Unlearning Asia: The Minor Pedagogies of Nakahira Takuma’s Okinawa and Ishimure Michiko’s Minamata

Abstract:

This talk explores Nakahira Takuma’s photography and writings on Okinawa following its “reversion” to Japanese rule in 1972 together with Ishimure Michiko’s literary reclamation of Minamata’s multi-layered lifeworlds caught in the wake of the Minamata mercury poisoning disaster in the novel Story of the Sea of Camellias. Attending to each work’s heightened sensitivities to the entanglements among human and more-than-human worlds, I explore their contributions to the pursuit of “minor pedagogies” that attenuate our habituated ways of approaching Asia based upon bounded, taxonomic, and extractive outlooks. I discuss the ways such pedagogies serve as vital pathways for unlearning the given epistemological infrastructures that inform our collective study of Asia shaped by the unsettled legacies of imperialism and the cold war. 

Bio:

Franz Prichard is Associate Professor in the department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University. His interdisciplinary research and teaching explore the literature, environmental thought, and visual media of contemporary Japan. In his first book, Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan (Columbia University Press, 2019) he explored the ways Japanese writers, artists, and critics reinvented their work in response to Japan’s intensive urbanization. His current research develops transcultural and ecocritical approaches to the study of contemporary Japanese literature and visual media. Weaving together the perspectives of writers, critics, photographers, and artists, among others, this research elaborates ecocritical approaches with a rigorously planetary perspective in pursuit of collaborative ways of knowing the generative relations among humans, animals, material objects, and shared worlds.