About

Anne Kirstin Mcknight

Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature

Contact Information
E-mail: mcknight@usc.edu
Phone: (213) 740-3706
Office: THH 356P

 

Education
B.A. English, Wellesley College, 1988
M.A. Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley, 1992
Ph.D. Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley, 2001
 

Postdoctoral Training
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science/SSRC, Ritsumeikan University; Kyoto, Japan, 2004-2005   
Researcher, Tokyo University, Komaba; Linguistics and Information Sciences, 1996-1999  
 

Description of Research

Summary Statement of Research Interests
My research interests tend to be comparative (primarily Japan and the US) and focus on modern and contemporary literature's relation to two other fields - ethnography and media studies. I am particularly interested in how modern claims about race and ethnicity have underwritten notions of "realism," as well as the rich repertoire of avant-garde and genre fiction that flees from realism. I am also fascinated by how concepts of narrative in literature (and its paraliterary friends) have materialized in postwar formations of mass culture and subculture, as books and bookish writing are joined by writing in other media. I have recently published articles in positions: east asia cultures critique, and New Cinemas, and regularly teach courses on feminism and sexuality in Japan, as well as courses on literary criticism, literature's relation to social movements, and Japanese cultural history during the US Occupation and Cold War. I recently completed a book manuscript, titled _Nakagami, Japan_. It frames the fiction-writer Nakagami Kenji, whom many see as the most important/adventurous writer born after the Pacific War, in terms of what I call "rhetorical activism." Nakagami was the first big-ticket writer of Japanese prose fiction to self-identify as coming from an outcast(e)/_hisabetsu buraku_ background, Japan's largest minority group. I show how Nakagami engaged with traditions of speaking, writing and arguing that motivated the very successful _buraku_ rights movement, yet clashed with its views on culture and "representation," in the sense of connecting _buraku_ identity in literature to broader claims on citizenship and political representation. I try to situate Japan in terms of debates on a global "South," a very different set of relationships than is provided by the place of "East" that the post-1868-->Cold War era assigned to Japan. Other interests in my academic work include: histories of literary "scenes" and their manifestos and programs; the history of food cultures, trade and cooking in Japan, especially in relation to the "New World" and the Columbian Exchange; and thinking about how ideas about personal space and privacy, vis-a-vis public spaces, develop through debates on characterization (what happens inside a character's mind, psychology, for instance) and about personal space (such as new kinds of housing), technologies (such as the Walkman), labor (as seen in the precariat and freeters) and property--especially in the 1970's to the present neo-liberal era that began under Koizumi.
 

Research Keywords
Modern and contemporary Japanese literature; labor and literature; subculture; buraku activism; cultural/intellectual histories of race, ethnicity, and differential identity in Japan
 

Research Specialties
modern & contemporary Japanese literature, literature vis-à-vis mass culture and new media
 

Conferences and Other Presentations

Conference Presentations
"More...or...Less Simultaneous: Translating the "Classics"", Japan Translates: Words between Languages from Classics to Hyperculture, Commentator, Refereed , UCLA, UCLA, Department of East Asian Languages & Culture, 2008-2009   
"Fighting Words: Subculture and Literary Studies in Postwar Japan", Junior faculty showcase in cultural studies, Talk/Oral Presentation, Refereed , USC, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Invited, Spring 2008   
"organizer/commentator", Re-thinking Postwar Japan: Article 9, the Courts, and The Self-Defense Forces, Panel discussion on visual culture and changes in thinking the "postwar", , USC, Center for International Studies, East Asian Studi, Spring 2008   
"Subculture and Frenchness in Japan, 1970s-now", Association for Asian Studies annual conference, Talk/Oral Presentation, Refereed , Atlanta, GA, AAS, Invited, Spring 2008   
"Subculture and Frenchness in Japanese Graphic Culture, 1970s-1990s", "Cinema/Movement" conference on experimental 60s and 70s Japanese film, Talk/Oral Presentation, , York, Ontario, Canada, York University, Department of Fine Arts, Invited, Fall 2007   
"When Surface Was Depth: Subculture, Costume, and French-ness, the Seventies to Now ", Dressing Japanese History: Sociohistory, Gender, and Japanese Clothing from Premodern to Present, Talk/Oral Presentation, , USC, Department of History, USC, Invited, Fall 2007   
"Modernist Narratives of the 1970 Ôsaka Exhibition, or: Eyes vs. Ears", Kinema Club VIII, Talk/Oral Presentation, Refereed , Frankfurt, Germany, Department of Theater, Film and Media Studies, J.W, Invited, Spring 2007   
 

Other Presentations
"On the Baroque and Subculture in Japan in the 1970s-1990s", invited lecture, Comparative Literature, UC Riverside, UC Riverside, Spring 2007   
 

Publications

Book Chapter
McKnight, A. (2008). French-ness and Transformations in Subculture in Japan, 1972-2004. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
 

Journal Article
McKnight, A. (2008). "Princesses and Revolution: The European Interfaces to Japanese Subculture, from the ‘Seventies to the Millennium.". Mini-komi: bulletin of the Akademischer Arbeitskreis Japan (Academic Austrian-Japanese Society).
McKnight, A. K. (2008). Imperial Syntax: Nakagami Kenji’s "Monogatari" and Modern Japanese Literature as Ethnography. Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture. Vol. 28 (1), pp. 142-165.
McKnight, A. K. (2005). Safety Last: Risk, Inter-Activity and Video Activism in Contemporary Tokyo. New Cinemas. Vol. 3 (3), pp. 169-185.
McKnight, A. K., Hayashi, S. (2005). Goodbye Kitty, Hello War: The Tactics of Spectacle and New Youth Movements in Urban Japan. Duke University Press. Vol. 13 (1), pp. 87-113.
 

Multimedia Scholarship and Creative Works
multimedia teaching module, "Goodbye Kitty, Hello War." Teaching module incorporating text, graphic, and sound files on "sound demos" in contemporary Tokyo. Inaugural module for Critical World, journal on world music based in the Department of Anthropology, Université de Montréal (URL: http://www.criticalworld.net/_client/projet.php?id=65&type=0). , 09/28/2005-  
 

Advisement
 

Other Advisement or Time Devoted to Students
Advisor to McNair scholar project on hip hop dance connectivity between Japan and Los Angeles, 2007-2008   
Advisor to undergraduate, Tokyo-based research project on debates on "subculture" in Japan from the 1970s-present, 2007-2008   
 

Service to the University

Media, Alumni, and Community Relations
Curriculum development, Beverly Hills Unified School District (developed curriculum on Japanese popular culture and science), 2008-2009   
Advisor to New Yorker writer, for essay on Japanese contemporary literature, Fall 2008   
 

Service to the Profession

Professional Memberships
AAS (Association for Asian Studies), 2006-2007   
MLA (Modern Language Association), 2006-2007   
 
 
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