Residual Futures - The Urban Ecologies of Literary Visual Media of 1960s 1970s Japan

List of contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Prelude to the Traffic War: Infrastructural Aesthetics of the Cold War
2. Disappearance: Topological Visuality in Abe Kōbō’s Urban Literature
3. Landscape Vocabularies: For a Language to Comeand the Geopolitics of Reading
4. An Illustrated Dictionary of Urban Overflows
5. Photography as Threshold and Pathway After Reversion
6. Residual Futures
Notes
Index

About the author

Franz Prichard is assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University.

Summary

In the postwar years, an eruption of urbanization took place across Japan, from its historical central cities to the outer reaches of the archipelago. During the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese literary and visual media took a deep interest in cities and their problems, and what this rapid change meant for the country. In Residual Futures, Franz Prichard offers a pathbreaking analysis of the works wrought from this intensive urbanization, mapping the ways in which Japanese filmmakers, writers, photographers, and other artists came to grips with the entwined ecologies of a drastic transformation.

Residual Futures examines crucial works of documentary film, fiction, and photography that interrogated Japan’s urbanization and integration into the U.S.-dominated geopolitical system. Prichard discusses documentary filmmaker Tsuchimoto Noriaki’s portrait of the urban “traffic war” and the remaking of Tokyo for the 1964 Olympics, novelist Abe Kōbō’s depictions of infrastructure and urban sociality, and the radical notions of landscape that emerge from the critical and photographic work of Nakahira Takuma. His careful readings reveal the shifting relationships among urban materialities and subjectivities and the ecological, political, and aesthetic vocabularies of urban change. A novel cultural history of critical urban discourse in Japan, Residual Futures brings an interdisciplinary approach to Japanese literary and visual media studies. It provides a vital new perspective on the infrastructural aesthetics and entangled urban and media conditions of the global Cold War.

Additional text

His book draws attention to a corpus of works from one of Japan's most formative eras and is an excellent addition to the current literature.

Product details

• Authors: Franz Prichard
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.04.2019
• EAN: 9780231191302
• ISBN: 978-0-231-19130-2
• No. of pages: 280
• Series: Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University; Studies of the Weatherhead Eas; Studies of the Weatherhead Eas; Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Photography, film, video, TV; Japan, Japanese, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, LITERARY CRITICISM / Asian / Japanese, Documentary films, c 1960 to c 1970, PERFORMING ARTS / Film / History & Criticism, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, c 1970 to c 1979, c 1960 to c 1969, Urban communities, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, c 1970 to c 1980, Photographic reportage, Photojournalism and documentary photography, Film; Japanese literary criticism; history