Japanese Program, Division of Languages and Literature, and Dean of the College Present

Radioactive Aesthetics:
Reading Radiation in Post-3.11 Literature

In the wake of the Tōhoku Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Disaster, many Japanese intellectuals came to see 2011 as a clear turning point for the country, in terms both of its identity and of its political and economic objectives. Writers and artists, similarly, called for a new ethics of representation adequate to the need to reflect people’s experience of the disaster. Behind this impetus toward change was a widespread reconsideration of the country’s reliance on nuclear power, a debate that brought thousands to the streets to protest the government’s deference to the ‘nuclear village.’

These loud demands for change, however, died down after a few years. The works that came to circulate under the rubric of an emerging “Post-Fukushima Literature” have thus tended almost without fail to emphasize certain aspects of the triple disaster over others. Indeed, far from engaging with the long-lasting legacy of radioactive contamination, many works seem actively to obscure it—to push it to the margins just as they do, in a way that is not at all coincidental, the ethnic and sexual minorities who numbered among the victims of the triple disaster.

In this talk, I will delineate some of the most common tropes characterizing “post-Fukushima” narratives, such as the focus on the authenticity of the accounts and their connection to the perceived epicenter of the disaster. I will then introduce the concept of ‘radioactive aesthetics’—a mode of reading that challenges these tropes. Here, I will focus on the literary work of writer and visual artist Kobayashi Erika, in particular her novella Precious Stones (2016) and her novel Trinity, Trinity, Trinity (2019), both recently translated in English. These texts, I argue, show the potential of a radioactive reading as it engages, on one hand, elements marginalized, or even erased‚ in narratives more closely aligned with official discourses; and as it widens, on the other, the purview of “post-Fukushima literature” to texts that trace the hidden paths and long histories of radiation, and its relationship to human and non-human lives.
 

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For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Moved to Zoom

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