The Anxiety of Ambiguity

Ōe's Man'en gannen no futtobōru is a powerful national allegory which affords serious meditation on the difficulties and perils of translating and transcribing the desires for collectivity and national identity in modernity. This essay analyzes the novel's attempt to weave the marginalized indigenous and the hegemonic Western into a ‘unique’ Japanese national identity. The narrative resolution of the identity crisisreveals a reinscription of exclusionary racial conceptualizations and elision of Japan's history of capitalist exploitation both within and outside of its national boundaries

Aesthetics · Allegory · Ambiguity · Art · Art history · Hegemony · Identity (music · Indigenous · Linguistics · Literature · Modernity · Narrative · National identity · Political science · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy