Anne McKnight is Associate Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature, and director of the program on Japan, as well as Vice Chair of the Comparative Literature Department. Her research interests are in Japanese literature and culture since 1945, with an emphasis on literature’s relation with other media. 

Her monograph, Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity (Minnesota, 2011) showed how Nakagami Kenji, the first big-ticket writer from an outcast class in Japan, aimed to re-write Japanese literature by writing in elements of oral culture, the Japanese “south,” and insights about racialization drawn from African American literature. She also works on cinema, especially non-fiction film, and food studies, with publications on eco-cinema (in Japanese); blackness in Japanese literature; contemporary eco-cinema and first-person filmmaking in small studios; Japanese science film; feminist challenges to censorship in contemporary art; and uses of Frenchness in Japanese pop culture, as well as many classes taught in community gardens. 

Her book on Kurosawa Akira and his incarnations as a cinéphile, Long Take, is scheduled to come out from University of Minnesota Press in Fall 2025.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS 

BOOKS

Long Take: Kurosawa Akira As Cinéphile (夢は天才である、文芸春秋、1999). Translation and critical introduction to book of interviews, essays and roundtable discussions with director Kurosawa Akira. Forthcoming Fall 2025 from University of Minnesota Press.

Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, March 2011). Link to book. 

BOOK CHAPTERS

2025 [forthcoming] “The Cherry Tree with Grey Blossoms: An Ecology of the Everyday,” on filmmaker Haneda Sumiko’s essayistic eco-cinema, in Haneda Sumiko: Approaches to Gender, Culture, Society and the Arts in Japanese Documentary Film. Eds. Marcos Centeno, Irene González-López and Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández. Under contract with Routledge. 

2022 “Geysers of Another Nature: The Optical Unconscious of the Japanese Science Film,” in Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema, eds. Shota Ogawa and Joanne Bernardi. Link to book.

2017 「エコシネマの『第四の壁』をとおして」、アウリオン叢書 第 17 号(弘学社、2017 年), 147-161 (English title: “Across the ‘Fourth Wall’ of Eco-Cinema”).

2017 “At the Source (Code): Obscenity and Modularity in Rokudenashiko’s Media Activism,” in Media Theory in Japan, eds. Marc Steinberg and Alex Zahlten (Durham: Duke UP, 2017), 250-281. Link to book. Reprinted in Field: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism (UC San Diego), December 2017. Link to article.   

2015 “Future-oriented Blackness in Shōwa Robot Culture—1924 to 1963,” in Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production: Two Haiku and a Microphone, eds. Will Bridges and Nina Cornyetz (Lanham: Lexington Books, June 2015), 141-165. Link to book.

2010 “French-ness and Transformations in Subculture in Japan, 1972-2004,” in Mechademia 5: An Annual Forum for Anime, Manga and the Fan Arts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 118-137. Link to issue. 

JOURNAL ARTICLES (Selected)

2021 “Doing Violence to Buraku History: J. Mark Ramseyer’s Dangerous Inventions,” co-written by Anne McKnight, David Ambaras, Ian Neary, and Maren Ehlers, in Asia Pacific Journal / Japan Focus, May 1, 2021. v. 19:9, no. 9. Link to article. 

2012 “The Wages of Affluence: The High-Rise Housewife in Japanese Sex Films,” in Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture and Media Studies 27:1 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 1-29. Winner of the Katherine Singer Kovács Essay Award, Honorable Mention for best academic essay on film published in 2012. Link to article.

2008 “Imperial Syntax: Nakagami Kenji’s ‘Monogatari’ and Modern Japanese Literature as Ethnography,” in Discourse: Berkeley Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and
Culture 28:1 (Winter 2008), 142-165. Link to issue and PDF.

2007 “Princesses and Revolution: The European Interfaces to Japanese Subculture, from the ‘Seventies to the Millennium,” in Minikomi 75, bulletin of the Akademischer Arbeitskreis Japan (Academic Austrian-Japanese Society), Institute for Japanese Studies, University of Vienna, Austria, 28-38. Link to issue.

2005 “Safety Last: Risk, Inter-Activity and Video Activism in Contemporary Tokyo,” in New Cinemas 3.3 (Fall 2005), 169-185. Link to article.

2005 “Goodbye Kitty, Hello War: The Tactics of Spectacle and New Youth Movements in Urban Japan.” Co-written with Sharon Hayashi, in positions: east asia cultures critique 13.1 (2005), 87-113. Link to Article.

2005 “Goodbye Kitty, Hello War: The Tactics of Spectacle and New Youth Movements in Urban Japan.” On-line component for Critical World, Department of Anthropology, Université de Montréal, launched September 23, 2005. 

1999 “Crypticism, or Nakagami Kenji’s Transplanted Faulkner: Plants, Saga and Sabetsu,” Written in Japanese as 『Crypticismまたは亡霊の読み直しと中上のフォークナー』in Faulkner Journal of Japan 1 (Kyoto: William Faulkner Society of Japan, 1999), 46-56. Link to article. 

EDITED and TRANSLATED VOLUMES

2018  Introduction to special dossier on fiction-writer Tsushima Yūko, “Memento libri: New Writings and Translations from the World of Tsushima Yūko (1947~2016),” in Japan Focus: The Asia-Pacific Journal. Co-edited with Michael Bourdaghs. Collection of translations and critical writings on fiction-writer Tsushima Yūko. Link to dossier.

2017  The Pattern Book—Re-visioning Silk through Amami Ōshima [奄美大島を通して観た絹の再考] , coedited with Lisa Onaga (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin), funded by Biomaterial Matters project, Nanyang Technical University. Link to PDF of entire book on line.

2013 Editor and publisher, Yoshiya Nobuko, “Yellow Rose,” introduction and translation by Sarah Frederick (Glendale, CA: Expanded Editions Press, 2013). Link here.