| My dissertation examines the ways in which Japanese and American fiction and film mobilize a political resistance to the nationalistic ideologies that emerge after the attacks against Hiroshima and on 9/11. Japan shored up their nationalism even as their military became constitutionally limited, and America vowed revenge on the terrorists responsible even as the capriciousness of definitions of "terrorism" became obvious. While early novels such as Black Rain and The Writing on the Wall respond to these atrocities by focusing resistance against sloganeering and the specific ideologies of nations, later novels like Oda's Hiroshima and DeLillo's Falling Man broaden their perspective into an interrogation of transnational identities and dogmas to seek out ways for recovery beyond reactionary violence. Similarly, Japan and the U.S. were in a state of political denial after their respective atrocities; however, whereas I Live in Fear challenges the sanity of the accepted views of nuclear destruction, Reign Over Me only naturalizes the denial through a dependence on American exceptionalism. Finally, films such as Kairo and Cloverfield employ genre-specific allegories to comment more generally on their country's cultural memory, yet only Kairo accepts the material decline of Japan as necessary to begin a new world order; Cloverfield is ambivalent about its envisioning of an apocalyptic future. Together these texts form a thematic corpus through which to confront the horrors of 9/11 and Hiroshima that are elided, and even abused, by their respective nations. |
