He investigates how nature, in manifestations ranging from infectious disease to nonhuman animals, has imposed its way onto the human past, as well as how humans have sliced, burned, extracted and engineered their needs and desires onto Earth and its living organisms. His books explore how humans have altered the environment, or have been altered by the environment, across both historical time and geographic space. ![]() Walker received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013 for his project, “The Slow Dying: Asbestos and the Unmaking of the Modern World.” He studies environmental history, the history of human health, and the history of science. The free lecture will take place at the Art Building Auditorium on Tuesday, March 11, at 6 p.m. Walker is coming to the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa to give a public lecture titled “An Environmental History of Terrorism: 9/11, World Trade Center Dust, and the Global Nature of New York’s Toxic Bodies.” Offering numerous full-color illustrations of previously unpublished art and photographs, as well as period manga, The Stakes of Exposure shows how contention over Japan’s new democracy was expressed, disavowed, and reimagined through representations of the gendered body.Dr. ![]() Through a close examination of their paintings, illustrations, and assemblage and performance art, Namiko Kunimoto reveals that, despite dissimilar aesthetic approaches and divergent political interests, Japanese postwar artists were invested in the entangled issues of gender and nationhood that were redefining Japan and its role in the world. Through such pivotal postwar episodes as the Minamata Disaster, The Lucky Dragon Incident, the budding anti-nuclear movement, and the ANPO protests of the 1960s, The Stakes of Exposure examines a wide range of issues addressed by the period’s prominent artists, including Tanaka Atsuko and Shiraga Kazuo (key members of the Gutai Art Association), Katsura Yuki, and Nakamura Hiroshi. The Stakes of Exposure fills this gap and explores art, visual culture, and politics in postwar Japan from the 1950s to the 1970s, paying special attention to how anxiety and confusion surrounding Japan’s new democracy manifested in representations of gender and nationhood in modern art. The Stakes of Exposure Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art Namiko Kunimoto The first major English-language study of some of Japan’s most important postwar artists How would artistic practice contribute to political change in post-World War II Japan? How could artists negotiate the imbalanced global dynamics of the art world and also maintain a sense of aesthetic and political authenticity? While the contemporary art world has recently come to embrace some of Japan’s most daring postwar artists, the interplay of art and politics remain poorly understood in the Americas and Europe. Is it possible to reimagine and reclaim industrial wreckage as sites of pleasure and recreation? Do these regenerated sites of industrial destruction promote the common good or further victimize the individuals and communities destroyed in the name of progress? This paper will show how Ishimure and King discuss the possibility of hope and renewal through the tourist industry, but will also question the efficacy of “dark tourism.” Is it possible to balance an ethics of care and respect for those whose lives have been destroyed by industrial contamination with the need of those who remain to make a living through tourism? This paper will explore the fictional possibility offered by King alongside the actual recovery and tourist industry generated in the aftermath of the Minamata poisoning and subsequent clean up efforts. ![]() Environmental activists, proponents of industrial progress, individuals in the affected communities, and novelists Michiko Ishimure and Thomas King discuss and weigh the possibilities of economic and material progress against the problems of environmental degradation and industrial contamination leading to disease and death for humans and ecosystems. ![]() Canada and Japan share a history of industrial contamination that has resulted in mercury poisoning the inhabitants of both Minamata, Japan and the Indigenous community of Grassy Narrows, Ontario have suffered from what would come to be known as Minamata disease.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |