Nuclear Futures in the Post-Fukushima Age Literature, Film, and Performance from Germany and Japan

This groundbreaking volume explores new artistic forms that emerged in German-speaking Europe and Japan in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. Considering the cultural specificity of post-3.11 literature, poetry, theater, and film, while also attending to moments of crossing, hybridity, and transference, Nuclear Futures in the Post-Fukushima Age offers a critical model for examining the intertwining of transnational connection and ecological contamination in a global present marked by  renewed nuclear threat. Bringing together incisive readings by eminent scholars of Germany and Japan as well as a newly translated work by Yoko Tawada, the volume offers a comparative humanities approach that is essential for reframing debates about environmental crisis and nuclear risk.

Introduction.-Nuclear Futures: Intertwined Histories and Imaginative Visions in Post-Fukushima Japan and Germany.-Hester Baer and Michele M. Mason.-From Half-Lives to Eternal Life: On Contamination and Isolation in Yoko Tawada’s Post-3.11 Eco Texts .-Jeremy Redlich.-Animal BabelYoko Tawada.- translated by Doug Slaymaker.-The Fractured Looking-glass: 20th-Century History in Post-Meltdown Japanese Theater

.-Justine Wiesinger.-Our Fukushima, Our Earth: Nuclear Protest Poetry Following Fukushima

.-Jeffrey Angles.-Fission, Food, and Family: Alina Bronsky’s Baba Dunja’s Last Love and the Possibility of “Bad Environmental” Narrative .-Bradley Boovy.-Slow Violence in Japan’s Nuclear Future: Kirino Natsuo’s Baraka .-Rachel DiNitto.-Of Culture and Contamination: Adolf Muschg’s Returning Home to Fukushima (2018).-Katharina Gerstenberger.-Filming the Phantasms of Fukushima: Relationality and Repair in Doris Dörrie’s Fukushima, Mon Amour (2016) .-Hester Baer and Michele M. Mason.-Quantum Narratives and Zen Moments: Thinking Nuclear Pasts and Futures .-Emily E. Jones.-Epilogue .-Hester Baer and Michele M. Mason.

Hester Baer is Professor of German and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research and teaching focus on German literature and culture in the 20th and 21st centuries, film history, feminist media studies, and environmental humanities. Her recent publications include the monograph German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism (2021) and the edited volume Babylon Berlin, German Visual Spectacle, and Global Media Culture (2024). She currently serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of The German Quarterly.

Michele M. Mason is an Associate Professor of Japanese literary and cultural studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, whose works include Reading Colonial Japan: Text, Context and Critique and Dominant Narratives of Colonial Hokkaido and Imperial Japan: Envisioning the Periphery and the Modern Nation State. She has dedicated herself to anti-nuclear studies, education, and activism, which is embodied in her co-produced short documentary film entitled Witness to Hiroshima (2008) and a monograph in progress on the legacy of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.