Reviewed by: The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought by Dennitza Gabrakova Annmaria Shimabuku (bio) The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought. By Dennitza Gabrakova. Brill, 2018. 210 pages. €88.00, cloth; €88.00, E-book. The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought by Dennitza Gabrakova is a unique delight. It is a study of Japanese literature published in English that bears the fruit of graduate study at the University of Tokyo rather than a program in the Anglophone academy. In a study on the "postcolonial," the reader is given the expected references to Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, [End Page 418] but yet is struck more profoundly by a sustained engagement with Japanese-language theorists such as Ukai Satoshi, Komori Yōichi, and Takahashi Tetsuya. In a study of the "postcolonial" in "postwar Japanese literature," one might assume a focus on texts emanating from the legacy of Japanese colonialism in Hokkaido, Okinawa, Taiwan, the Korean peninsula, and beyond. But this is not the case here. The texts are—I daresay—ineluctably Japanese, albeit in a radically different manner. They are "Japanese" in a way that the author might argue is "unnamable." In all of these ways, this work displaces the centrality of Anglophone scholarship with archipelagic thought infused into postwar literature in Japan. Archipelagic thought has been explored through the work of the writer Shimao Toshio who conceptualized Yaponeshia, or the merging of the words for "Japan" and "islands" (p. 157). Shimao was largely concerned with displacing the centrality of a purportedly homogenous Japan by engaging with the peripheral islands of Okinawa. Gabrakova, however, is more informed by the cultural anthropologist Imafuku Ryūta's world theory of the archipelago which she reads in a deconstructive vein. In her approach, engagement with islands does not reaffirm the continental stability of the writer but, rather, provides a reflection on the fragmentation and multiplicity that was always already there, within "Japan." The first two chapters provide a theoretical foundation for the middle three chapters, which examine literary texts. Chapter 1, "Archipelagic Thought and Theory's Gift," engages with Imafuku's theory of the world through the guntō or archipelago and the art critic Taki Kōji's notion of the same. Taki follows Kant's division of "the transcendental subject into several faculties representing islands" and examines the "movement between them" that he calls the "archipelago" (p. 20). Whereas the transcendental subject synthesizes these faculties in an act of self-determination, Gabrakova, via this constellation of theorists, is more interested in the generative power of the individual faculties, or islands themselves, and their intercourse. She is critical of iterations of Japan in which its archipelagic diversity is eliminated by synthesizing itself internally in the name of sovereignty that gives protection but also asks for conformity in return. Archipelagic thought, following Gabrakova's reading of Trinh T. Minh Ha, "give[s] without obligation or debt involved and, without expecting any form of return" (p. 14). This is the "un-give in giving" (p. 14) and points to "Japan strictly enforcing Article 9" as a "gift of a higher degree that cannot involve reciprocation but rather anticipates a dissolution of sovereignty" (p. 28). Chapter 2, "Translating Shame and the Wound of Ethnicity," operates as a "supplement to Imafuku's 'archipelago'" (p. 61). If the disjointed motion of the archipelago is the euphoric moment of the "un-give in giving," then this chapter examines the painful moment of shame when confronting the gendered and ethnic implications of the failure to erect a sovereign [End Page 419] national polity. Through a Ukai Satoshi–inspired reading of Ruth Benedict, Gabrakova argues that whereas guilt is rooted in abstractions of the moral, shame is located in bodies marked by ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. The "wound" or gaishō is literally an "external wound" (p. 47), or that passage where one is both wounded by the outside while also opened up to it. Quoting Ukai, she prioritizes the "poetics of translation" (p. 53) in thinking about ways to negotiate this wound. She invokes Ukai's question: "How could one...
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