This semester, Center for Japanese Studies will collaborate with the Department of Film & Media to host a multi-part series on "Japanese Media 1970s and Beyond," organized and moderated by Miryam Sas in conjunction with her seminar on Japanese Cinema, Visual Cultures and Media Theory.
Scholarship on postwar Japan has often focused either on the politicized protest-adjacent culture of the 1960s, or on the “postmodern” consumerism of the 1980s bubble economy and its aftermath. The 1970s has consequently most frequently been narrated as a transitional period that marks the defeat of resistance against capitalism and the nation-state. However, such a view overlooks the sheer diversity of alternative and experimental media practices in Japan’s 1970s. In this series, speakers share their research on how different media practitioners and theorists sought to reconfigure the increasingly reified categories of technology and sociality. Ranging across a variety of media such as photography, film, television, and video, this series seeks to open up Japan’s 1970s as a period of rich media theory and practice, in which the question of redefining mediation was itself at stake, and to reconsider the legacies of these interventions today.
See the Film & Media events calendar for details on each date. The events include:
Part 1: Photography and Media Theory (4PM Feb 27, Zoom registration) with Junnan Chen (NYU Shanghai), “Taki Kōji: Image of the World,” and Elise Voyau (Kanagawa University) “Photography across Media: Print, Text, and Exhibition in 1970s Japan”
Part 2: Cinema and Media Theory (4PM, March 5, 226 Dwinelle): Julia Alekseyevna, University of Pennsylvania, "Matsumoto Toshio’s Antifascist Queer Becomings”
Bonus: ("and Beyond") (4PM, March 18, 370 Dwinelle): Namiko Kunimoto, Ohio State University, "Imperial Animations in Japan's Art Historical Present"
Part 3: Television and Media Theory (4PM, April 9, 226 Dwinelle): Patrick Chimenti, (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) “You Are Nothing More Than a ‘Presence’: Ethnography, Performative Remediation, and the Making of Place in Konno Tsutomu’s Television Documentaries”
Part 4: Video and Media Theory (4PM, 226 Dwinelle, April 16), Nina Horisaki-Christens, independent curator, "Against Japanese Video: Process, Discourse, and Translation in 1970s Tokyo." (Further details will be posted on CJS website)
We hope to see you there! Thanks to Kumi Sawada Hadler, Tessa Machida, Wei Lin Tan and Junko Habu for help with coordination and sponsorship.