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Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity

Online ISBN:
9781452947327
Print ISBN:
9780816672851
Publisher:
University of Minnesota Press
Book

Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity

Anne McKnight
Anne McKnight
Assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Culture and the Department of Comparative Literature at University of Southern California
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Published:
2 March 2011
Online ISBN:
9781452947327
Print ISBN:
9780816672851
Publisher:
University of Minnesota Press

Abstract

How do you write yourself into a literature that doesn’t know you exist? This was the conundrum confronted by Nakagami Kenji (1946–1992), who counted himself among the buraku-min, Japan’s largest minority. His answer brought the histories and rhetorical traditions of buraku writing into the high culture of Japanese literature for the first time and helped establish him as the most canonical writer born in postwar Japan. This book shows how the writer’s exploration of buraku led to a unique blend of fiction and ethnography—which amounted to nothing less than a reimagining of modern Japanese literature. The book develops a parallax view of Nakagami’s achievement, allowing us to see him much as he saw himself, as a writer whose accomplishments traversed both buraku literary arts and high literary culture in Japan. As the text considers the ways in which Nakagami and other twentieth-century writers used ethnography to shape Japanese literature, it reveals how ideas about language also imagined a transfigured relation to mainstream culture and politics. This analysis of the resulting “rhetorical activism” lays bare Nakagami’s unique blending of literature and ethnography within the context of twentieth-century ideas about race, ethnicity, and citizenship—in Japan, but also on an international scale.

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