Finding the Rainbow World: Transnational Queer Networks and Literary Translation in Cold War Japan Patrick Carland

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Carland, Patrick, author.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania. East Asian Languages and Civilizations., degree granting institution.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

0305.

0342.

0492.

Local Subjects:

0305.

0342.

0492.

Physical Description:

1 electronic resource (296 pages)

Contained In:

Dissertations Abstracts International 87-07A

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, 2025

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This dissertation analyzes the mutually constitutive relationship between transnational queer subcultures and networks of literary translation in Japan from the 1940s to the 1970s. In contrast to much of the English-speaking world, post-World War II Japan was relatively tolerant towards sexual minorities, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s, a period that coincided with a renaissance in the global circulation of Japanese art and literature in translation. Utilizing methodologies drawn from feminist studies, queer studies, and translation studies, this dissertation shows how Japan's relative tolerance to same-sex sexuality after World War II allowed it to emerge as a transnational hub of queer artistic and literary exchange, conditions that created a "boom" of Japanese literature, art, and culture in translation by the early 1950s. It considers overlapping networks of queer-male writers, translators, publishers, and other actors involved in both the postwar Japanese literary boom and in nascent Japanese gay subcultures. It introduces the concept of affective maneuverability as a way of reconsidering the relationship between discrete historical conditions and queer literary production, in particular literary translation. Queer translators, attracted to more tolerant literary cultures for the affective maneuvering space they offer, utilize the texts of foreign literary cultures to intervene in the gender and sexual politics of their own intellectual zeitgeist. Focusing on the specific nexus of queer Japanese writers and English-speaking translators in early postwar Japan, this dissertation shows how queer translators utilized Japanese literary texts to resist heteronormative conventions in their own home cultures, reinterpreting and deploying those texts to respond to their own lived conditions. It offers a new approach to literary history by emphasizing the dynamic and generative role that queer translation communities can play in reshaping translingual literary canons and the dynamics of cross-cultural interaction at key historical moments

Notes:

Advisors: Kano, Ayako Committee members: Chance, Linda H.; Katz, Jonathan David; Vincent, J. Keith

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 87-07, Section: A.

Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 2025

Vendor supplied data

Local Notes:

School code: 0175

ISBN:

9798276007083

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license