Professor Akane Kawakami's Inaugural Lecture: Transhuman Tokyo in Millennial Writing and Film
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Clore Management Centre
All capital cities are assemblages made up of the human and nonhuman, where millions of human beings interact daily with complex technological systems and the built environment. Theorists have always been fascinated by this interdependency, and artists, by the ‘life’ that it creates. Millennial Tokyo has been particularly inspirational for an international range of writers and filmmakers who have attempted to represent its everyday existence, and for theorists – from urban studies, environmental humanities and sociology – who have thought about how agency is shared, distributed and passed around between human and nonhuman actants.
In this lecture, I examine two works that engage with the reality of Tokyo as a city of assemblages, showing these interactions at work in two different kinds of space. First, the Tokyo underground, which is an intricate web of human and non-human elements: I describe how the whole entity responded to the sarin gas attack of 1995 through a reading of witness statements from the individuals involved, collected in Haruki Murakami’s Andarguraundo (Underground) (1997), a fascinating overview of how the incident affected the whole city across space and time. Above ground, the hero of Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (2023) is a deeply damaged man whose interactions with his nonhuman environment – the toilets he cleans, the van containing his tools, the trees in the park where he has lunch – are completely integral to his being; it is only as a part of this assemblage that he can survive. Through these case studies I argue that nonhuman components of the city are equal partners of human individuals and communities in enacting the everyday of the enormous ‘living’ organism that is Tokyo, and that the artworks themselves are produced through their interactions.
Biography
Professor Akane Kawakami arrived at Birkbeck in 2006, having held lectureships previously at the Universities of Cambridge and Warwick. She teaches and researches in the field of twentieth–century and contemporary French and Francophone literature. Her interests include travel writing, photography, transcultural writing, and contemporary fiction. She has published widely across these and other areas: her monographs include Patrick Modiano’s Postmodern Fictions (LUP, 2000), Travellers’ Visions: French Encounters with Japan, 1887-2004 (LUP, 2005), Photobiography: Photographic Self-Writing in Proust, Guibert, Ernaux and Macé (Legenda, 2013), Patrick Modiano (LUP, 2015), and Michael Ferrier, Transnational Novelist (LUP, 2023).
The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the Clore foyer.
Contact name: Chris Fray
Tags: