Black Markets and the Ruins of Empire in Postwar Tokyo

Lecture Information:
As both abstract and concrete space, the black markets (yami ichi) played a central role in the development of postwar Tokyo, while helping to shape the literary and popular imagination of the city. This lecture examines the literary representation of the black markets, focusing on their role as mediating spaces between the collapse of empire and the reconstruction of the postwar nation-state.

Lecturer Information:
Seiji M. Lippit teaches Japanese literature and culture at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include modernism, mass culture, urban space, and minority literature, as well as representations of decolonization, occupation, and the transformation of national consciousness in postwar Japan. His publications include Topographies of Japanese Modernism (Columbia UP, 2002), an examination of modernist fiction in the 1920s and 30s, and the edited volume The Essential Akutagawa (Marsilio, 1999), an anthology of writings by the celebrated writer Akutagawa Ryûnosuke. Professor Lippit is currently working on a book project on literature of the immediate postwar period that focuses on representations of urban space in the wake of empire’s collapse.