Michael Bourdaghs

As a scholar of modern Japanese literature, I stress the importance of moving beyond the boundaries of Japan. Japanese literature moves within and across multiple global networks, and its meanings are fundamentally shaped by those dialogues. I also have a strong commitment to engaging actively with our counterparts in Japan. I have edited or co-edited several volumes that introduce Japanese works of critical theory, literary scholarship, and philosophical inquiry, to English-language readers.

My primary current research project pursues a rethinking of Japanese cultures of the Cold War era. Growing out of a class I have been teaching here for several year, this project aims to go beyond the U.S./Japan bilateral relation that dominates most existing scholarship to think about how Japanese writers, filmmakers, and musicians simultaneously participated in multiple Cold War networks, including (to use the vocabulary of the era) the First World of capitalist liberal democracies, the Second World of the socialist bloc, and the Third World of the decolonization movement.

Past projects include a rethinking of the work of Natsume Sōseki that takes up his fiction and critical essays in relation to ideologies of modern property ownership. Moreover, like Sōseki, I think the realm of the literary extends beyond fiction, poetry, and drama. I have strong ongoing interests in philosophy, critical theory, social history, popular culture, and film and media studies. In Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Pre-History of J-Pop (Columbia University Press, 2012), I explore Japanese popular music from 1945 through the early 1990s, looking at how songs performed by such figures as Kasagi Shizuko, Sakamoto Kyū, and Yellow Magic Orchestra engaged creatively with the shifting historical situation of Japan's Cold War. I practice literature in other modes as well: I am an active translator, and I continue to write fiction on a daily basis.