2021 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
| Project/Area Number |
21K00340
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| Research Institution | University of Tsukuba |
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Principal Investigator |
竹谷 悦子 筑波大学, 人文社会系, 教授 (60245933)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2021-04-01 – 2024-03-31
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| Keywords | Occupied Japan / Theodor Seuss Geisel / transnational aeriality |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
Aeriality has emerged as one of the most defining perceptual and cognitive practices of the 20th century. This project explores how aerial power/knowledge was exercised transnationally in occupied Japan (1945-1952), thereby shaping American literary and cultural production. It examines a diverse but select set of what I heuristically call aerial archives of race. The operational definition of this term refers to texts, literary or otherwise, that operate as archiving systems, representing and relating a shift in the aerial imagination and the corollary shifting ground of race that it caused.
During the first year of the project, I examined Theodor Seuss Geisel’s Horton Hears a Who! (1954), a story of a speck of dust floating in the air and its small, unseen residents, inspired by Geisel’s trip to Japan, and considered the relationship between transnational aeriality and occupied Japan that became a vanishing point in American literary history.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.
Reason
This project is part of my book project in progress. Part of a chapter on Langston Hughes is slated for publication in Langston Hughes in Context (Cambridge University Press).
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
I hope to visit the Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford University to examine photographs taken in occupied Japan. I also intend to prepare another chapter.
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| Causes of Carryover |
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, it was not possible to conduct archival research in the United States. I hope to visit archives and libraries such as the Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford University and the Hiroshima City Library holding materials pertinent to the project.
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