1st Edition

Japanese Poetry and its Publics From Colonial Taiwan to Fukushima

By Dean Anthony Brink Copyright 2018
    200 Pages
    by Routledge

    200 Pages
    by Routledge



     



    This book aims to explore precisely how modern Japanese poetry has remained central to public life in both Japan and its former colony of Taiwan.





    Though classical Japanese poetry has captivated the imagination of Asian studies scholars, little research has been conducted to explore its role in public life as a discourse influential in defining both the modern Japanese empire and contemporary postcolonial negotiations of identity. This book shows how highly visible poetry in regular newspaper columns and blogs have in various historical situations in Japan and colonial Taiwan contested as well as promoted diverse colonial imaginaries. This poetry reflects both contemporary life and traditional poetics with few counterpoints in Western media. Methodologically, this book offers a defense of the public influence of poetry, each chapter enlisting a wide range of social and media theorists from Japan, Europe, and North America to explore specific historical moments in an original recasting of intertextuality as a vital feature of active inter-evental material engagements.





    In this book, rather than recite a standard survey of literary movements and key poets, the approach taken is to examine uses of poetry shown not only to support colonialism and imperialism, emerging objectionable forms of exploitation as well as the destruction of ecologies (including old-growth forests in Taiwan and the Fukushima Disaster), but also to present a medium of resistance, a minor literature for registering protest, forming transnational affiliations, and promoting grass-roots democracy. The book is based on years of research and fieldwork partially in conjunction with the production of a documentary film, Horizons of the Rising Sun: Postcolonial Nostalgia and Politics in the Taiwan Tanka Association Today (2017).

    Introduction: Japanese Poetry and its Publics



    Chapter One: Japanese Imperialism and Poetic Matrices – Conventional and Autopoietic Projections of "Nature," Place, and Labor in Early Colonial Taiwan



    Chapter Two: Transculturation and Extreme Intertextuality—Taiwanese Poets in the New Year’s Day Poetry Pages of Colonial Taiwan



    Chapter Three: Nativist Legacies of Desinicization and Nationalist Sentiment in Poetry During the Second Sino-Japanese War



    Chapter Four: The Long View of Colonial Regimes: The Taiwan Tanka Association’s Poetry of Witness



    Chapter Five: Postcolonial Affiliation after 3.11: Hyperobjects and Inter-evental Entanglement in the Taiwan Tanka Association



    Chapter Six: Poetry Blogs and Posthuman Archives in Postcolonial Taiwan



    Appendix



    Index

    Biography

    Dean Anthony Brink, Associate Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Chiao Tung University