Results by title

Ozu and the Ethics of Indeterminacy re-examines cinema studies through the work of Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu, employing the multiple methodologies and indeterminacy of Ozu’s films as a model for discussions of cinema’s relationship to the world and the formation of film studies as a discipline. Centering a selection of Ozu films in each chapter, Daisuke Miyao builds a method based on the way films directed by Ozu avoid unitary perspective and allow multiple possibilities of standpoint and spectatorial position, which Miyao calls the ethics of indeterminacy. Analyzing Ozu’s use of cinematography, narrative, and color, Miyao theorizes the indeterminate in film—the seen and unseen, human and nonhuman, domestic and international—to initiate a multi-directional dialogue on the study of cinema that reaches beyond auteurism and culturalism to establish a new basis for disciplinary conversations.

Playing in the Shadows considers the literature engendered by postwar Japanese authors’ robust cultural exchanges with African Americans and African American literature. The Allied Occupation brought an influx of African American soldiers and culture to Japan, which catalyzed the writing of black characters into postwar Japanese literature. This same influx fostered the creation of organizations such as the Kokujin kenkyū no kai (The Japanese Association for Negro Studies) and literary endeavors such as the Kokujin bungaku zenshū (The Complete Anthology of Black Literature). This rich milieu sparked Japanese authors’—Nakagami Kenji and Ōe Kenzaburō are two notable examples—interest in reading, interpreting, critiquing, and, ultimately, incorporating the tropes and techniques of African American literature and jazz performance into their own literary works. Such incorporation leads to literary works that are “black” not by virtue of their representations of black characters, but due to their investment in the possibility of technically and intertextually black Japanese literature. Will Bridges argues that these “fictions of race” provide visions of the way that postwar Japanese authors reimagine the ascription of race to bodies—be they bodies of literature, the body politic, or the human body itself.