Italian Modern Art in the Age of Fascism by Anthony White (review)

Abstract

591 Shibata suggests that, despite differences between their aesthetic strategies, Resnais aligned himself with Kikkawa’s project by including Kikkawa in Hiroshima Mon Amour. Yet, as she points out, in contrast to Kikkawa’s highly personal, activist performance, Resnais’s strategy of fragmentation and abstraction removed hibakusha from their historical context and deprived atomic bomb survivors of their identity by excluding their voices and stories from the film. Because of these techniques, Hiroshima Mon Amour became a politically ambiguous film that is strongly marked by “ambivalent and antithetical functions of affect—both an indifference to and a strong interest in the ‘colonial’ Other” (76). Taken together, Shibata’s readings offer an incisive critique of the compartmentalized knowledge structure of academia, where divisions between different specializations are drawn according to national/area focus and discipline. As Shibata argues, this division of labor has contributed not only to blind spots but even “a certain structure of indifference to one another across the Pacific” (98). This is what Shibata calls the “connected divide”: texts become lodged in separate discursive spheres, unable to overcome disciplinary walls that are established along the lines of language differences and national boundaries. Scholars become invested in maintaining artificial distinctions between different forms of narrative (e.g., historiography, fiction) and genre or medium (e.g., reportage, documentary film, avant-garde cinema). Shibata shows how Japanese, French, and American representations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in different media are “ostensibly divided but also mutually embedded at the level of texts and contexts,” and argues, “[i]ndeed, what is divided is our recognition, not these texts” (10). If there is any weakness in Shibata’s project, it is that she sometimes pushes her allegorical readings quite far, particularly in her analysis of Hiroshima Mon Amour in chapter one. Some of her more unsubtle claims in chapter one also strain plausibility, detracting from an otherwise nuanced and brilliant analysis. Nevertheless, Shibata’s work raises a powerful challenge to the departmentalization of disciplines, as well as other forms of institutionalized knowledge production, which have resulted in an uneven distribution of scholarship across mutually exclusive sites (e.g., Japanese studies, American literature, film studies). As she notes, emphasis is usually placed on Euro-American texts in North American universities. This separate and unequal division between disciplines in the academy, she asserts, is structurally analogous to colonialism. As she argues, “These paralleled discursive spheres across the Pacific do not stand as equals. Rather, they form a core/peripheral dichotomy within a hierarchically organized epistemological web” (98). Overall, with its trenchant insights, Producing Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a thrilling new addition to the literature. It offers a new critique of area studies from within Japan studies and serves as an exciting example of transdisciplinary and transnational intertextual reading.