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Cornyetz, Nina.
Amorphous Identities, Disavowed History: Shimada Masahiko and National Subjectivity
positions: east asia cultures critique - Volume 9, Number 3, Winter 2001, pp. 585-609
Duke University Press
positions: east asia cultures critique 9.3 (2001) 585-609 Amorphous Identities, Disavowed History: Shimada
Masahiko and National Subjectivity Nina Cornyetz "I am my own,
independent (hitori no) Tower of Babel," proclaims Akuma Kazuhito, the
protagonist of Shimada Masahiko's (b. 1961) Boku wa mozoningen [I am an
automaton] (1986). This essay reads a sampling of Shimada's narratives
written between 1985 and 1989 as a set of discursive forays into
dominant modern Japanese models of individual and national
subjectivity, forays that unsettle the practice of marshaling Japanese
literature to complicity with those cultural models. His characters
persistently inhabit the interstices of identifying categories,
bartering their erotic bodies in the contemporary global market
economy. These 1980s texts are liberally peppered with postcolonial and
postmodern jargon and concepts, such as that of in-betweenness. Because
of these and other attributes U.S. Japanologists frequently designate
(and dismiss) Shimada as a "postmodern writer." I want here to rethink
how these postmodern traits signify -- as not mere reproduction of but as
politically informed commentary -- in these 1980s texts.
Shimada's texts are deeply self-reflexive, intellectual exercises on
contemporary theoretical issues. Hence postmodern signifiers
(fragmentation, pastiche, polymorphous perversity, and so on) that
appear in his texts are, rather than simply "natural" (nonreflexive)
occurrences,...
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