Faculty
Anne McKnight
PhD in Comparative Literature, emphasis in Japanese and American Literatures, UC Berkeley, 2001
Researcher in modern Japanese literature, Dept. of Language and Information Studies, Tokyo University, Tokyo, Japan, 1996-99
Intensive Language Training Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Training, Stanford University, Yokohama, Japan, 1994-1995
MA in Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley, 1992
BA in English (magna cum laude), Wellesley College, 1988
Email: anne.mcknight@ucr.edu
For letters of recommendation, please submit all materials at least two weeks in advance through this portal: https://forms.gle/H1DCoUFvhKpnbCUK9. Prof. McKnight will need at least two weeks to write the letter after receiving all the materials, including the link or invitation to write the individual letter.
*** ON SABBATICAL FALL 2022 ***
Anne McKnight is Associate Professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature. 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; 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.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS since 2005
BOOKS
Nakagami, Japan: Buraku and the Writing of Ethnicity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, March 2011).
In Dreams, Genius (夢は天才である、文芸春秋、1999). Translation and critical introduction to book of roundtable discussions with director Kurosawa Akira. Under contract with University of Minnesota Press.
BOOK CHAPTERS
2019 (submitted) “Geysers of Another Nature: The Optical Unconscious of the Japanese Science Film,” chapter in Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema, eds. Shota Ogawa and Joanne Bernardi.
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. Reprinted in Field: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism (UC San Diego), December 2017. URL: http://field-journal.com/issue-8/at-the-source-code-obscenity-and-modularity-in-rokudenashikos-media-activism
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.
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.
JOURNAL ARTICLES
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.
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.
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.
2005 “Safety Last: Risk, Inter-Activity and Video Activism in Contemporary Tokyo,” in New Cinemas 3.3 (Fall 2005), 169-185.
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.
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.
EDITED VOLUMES
2018 Introduction to special dossier on Tsushima Yūko, “Memento libri: New Writings and Translations from the World of Tsushima Yūko (1947~2016),” Japan Focus: The Asia-Pacific Journal. Co-edited with Michael Bourdaghs. Collection of translations and critical writings on fiction-writer Tsushima Yūko. Submitted May 2018.
2017 The Pattern Book—Re-visioning Silk through Amami Ōshima [奄美大島を通して観た絹の最高] , coedited with Lisa Onaga (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin), funded by Biomaterial Matters project, Nanyang Technical University.
2013 Editor and publisher, Yoshiya Nobuko, “Yellow Rose,” introduction and translation by Sarah Frederick (Glendale, CA: Expanded Editions Press, 2013).