February 10, 2020/ 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM
Bunche 6275
Tokyo in Tashkent: The Afro-Asian Writers Conference and the Problem of Colonial ResponsibilitySeven Japanese writers attended the Afro-Asian Writers Conference held in Tashkent in 1958, the first great cultural event of the era of decolonization and non-alignment. Speeches by the writers and debates afterward exposed fault lines in views of the Japanese empire and Japan's de-imperialization that persist in the historiography of postwar Japan, the Cold War, and the decolonization of Asia. As interest in anticolonial cultural organizations is growing, Tokyo's trip to Tashkent is an opportunity to reconsider the geopolitics of the "Bandung Moment."
About the Speaker
Christopher Hill
writes on the transnational intellectual and cultural history of the nineteenth
and twentieth century. He has published
on the history of nationalist thought and the development of the novel as a world
literary form, and is currently researching postwar Japanese writers' responses
to the decolonization of Asia. His
publications include National History and
the World of Nations: Capital, State, and the Rhetoric of History (Duke,
2008), Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form
(Northwestern University Press, forthcoming 2020), and "Crossed
Geographies: Endō and Fanon in
Lyon" (Representations, 2014).
Download file: 2.10.20-HILL-FLYER-kx-i45.pdf