Care, Kin, Crack-Up

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How does environmental crisis become the impetus for a kind of caring that is also intense thinking? Faced with Fukushima, how do people make sense of nuclear enormity? Care, Kin, Crack‑Up examines Japanese literature and activist narratives to show people at their most creative when struggling to engage ecological catastrophe as the “intrusion of Gaia.” Margherita Long explores the transformation of crack-ups (kurui, or madness) into art and thought, tracing how kurui is bound up with questions of care and kin. Reframing historical debates about Japan’s postwar peace constitution, military sexual slavery, and Minamata mercury poisoning, this book opens environmental humanities in feminist directions, drawing on ideas from Indigenous studies, disability studies, and Deleuze.

Margherita Long is Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of This Perversion Called Love: Reading Tanizaki, Feminist Theory, and Freud.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Flow Connecting Everything

1. What Can a Radiation Brain Think? Hayashi, Kimura, Kobayashi

2. Ōe and the Semiotics of Neurodiversity: This Margin Which Is Not One

3. On Being Worthy of the Event: Activist Narratives, Fukushima Stoics

4. Undercommons: Kin, Care and Pedagogy in Fukushima Documentary

Coda: Intelligence, Care, Mothers

Works Cited

Index