Care, Kin, Crack-Up

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How does an environmental crisis become the impetus for a kind of caring that is also intense thinking? Care, Kin, Crack-Up examines Japanese literature and activist narratives to show people at their most creative when struggling to engage Gaia: earth, intrusion, life. Faced with Fukushima, how did they trace nuclear enormity along thin lines of immanence and sense? Into incorporeal cracks rather than debilitating crack-ups? Margherita Long opens environmental humanities in new feminist directions using ideas from Indigenous studies, disability studies, science and technology studies, and Deleuze. This book maps new problems, like the gendered politics of the nuclear disaster, to reframe old ones, like Japan's peace constitution, military sexual slavery, and Minamata mercury poisoning. 

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