Discourses of the vanishing : modernity, phantasm, Japan

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Discourses of the vanishing : modernity, phantasm, Japan

Marilyn Ivy

University of Chicago Press, 1995

  • : pbk

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. 249-260) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Volume

ISBN 9780226388328

Description

Deep anxieties about the potential loss of national identity and continuity disturb many in Japan, despite widespread insistence that it has remained culturally intact. In this conjoining of ethnography, history and cultural criticism, Marilyn Ivy discloses these anxieties, as she tracks what she calls the vanishing: marginalized events, sites and cultural practices suspended at moments of impending disappearance. Ivy shows how a fascination with cultural margins accompanied the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state. This fascination culminated in the early 20th-century establishment of Japanese folklore studies and its attempts to record the spectral, sometimes violent, narratives of those margins. She then traces the obsession with the vanishing through a range of contemporary reconfigurations: efforts by remote communities to promote themselves as nostalgic sites of authenticity, storytelling practices as signs of pre-modern presence, mass travel campaigns, recallings of the dead by blind mediums, and itinerant, kabuki-inspired populist theatre.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 1: National-Cultural Phantasms and Modernity's Losses 2: Itineraries of Knowledge: Trans-figuring Japan Travels of the Nation-Culture Discovering "Myself" Exotic Japan The Neo-Japonesque Re: New Japanology 3: Ghastly Insufficiencies: Tono Monogatari and the Origins of Nativist Ethnology Civilization and Its Remainders The Distance between Speech and Writing The Modern Uncanny Undecidable Authorities An Originary Discipline 4: Narrative Returns, Uncanny Topographies The Home Away from Home Museum'd Utopias Memorable Ruins Textual Recursions Reminders of the Archaic 5: Ghostly Epiphanies: Recalling the Dead on Mount Osore Memorialization and Its Others Boundaries of Excess: Markings, Offerings, Garbage Ghosts in the Machine Dividing the Voice Trance Effects: Mourning and Predictions Dialect and Transgression 6: Theatrical Crossings, Capitalist Dreams Low-Budget Kabuki and Its Promises The Grand Show Doubled Crimes, Gendered Travesties Counternarrative and Figurality Powers of Attraction Ephemeral Gifts Afterwords on Repetition and Redemption Bibliography Index
Volume

: pbk ISBN 9780226388335

Description

Deep anxieties about the potential loss of national identity and continuity disturb many in Japan, despite widespread insistence that it has remained culturally intact. In this conjoining of ethnography, history and cultural criticism, Marilyn Ivy discloses these anxieties, as she tracks what she calls the vanishing: marginalized events, sites and cultural practices suspended at moments of impending disappearance. Ivy shows how a fascination with cultural margins accompanied the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state. This fascination culminated in the early 20th-century establishment of Japanese folklore studies and its attempts to record the spectral, sometimes violent, narratives of those margins. She then traces the obsession with the vanishing through a range of contemporary reconfigurations: efforts by remote communities to promote themselves as nostalgic sites of authenticity, storytelling practices as signs of pre-modern presence, mass travel campaigns, recallings of the dead by blind mediums, and itinerant, kabuki-inspired populist theatre.

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