills me, interferes with what, in my living universe, is supposed to save me from death: childhood, science, among other things" (4). It is the perversion of innocent imagery that the abject is most directly embodied.
Kristeva's conceptualization wavers from time to time, such as when she suggests in one point that nothing in the abject is recognizable and then in other times that it is the corruption of recognizable objects that elicits abjection.
The abject is "a land of oblivion that is constantly remembered" (8) and yet it is a border, as "abjection is above all ambiguity" (9). Kristeva may at times seem to be presenting a system of irreconcilably opposed definitions as a way of presenting the reader with the contradiction of how it is neither an "object" or an "ob-jest." Later Kristeva characterizes it is a kind of narcissitic crisis; as related to perversion; as a rite of defilement and pollution and paganism; and in turn as a facet of purity and impurity which are in turn tied up with monotheism.
Kristeva considers how in judeo-christian monotheism (the Bible), the authorization to consume meat is only granted after the cataclysm of the Flood; it is only after acknowledging the essential nature of man as evil that life based on devouring animals can emerge.
In her final section on "Powers of Horror" Kristeva supposes that "all literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to me rooted, no matter what its socio-historical conditions might be, on the fragile border (borderline cases) where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so--double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject" (207). This is the point: abjection is the "other facet of religious, moral, and ideological does" and the return of these repressed codes "make up our 'apocalypse,' and that is why we cannot escape the dramatic convulsions of religious crises" (209).
Kristeva is skeptical that one can analyze the abject while resiting "making capital out of its power" or confusing himself for the abject; instead, all one can hope for is "the first great demystification of Power (religious, moral, political, and verbal) that mankind has ever witnessed; and it is necessarily taking place within that fulfillment of religion as sacred horror, which is Judeo-Christian monotheism" (210).
Kristeva suggests that through contemplation of the abject we will penetrate the mystification of sacred horror. It is religious signification that the analyst destroys.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia U P, 1982. Print.
Original essay published 1980 in French.
The abject elicits a revolt. It feels as though it is a threat. It is not an object; it is unnameable. It is not even what Kristeva calls an "ob-jest," or "an otherness ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest for desire" (1). It is not defined through the quest to define it; it is not the Holy Grail; it is not a zombie, exactly, but it is perhaps apocalyptic. If it is acknowledged it annihilates. In its purest form at least.
Yet the corpse is one of Kristeva's first examples of the upsetting: the corpse "upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance" (3). The problem is that the elements of a corpse which produce an affect (that is, blood and pus, the smell of decay) do "not signify death" (3). Instead they "show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live" (3). A flat encephalograph, by contrast, can be anticipated and accepted--if death is totally signified, it is comprehensible. It is in decay that abjection appears.
The abject is embodied in Auschwitz when "I see a heap of children's shoes, or something like that" and so the "abjection of Nazi crime reaches its apex when death, which, in any case , kills me, interferes with what, in my living universe, is supposed to save me from death: childhood, science, among other things" (4). It is the perversion of innocent imagery that the abject is most directly embodied.
Kristeva's conceptualization wavers from time to time, such as when she suggests in one point that nothing in the abject is recognizable and then in other times that it is the corruption of recognizable objects that elicits abjection.
The abject is "a land of oblivion that is constantly remembered" (8) and yet it is a border, as "abjection is above all ambiguity" (9). Kristeva may at times seem to be presenting a system of irreconcilably opposed definitions as a way of presenting the reader with the contradiction of how it is neither an "object" or an "ob-jest." Later Kristeva characterizes it is a kind of narcissitic crisis; as related to perversion; as a rite of defilement and pollution and paganism; and in turn as a facet of purity and impurity which are in turn tied up with monotheism.
Kristeva considers how in judeo-christian monotheism (the Bible), the authorization to consume meat is only granted after the cataclysm of the Flood; it is only after acknowledging the essential nature of man as evil that life based on devouring animals can emerge.
In her final section on "Powers of Horror" Kristeva supposes that "all literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to me rooted, no matter what its socio-historical conditions might be, on the fragile border (borderline cases) where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so--double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject" (207). This is the point: abjection is the "other facet of religious, moral, and ideological does" and the return of these repressed codes "make up our 'apocalypse,' and that is why we cannot escape the dramatic convulsions of religious crises" (209).
Kristeva is skeptical that one can analyze the abject while resiting "making capital out of its power" or confusing himself for the abject; instead, all one can hope for is "the first great demystification of Power (religious, moral, political, and verbal) that mankind has ever witnessed; and it is necessarily taking place within that fulfillment of religion as sacred horror, which is Judeo-Christian monotheism" (210).
Kristeva suggests that through contemplation of the abject we will penetrate the mystification of sacred horror. It is religious signification that the analyst destroys.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia U P, 1982. Print.
Original essay published 1980 in French.
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This is a blog dedicated to anything and everything including or related to all things apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, post|apocalyptic, disaster, necrofuturistic, salvagepunk, robinsonade, atomic bomb, survival, crisis, end of the world, BOOM...
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fiction, non-fiction, documentary, history, rhetoric, argument, cinema, games, interactive, spectacle, visual, aesthetic, style...
close readings, distant readings, cultural studies, rhetorical theory, marxism and post-marxism and gucci-marxism, reader response and phenomenology and run-on-sentences...
post-colonial and colonial and settler colonial and american...
elliptical and ironical and pretentious and parodic...
it's a collection and a response and a reflection and a performance and it's still going
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