Residual Futures

An important and necessary book that even beyond the discussion of its immediate objects will help further thedebate on the status of the city in cultural discourse, then and today. * Journal of Asian Studies *This book will command attention from a wide range of scholars and other critically minded readers to urgent consideration of these registers, as well as of the urban space they formed and transformed. * Japanese Language and Literature *An engaging and challenging work that will attain a secure position among studies of 1960s/1970s visual and textual culture, and, one hopes, stimulate future scholarly work in these areas. * The Journal of Japanese Studies *Franz Prichard’s Residual Futures is a thrilling exploration of the literary and visual remaking of the urban landscape of Cold War Japan. It offers us radically new ways to think about the interrelationship of urban ecologies, media forms, aesthetics, and politics–not only in Japan of the 1960s and ’70s, but here and now. – Marilyn Ivy, Columbia UniversityResidual Futures traces connections between the rapidly changing cityscape of Tokyo in the 1960s and 1970s and transformations of the mediascape of literature, cinema, and photography. Prichard adroitly shows how the new mediascape strove to inhabit a strange new set of linkages inadvertently afforded by the concerted efforts to remake both city and country. Residual Futures calls attention to the unforeseen possibilities emerging from the tangled infrastructural skein of mediascape and cityscape. – Thomas Lamarre, McGill UniversityThis original, provocative, and timely study expands the horizon of Japan studies, as well as literary and visual cultural studies, onto a complex urban terrain that is at once cosmopolitan and dystopic. Residual Futures renders a future-present that is formed in the atomic residues of the postwar planet, but also along a fault line that opens onto a future that has already come and gone. – Akira Mizuta Lippit, University of Southern CaliforniaThis book provides a deeply fascinating view into a crucial trajectory that has not received enough attention in the study of media or visual arts in general, much less of Japan. The transition of media culture from the 1960s to the 1980s is deeply consequential for our situation today, and Prichard lays it out in surprising and lucid ways, always keeping an eye on the possibilities it contained. Immensely informative, this book will make a tremendous contribution to work on visual arts and to the study of the contexts of Japan. – Alexander Zahlten, Harvard UniversityAdvancing existing work on 1960s and ’70s Japan significantly, Prichard treats photographers like Nakahira as full-fledged intellectuals making a direct and meaningful contribution to contemporaneous discourse on the fundamental characteristics of modern urban life, further unsettling notions of the position of the artist in society as a mirror held up to certain kinds of social problems. – Steven Ridgely, University of WisconsinHis book draws attention to a corpus of works from one of Japan’s most formative eras and is an excellent addition to the current literature. * Urban History *A challenging, erudite, and consistently thought-provoking study that itself opens thresholds for the fields of Japanese and urban studies. * Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies *

Franz Prichard is assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University.