ANXIOUS CONSUMPTION: THE FANTASTIC, AFFECT, AND TRANSNATIONAL CULTURAL FLOWS IN 1970s-1990s JAPAN

Abstract

This dissertation, Anxious Consumption: The Fantastic, Affect, and Transnational Cultural Flows in 1970s-1990s Japan, traces an alternate genealogy of consumption in 1970s-1990s Japan through reading the fantastic in literary and media texts. My use of the term “fantastic” broadly conceives of the category beyond its common limitation to the supernatural and otherworldly, to indicating a form of pervasive structural anxiety behind consumer culture’s celebratory façade of material prosperity and images of economic “progress." Rather than a specific subject position of any particular individual or group, I approach the fantastic as a liminal affective force that is fluid and constantly in-motion, capable of enveloping, implicating, and bypassing various bodies it comes across, while holding the power to disrupt ideological borders, the confines of static forms of identities, and categories such as gender, race, class, and nationality. Emerging at a historical moment characterized as a de-politicized plunge into self-indulgent celebrations of consumerism, the fantastic complicates this narrative through its power to unveil the workings of otherwise seamless immaterial forces of control within a consumerist landscape. Through its power to reveal and de-familiarize what has been naturalized, the fantastic surfaces as an indication of unease—from expressing unspoken anxiety experienced on the affective register, to revealing nationalistic agendas of the nation state. In the texts that I examine, the fantastic is represented by expressions of anxiety manifesting as the abject, Otherness, and the monstrous feminine— liminal figures that, I argue, reveal the psychological structure underlying cultural production in 1970s-1990s Japan. Through reading across various media forms—fiction, literary- nonfiction texts, newspaper reportage, manga, magazines, and protest leaflets—I trace fantastic’s mobilizing force in de-stabilizing dominant and homogenizing frameworks through which consumption in postwar Japan has been narrated. Chapters one and two focus on the affective dimensions of consumption. These chapters look at the on-going negotiation between biopolitical capture and liberatory potentials within consumer culture in an urban landscape. Chapters three and four look at the material dimensions of consumption, focusing on the mapping of consumption onto iterations of space and notions of mobility—across boundaries of nation, race, and species. These chapters examine how marginalized bodies excluded from national visions of prosperity and development make visible limitations of nation states, or human-centric modes of sensing.