UCLA

My dissertation investigates dissent in the aftermath of war through a study of the Japanesepoetry group, “The Waste Land” (Arechi). With their group’s first iteration interrupted by censorship and military conscription during World War II, the surviving members reformed the group in 1947 to offer poetry and prose to address the nearly inexpressible experiences of wartime domination and horror to consider postwar survival and possibilities. Even as Emperor Hirohito exhorted the Japanese people to refrain from “any outburst of emotion that may engender needless complications”, the Arechi group asserted the essential role of writing and the responsibility to face and articulate their experiences in order to make a different present possible. In contrast with much of the scholarship on the early postwar focused on the institutional ruptures of the allied occupation, my cultural history and its attention to works of literature, poetry, iii and philosophy illuminates the ways that cultural producers struggled against the persistence of wartime forms of thought, culture, and ideology, and against their remobilization within the new state and the nascent Cold War. Informed by an interdisciplinary engagement with history, literature, critical theory, post-colonial theory, gender studies, and psychoanalysis, my study situates this work within a global transwar moment and its overlapping histories. The authors of Arechi refused demands for hasty consensus and renormalization. Their work confronted persisting forms of jingoism in new guises, while struggling to find words adequate to memories and experiences in the face of state pressures to forget. It thus presents a window into a world of dissent, transwar cultural and political struggles, and of the role of aesthetics and cultural production in historical transformation Each chapter of my dissertation follows a core member’s broader textual itinerary to consider the global cultural practice that informed his work. I historically analyze and interpret their writings to build a diverse yet linked group perspective on their moment and its stakes. Thus the dissertation frames Arechi poetry and prose as a complex form of historical evidence, one which offers a new lens onto Japan’s intellectual and cultural production during the 1940s and 1950s.