Dewey Decimal306.4/0952
Table Of ContentAcknowledgments 1: National-Cultural Phantasms and Modernity's Losses 2: Itineraries of Knowledge: Trans-figuring Japan Travels of the Nation-Culture Discovering "Myself" Exotic Japan The Neo-Japonesque Re: New Japanology 3: Ghastly Insufficiencies: Tono Monogatari and the Origins of Nativist Ethnology Civilization and Its Remainders The Distance between Speech and Writing The Modern Uncanny Undecidable Authorities An Originary Discipline 4: Narrative Returns, Uncanny Topographies The Home Away from Home Museum'd Utopias Memorable Ruins Textual Recursions Reminders of the Archaic 5: Ghostly Epiphanies: Recalling the Dead on Mount Osore Memorialization and Its Others Boundaries of Excess: Markings, Offerings, Garbage Ghosts in the Machine Dividing the Voice Trance Effects: Mourning and Predictions Dialect and Transgression 6: Theatrical Crossings, Capitalist Dreams Low-Budget Kabuki and Its Promises The Grand Show Doubled Crimes, Gendered Travesties Counternarrative and Figurality Powers of Attraction Ephemeral Gifts Afterwords on Repetition and Redemption Bibliography Index
SynopsisJapan today is haunted by the ghosts its spectacular modernity has generated. Deep anxieties about the potential loss of national identity and continuity disturb many in Japan, despite widespread insistence that it has remained culturally intact. In this provocative conjoining of ethnography, history, and cultural criticism, Marilyn Ivy discloses these anxieties--and the attempts to contain them--as she tracks what she calls the vanishing: marginalized events, sites, and cultural practices suspended at moments of impending disappearance. Ivy shows how a fascination with cultural margins accompanied the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state. This fascination culminated in the early twentieth-century establishment of Japanese folklore studies and its attempts to record the spectral, sometimes violent, narratives of those margins. She then traces the obsession with the vanishing through a range of contemporary reconfigurations: efforts by remote communities to promote themselves as nostalgic sites of authenticity, storytelling practices as signs of premodern presence, mass travel campaigns, recallings of the dead by blind mediums, and itinerant, kabuki-inspired populist theater., Japan today is haunted by the ghosts its spectacular modernity has generated. Deep anxieties about the potential loss of national identity and continuity disturb many in Japan, despite widespread insistence that it has remained culturally intact. In this provocative conjoining of ethnography, history, and cultural criticism, Marilyn Ivy discloses these anxieties-and the attempts to contain them-as she tracks what she calls the vanishing: marginalized events, sites, and cultural practices suspended at moments of impending disappearance. Ivy shows how a fascination with cultural margins accompanied the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state. This fascination culminated in the early twentieth-century establishment of Japanese folklore studies and its attempts to record the spectral, sometimes violent, narratives of those margins. She then traces the obsession with the vanishing through a range of contemporary reconfigurations: efforts by remote communities to promote themselves as nostalgic sites of authenticity, storytelling practices as signs of premodern presence, mass travel campaigns, recallings of the dead by blind mediums, and itinerant, kabuki-inspired populist theater.
LC Classification NumberDS830.I89 1995