The Past and Future of Chika Sagawa (1911-1939), Japanese Modernist Poet

FAIN: FEL-283053-22

Sawako Nakayasu
Brown University (Providence, RI 02912-9100)

Research and writing leading to a digital monograph on the reception and legacy of modernist Japanese poet Chika Sagawa (1911–1936).

The Past and Future of Chika Sagawa brings together Anglophone and Japanese scholars and artists to reexamine the legacy of one of Japan’s most influential poets, Chika Sagawa (1911–1936). The first extensive study of any female modernist poet in Japan, the digital publication widens and deepens our understanding of literary developments in Japan in the interwar period via a necessarily “anti-orientalist” reading of literary culture. As a cross-disciplinary, multimodal, bilingual digital publication, it forges connections between contemporary arts communities both in the US and Japan that are actively engaged with Sagawa’s poetry. Enhancing the multidisciplinary dimension of the project, a video recording of a specially organized taidan, or formal conversation, provides dynamic content to sit alongside Sagawa’s poetry, accompanying interpretive texts by scholars, as well as newly commissioned electro-acoustic and visual works.