Dean Anthony Brink - Japanese Poetry and Its Publics: From Colonial Taiwan to Fukushima

This book aims to explore precisely how modern Japanese poetry has remained central to public life in both Japan and its former colony of Taiwan.

Though classical Japanese poetry has captivated the imagination of Asian studies scholars, little research has been conducted to explore its role in public life as a discourse influential in defining both the modern Japanese empire and contemporary postcolonial negotiations of identity. This book shows how highly visible poetry in regular newspaper columns and blogs have in various historical situations in Japan and Taiwan contested as well as promoted diverse colonial imaginaries. This poetry reflects both contemporary life and traditional poetics with few counterpoints in Western media. Methodologically, this book offers a defense of the public influence of poetry, each chapter enlisting a wide range of social and media theorists from Japan, Europe, and North America to explore specific historical moments in an original recasting of intertextuality as a vital feature of active inter-evental material engagements.

In this book, rather than recite a standard survey of literary movements and key poets, the approach taken is to examine uses of poetry shown not only to support colonialism and imperialism, emerging objectionable forms of exploitation as well as the destruction of ecologies (including old-growth forests in Taiwan and the Fukushima Disaster), but also to present a medium of resistance, a minor literature for registering protest, forming transnational affiliations, and promoting grass-roots democracy. The book is based on years of research and fieldwork partially in conjunction with the production of a documentary film, Horizons of the Rising Sun: Postcolonial Nostalgia and Politics in the Taiwan Tanka Association Today.

Dean Anthony Brink, Associate Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Chiao Tung University.

Postcolonial Politics

Edited by Pal Ahluwalia

University of South Australia

Michael Dutton, Goldsmiths

University of London

Leela Gandhi

University of Chicago

Sanjay Seth, Goldsmiths

University of London

For a full list of titles please see:

https://www.routledge.com/Postcolonial-Politics/book-series/PP

Postcolonial Politics is a series that publishes books that lie at the intersection of politics and postcolonial theory. That point of intersection once barely existed; its recent emergence is enabled, first, because a new form of politics is beginning to make its appearance. Intellectual concerns that began life as a (yet unnamed) set of theoretical interventions from scholars largely working within the New Humanities have now begun to migrate into the realm of politics. The result is politics with a difference, with a concern for the everyday, the ephemeral, the serendipitous and the unworldly. Second, postcolonial theory has raised a new set of concerns in relation to understandings of the non-West. At first these concerns and these questions found their home in literary studies, but they were also, always, political. Edward Saids binary of Europe and its other introduced us to a style of thought that was as much political as it was cultural as much about the politics of knowledge as the production of knowledge, and as much about life on the street as about a philosophy of being, A new, broader and more reflexive understanding of politics, and a new style of thinking about the non-Western world, make it possible to think politics through postcolonial theory, and to do postcolonial theory in a fashion which picks up on its political implications.

Postcolonial Politics attempts to pick up on these myriad trails and disruptive practices. The series aims to help us read culture politically, read difference concretely, and to problematise our ideas of the modern, the rational and the scientific by working at the margins of a knowledge system that is still logocentric and Eurocentric. This is where a postcolonial politics hopes to offer new and fresh visions of both the postcolonial and the political.

Subseries: Writing Past Colonialism

The Institute of Postcolonial Studies (IPCS)

Edited by Phillip Darby

University of Melbourne

Writing Past Colonialism is the signature series of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, based in Melbourne, Australia. By postcolonialism we understand modes of writing and artistic production that critically engage with the ideological legacy and continuing practices of colonialism, and provoke debate about the processes of globalisation. The series is committed to publishing works that break fresh ground in postcolonial studies and seek to make a difference both in the academy and outside it. By way of illustration, our schedule includes books that address:

• grounded issues such as nature and the environment, activist politics and indigenous peoples struggles

• cultural writing that pays attention to the politics of literary forms

• experimental approaches that produce new postcolonial imaginaries by bringing together different forms of documentation or combinations of theory, performance and practice

6 Reconciliation and Pedagogy

Edited by Pal Ahluwalia, Stephen Atkinson, Peter Bishop, Pam Christie, Robert Hattam and Julie Matthews

7 From International Relations to Relations International (IPCS)

Postcolonial Essays

Phillip Darby

8 Gender, Orientalism, and the War on Terror

Representation, Discourse, and Intervention in Global Politics

Maryam Khalid

9 Multicultural politics of recognition and postcolonial citizenship

Rethinking the nation

Rachel Busbridge

10 Japanese Poetry and Its Publics

From Colonial Taiwan to Fukushima

Dean Anthony Brink

First published 2018

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2018 Dean Anthony Brink

The right of Dean Anthony Brink to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Names: Brink, Dean Anthony, author.

Title: Japanese poetry and Its publics: from colonial Taiwan to Fukushima / Dean Anthony Brink.

Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. | Series: Postcolonial politics; 10 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017026358

Subjects: LCSH: Japanese poetryHistory and criticism. | Literature and societyJapan. | Public artJapan. | Mass media and literatureJapan. | National characteristics, Japanese, in literature.