Speaker
Description
Deleuze and Guattari's "nomadology" has been subject to withering criticism on the grounds that it constitutes a form of primitivism. In this paper, I explore "another" set of nomadologies that arose in postwar Japan, independent of Western critical theory, at a time of infrastructural transformation. Focusing on the late-1960s encounter between Hirosue Tamotsu, a scholar of "itinerancy (yugyō)" in medieval and early modern Japanese literature, and Kara Jūrō, founder of the "Itinerant Troupe" (Yugyō Ichiza—better known as the Situation Theater), I argue that conditions in postwar Japan allowed for a discourse of nomadism that had more nuance and higher political stakes than the one surrounding Deleuze and Guattari's nomadology. This was partially because it emerged within the Japanese critique of Western modernity, an intellectual tradition that provided some inoculation against primitivism. But it also represents an important stage in debates that took place after the failure of protests against the 1960 renewal of the United States-Japan Security Treaty, which sapped the left of confidence in its ability to create an "image of the people." While many intellectuals responded to this development by idealizing the "autochthonous (dochaku)"—a vision of indigeneity as static rootedness—Hirosue and Kara posited itinerant performers as major protagonists of Japanese cultural history, precursors to the intelligentsia and the anarchic counterculture. At the same time, they remained vigilant against romanticism, repeatedly reformulating their understanding of itinerancy as they came to terms with the rapid urbanization unfolding around them. Taken together with filmmakers and writers of the period who pursued primitivism in an ironic mode, these two thinkers provide a useful case study in the abstraction of mobility metaphors from historically specific realities.
Biography
Andrew Kahn is a PhD student in Japanese film and media in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University, under Takuya Tsunoda. His interdisciplinary research seeks to understand how concepts of “indigeneity” functioned to define nation and self in discourses of the 1960s and 1970s. For his M.A. thesis project, Kahn situated Imamura Shōhei’s filmmaking practice in the 1960s within contemporary discussions about autochthony (dochaku). Before entering graduate school, he worked as a journalist at Slate, programming web interactives and writing on culture, and performed sketch comedy in New York City.
