Uncovering the Red Decade

Session Submission Type: Roundtable Session

Abstract

This roundtable explores the ways that close engagement with the “red decade” (1925-35) in Japan has the potential to transform scholars’ and students’ understanding of 20th and now 21st-century history, politics, and literature. Roundtable participants have worked collaboratively for a decade to retrieve proletarian literature from the Cold War dustbin, then translate selected literary and theoretical works into English for a new century of readers. As Samuel Perry notes, Japan’s diverse and internationally oriented group of proletarian “cultural workers” constituted “a resistance movement” that flourished, if briefly, “in the context of Japan’s advanced capitalist society, its vibrant print culture, and its increasingly militarized empire.” Self-consciously revolutionary, proletarian writers engaged with theorist Kurahara Korehito’s challenge to “use the eyes” of the proletarian vanguard to see the world, a challenge to not only see the world differently, but represent it differently. This roundtable is an opportunity for scholars who specialize in fields across literature, history, and culture to reflect on how their production of a recent anthology of proletarian literature has provocative implications well beyond the red decade. After each panelist speaks for 6-7 minutes, they will engage in discussion with the audience. First, Long will explore the legacy of dissent and the foregrounding of social inequality as key categories in the historiography and pedagogy of student activism down to the Anpo protests of the 1960s. Sherif will consider the dynamic interaction among proletarian texts, visual cultures, and publishing in their own time and again during the Cold War. Bergstrom will draw on the debates on the role of art in society foregrounded in the proletarian movement to consider the constitution of public spheres and the production and consumption of art in our age of political, environmental, and economic crisis both inside and outside Japan. Bowen-Struyk will contrast the problematic of love central to bourgeois literature and framed as universal with the “love question” pursued in proletarian literary texts. Field will discuss the impact of co-editing the proletarian anthology on giving her “eyes” for uncovering the present, most especially, the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011 and the conditions for protest.

Area of Study

• Japan

Session Organizer

• Heather Bowen-Struyk, University of Notre Dame

Chair

• Heather Bowen-Struyk, University of Notre Dame

Discussants

• Jeff E. Long, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania

• Ann Sherif, Oberlin College

• Brian Bergstrom, McGill University

• Heather Bowen-Struyk, University of Notre Dame

• Norma Field, University of Chicago