Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan
    Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan
    Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan
    Ebook272 pages6 hours

    Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan

    By Marilyn Ivy

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Japan today is haunted by the ghosts its spectacular modernity has generated. Deep anxieties about the potential loss of national identity and continuity disturb many in Japan, despite widespread insistence that it has remained culturally intact. In this provocative conjoining of ethnography, history, and cultural criticism, Marilyn Ivy discloses these anxieties—and the attempts to contain them—as she tracks what she calls the vanishing: marginalized events, sites, and cultural practices suspended at moments of impending disappearance.

    Ivy shows how a fascination with cultural margins accompanied the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state. This fascination culminated in the early twentieth-century establishment of Japanese folklore studies and its attempts to record the spectral, sometimes violent, narratives of those margins. She then traces the obsession with the vanishing through a range of contemporary reconfigurations: efforts by remote communities to promote themselves as nostalgic sites of authenticity, storytelling practices as signs of premodern presence, mass travel campaigns, recallings of the dead by blind mediums, and itinerant, kabuki-inspired populist theater.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateFeb 15, 2010
    ISBN9780226388342
    Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan

    Related to Discourses of the Vanishing

    Related ebooks

    Social Science For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Where the Sun Never Set

      Mar 5, 2018

      Where the Sun Never Set
      3 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Jul 15, 2021

      Reviews
      6 min read

    • Article

      Hopeful Interruptions

      Jan 5, 2024

      Hopeful Interruptions
      4 min read

    • Article

      Kanishk Tharoor on Writing Outside of Western Traditions

      Mar 16, 2017

      For years I knew Kanishk Tharoor primarily as the author of thoughtful essays about history, in the broadest sense: not just what happened in the past but also how humans have explored the past, made sense of the past, contested the past. So when I s

      6 min read

    • Article

      Brave And Barmy New Worlds

      Jun 24, 2021

      Brave And Barmy New Worlds
      4 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Mar 15, 2020

      I am fascinated by Erika DeFreitas’s encounters with Jeanne Duval’s spectre in arriver avant moi devant moi. How to approach Duval at all, when she is largely canonized as Baudelaire’s “Black mistress”? She was also a dancer, an actor and, by way of

      5 min read

    • Article

      Chronicles From The Land Of The Happiest People On Earth Review – Nigeria Unmasked

      Oct 14, 2021

      Wole Soyinka won the Nobel prize for literature in 1986, the first black person to win the award. He is perhaps the most versatile of African writers, equally at home in all genres; his dramatic masterpieces, such as Kongi’s Harvest and Death and the

      3 min read

    • Article

      Twelve Ways to Resurrect the Dead, Which Is to Say: To Write

      Dec 14, 2022

      1. The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day (Chronicle Books, 2015) translated by Ogden Goelet, Raymond Faulkner, Carol A. R. Andrews, J. Daniel Gunther, James Wasserman. On not dying a second time. Nor losing your heart in the g

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Martha Anne Toll

      Dec 23, 2020

      The drama! The agony! The misogyny! The biting social commentary! The pathos! The post A Year in Reading: Martha Anne Toll appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Diving Deep

      May 8, 2017

      Serial immersionist TED CONOVER on the connections between anthropology and journalism; knowing when to resist digression; and the importance of writing “across the aisle.” TED CONOVER has spent his entire career delving into different cultural world

      18 min read

    • Article

      Best Of Art 20 Years

      Aug 7, 2019

      Best Of Art 20 Years
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Dangerous Quest for Identity

      Jan 21, 2023

      The Dangerous Quest for Identity
      5 min read

    • Article

      Folk Tales In The Modern Era

      Jun 8, 2020

      Today, as most people’s lives revolve around technology, folk tales have long since fallen out of fashion, as if a remnant of a past world long forgotten. We live in an age of science and reason where oral traditions that once helped make sense of li

      1 min read

    • Article

      Cutting To The Core

      Sep 1, 2020

      Cutting To The Core
      5 min read

    • Article

      Rethinking Recreation

      Sep 15, 2022

      What are the boundaries between work and play? How do we spend our leisure time? What details of our past do we weave into the things we make? This issue showcases some of these questions and reminds us that our solitary and collective pursuits matte

      1 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Discourses of the Vanishing

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Discourses of the Vanishing - Marilyn Ivy

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1