Dear All,

Please join us Friday, January 19th at 3PM in CEAS 319 (1155 E. 60th St) as the Art and Politics of East Asia and Mass Culture Workshops are proud to host Brian White, PhD Candidate in East Asian Languages and Civilizations. He will present a draft of his dissertation chapter titled “Asian Aliens: Race and Ethnicity in 1960s Japanese Speculative Fiction.”
Cover for Tsutsui Yasutaka’s 1967 short story “The Vietnam Travel Agency”

Brian’s dissertation chapter is available here.

Please email either Panpan [panpan@uchicago.edu] or Jenisha [jenisha@uchicago.edu] for the password.

Cody Jones, PhD Student in Comparative Literature and Divinity, will serve as the discussant.

Please note the special time and location.

Refreshments will be provided.

We look forward to seeing you this Friday!

Warmly,

Panpan and Jenisha

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Asian Aliens: Race and Ethnicity in 1960s Japanese Speculative Fiction

In this partial dissertation chapter, I take up a 1968 short story by metafiction writer Tsutsui Yasutaka, entitled “Rose-Tinted Rhapsody.” Through a close reading of this text, I discuss the significance of race and ethnicity in considerations of Cold War-era SF (speculative- or science-fiction). This argument is an intervention in the hegemonic scholarly tradition in Japanese popular cultural studies of reading postwar texts within a bilateral system in which the United States is Japan’s only interlocutor and nuclear trauma and hyper-capitalism its only thematic concerns. Instead, I argue for a reading of these texts that is more sensitive to the complex contemporary geopolitical situation, in which a variety of affinities were negotiated, opened up, and closed off.