Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan - The Performing Body During and After the Cold War

Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan examines how the performing arts, and the performing body specifically, have shaped and been shaped by the political and historical conditions experienced in Japan during the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. This study of original and secondary materials from the fields of theatre, dance, performance art, film and poetry, probes the interrelationship that exists between the body and the nation-state. Important artistic works, such as Ankoku Butoh (dance of darkness) and its subsequent re-interpretation by a leading political performance company Gekidan Kaitaisha (theatre of deconstruction), are analysed using ethnographic, historical and theoretical modes. This approach reveals the nuanced and prolonged effects of military, cultural and political occupation in Japan over a duration of dramatic change. Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan explores issues of discrimination, marginality, trauma, memory and the mediation of history in a ground-breaking work that will be of great significance to anyone interested in the symbiosis of culture and conflict.>

About the author

Adam Broinowski is Post Doctoral Research Fellow in the School of Culture, History and Language in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University, Australia.

Product details

• Authors: Adam Broinowski, Adam (Australian National University Broinowski, Dr Adam Broinowski
• Assisted by: Stephen McVeigh (Editor)
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 14.01.2016
• EAN: 9781780935966
• ISBN: 978-1-78093-596-6
• No. of pages: 280
• Series: War, Culture and Society; War, Culture and Society
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Regional and national histories; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; Japan, Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000, HISTORY / Social History, Social & cultural history, HISTORY / Asia / Japan, Later 20th century c 1950 to c 1999, Social and cultural history, Asian History, c 1945 to c 2000 (Post-war period)