Northrop Frye Centre Lecture | Brown Study
Where: Northrop Frye Centre (VC 102)
About this Event: By the end of the Cold War, Japanese imperialism re-emerges as a form and vehicle in minoritarian arts and letters. Its reappearance in the neoliberal moment produces a re-subjectification of the minoritarian figure while also structuring the turn toward subjectless discourse in critical ethnic studies. In other words, Japan is situated within the political unconscious that shapes the epistemic foundations of subjecthood and subjectlessness. Kukiela argues that minoritarian desires for a return to third-world politics since the end of the Cold War are upended by neoliberal identity formation via revenant Japanese imperialism, describing this revenant as an “honorary brown” figure.
This talk aims to theorize the “honorary brown” figure through “brown study.” Brown study brings together the study of neoliberal subjecthood and minoritarian subjectless discourse toward a sense of brown, following José Esteban Muñoz, as an epistemological site of racial relationality against and beyond American imperialism by sustaining the form and vehicle of Japanese imperialism. Kukiela situates in constellation theories of subjectlessness via Kandice Chuh, Fred Moten and Muñoz, the events of Vincent Chin’s murder in 1982 and Rodney King’s beating in 1991 and the publication of Ishmael Reed’s 1993 campus novel Japanese by Spring. These case studies for brown study illuminate the creation of neoliberal subjectification and subjectlessness, which Kukiela contends is haunted by Japanese empire.
About the Speaker: Lilika Ioki Kukiela is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Toronto in collaboration with the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. Lilika researches comparative racialization and comparative empires between the United States and Japan. Their dissertation examines the intersection of American Orientalism and ethnic American espousal of Japanese imperial legacies in the late twentieth century. She analyzes novels, documentaries, Japanese and American anime and more. Their research is informed by Asian American literary and cultural studies, the study of global Asias and critical ethnic studies. Research from this work has been supported by The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, The Centre for the Study of the United States and the Northrop Frye Centre at the University of Toronto.