Reconfiguring Marginality: Discourse and Embodiment in 20th-Century Japanese and Chinese Literature and Performance - Sponsored by the AAS Council of Conferences (COC)

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

The papers in this year’s Council of Conferences-sponsored graduate student panel address the notion of “marginality” in terms of discourse and embodiment. Juliana Buritica Alzate’s paper, “Nearer to or Farther from the Idealized Mother: Portrayals of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering by Contemporary Japanese Women Writers” argues that reading the works of Itō Hiromi, Kawakami Mieko, and Kirino Natsuo together highlights a cohesive voice in Japanese women writers’ questioning of deterministic visions of motherhood. In Rae Yan’s “Sickening Narratives of Lu Xun’s ‘Diary of a Madman,’” Yan argues Lu Xun, at the margin of tradition and modernity, not only resists universalization of Western scientific discourse, but specifically draws upon it in order to “pathologize” the “sick man of Asia.” Hangping Xu’s paper “Identity Complex, Political Agency, and Nationalism: Xiao Hong’s Field of Life and Death Revisted,” re-examines Xiao Hong’s 1934 novella in light of long-standing nationalist interpretations. Xu, in turn, critiques the dichotomizing of “female body” vs. “nationalist discourse,” arguing for the necessity to reconsider political agency (including the agency of both author and characters) as a dialectical point between embodiment and discourse. Finally, Stephanie Hohlios examines the Japanese street performance form gaitō kamishibai (“paper drama”), arguing that itinerant kamishibai performers, like the wandering rōnin who inhabit their picture-stories, exist on the margins of society as vagrant outcasts, never fully naturalized to the community proper. For these authors, marginality may be constructed in terms of history, politics, gender, or performance, but it is ultimately discursive and embodied in nature.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing

Session Organizer

• Adam Frank, University of Central Arkansas

Chair

• Adam Frank, University of Central Arkansas

Individual Presentations

• Beyond the Ideal: Depictions of Motherhood by Contemporary Japanese Women Writers - Juliana Buritica Alzate, International Christian University

• The Wandering Hero: Grassroots Democracy and Paper Drama in Postwar Japan - Stephanie M. Hohlios, University of California, Berkeley

• Identity Complex, Political Agency, and Nationalism: Xiao Hong’s Field of Life and Death Revisited - Hangping Xu, Stanford University

• Sickening Narratives of Lu Xun’s Diary of a Madman - Rae X. Yan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Discussant

• Adam Frank, University of Central Arkansas