Event

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 kokyō o mezasu) and Kobayashi Masaki's epic 1958-1961 film The Human Condition (Ningen no jōken) 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. In the case of Manchukuo fiction, I focus on the rift opened up in individuals' sense of belonging by the notion of becoming "Manchukuoan." In contrast to readings focused on the question of complicity with or resistance against the state that assume a consciousness of where one stands in historical time, I draw on Lauren Berlant’s notion of “animated suspension” to examine how these literary texts probed subjectivities shaped by a crisis in which social relations are sensed to be changing but the new genres and rules of storytelling have not yet come into being. In particular, Imamura and Nogawa each demonstrate the precariousness of subjects becoming untethered to a specific ethno-national allegiance within Manchukuo society, and therefore the contradictions between Manchukuo’s claims to independence and the terms of its multi-ethnic society. By focusing on such unstable-yet-ongoing temporal moments, I argue that the texts point to the production of Manchukuoan subjectivities in the process of becoming that were rendered irrecoverable by national narratives of the Cold War order in East Asia. Turning to Abe's novel and Kobayashi's film, I argue that these subjectivities denied return in the postwar nevertheless a powerful, if spectral, significance for resisting the categories of global alignment taking hold in the immediate wake of the "Bandung moment" and establishment of Japan's "1955 System" under the Liberal Democratic Party. Considered together, these texts call for a re-examination of the historical development of frameworks we have come to take for granted in our present-day analyses, and how these frameworks are predicated on the recognition of certain modes of subjectivity while rendering others invisible.

Currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies, Stephen Poland received his Ph.D. in Modern Japanese Literature from Yale University in 2016, previously earning an M.A. at the University of Washington and B.A. in Philosophy at Grinnell College. He works on literature and cinema in 20th century East Asia, focusing on how shifting problems of empire and nation, community and subjectivity are worked through by these two important cultural industries of capitalist modernity.

His doctoral dissertation, "Manchukuo as Method: Problematizing Nationality in Literature, 1906-1945," examines literature produced by Japanese, Chinese, and Korean writers in Northeast China during the period of Japanese imperial expansion, culminating in the establishment of the "puppet-state" Manchukuo (1932-1945). Through readings of individual literary texts and debates, it traces the articulation between spatio-temporal orders of Manchuria (such as the railway, the region, and the Manchukuo state) and globally circulating genres and forms of modern literary practice, arguing for Manchukuo as a method of reading the micropolitical aesthetics of literary texts whereby literature served as a practice of experimenting with affective and subjective possibilities that resisted capture by national imaginaries. This approach sheds light on how imperial formations sought new rationalities capable of recapturing the nation following waves of national liberation movements after World War I.

As he works on expanding and revising the dissertation into a manuscript for publication, Stephen is also beginning work on a second project, which explores representations of Manchukuo in postwar Korean, Japanese, and Chinese media, and how these “specters of Manchukuo” resonated with contemporaneous political developments locally, regionally, and globally through the Cold War period and after.