Our book announcements tend to get buried in the files for some reason, so here’s another belated one:
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How Japan’s most canonical postwar writer brought that country’s largest social minority into the mainstream
NAKAGAMI, JAPAN: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity
By Anne McKnight
Anne McKnight shows how Nakagami Kenji’s exploration of buraku writing led to a unique blend of fiction and ethnography-and a reimagining of modern Japanese literature. McKnight develops a parallax view of Nakagami’s achievement, allowing us to see the writer much as he saw himself, as a writer whose accomplishments traversed both buraku literary arts and high literary culture in Japan.
PRAISE FOR NAKAGAMI, JAPAN:
“Anne McKnight’s proposal that we understand Nakagami’s writings in terms of a ‘parallax vision’ immediately resonates in the mind of anyone familiar with his works: it is an approach that finally allows Nakagami to be Nakagami. We know that we need to get outside the framework of national literary studies, but that is a task easier said than done. McKnight goes a good deal of the way toward showing us what is to be done now in the study of both Japanese literature and minority cultures.” -Michael K. Bourdaghs, University of Chicago
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Anne McKnight is assistant professor of East Asian languages and cultures and comparative literature at the University of Southern California.
For more information, including the table of contents, visit the book’s webpage:
What can I do with a B.A. in Japanese Studies? 