Street Politics and Urban Space

“Street Politics and Urban Space”
- Screening & Lecture -
(Christophe Thouny / Associate Professor at Kyushu University)

　What makes a place, the home, the street, political? How does an everyday dwelling space we are so used to we don’t even notice it exists, lives and changes, suddenly become visible, and a stage for new political practices? In the wake of 3.11 and increasing climate change, as we unusually sweat and typhoons move in random directions, the collapse of planetary urban infrastructures has become impossible to ignore: we cannot continue to live as we did before.

Urban places have become visible once more, but have they yet become political? Common answers to the infrastructural crisis are centred on a logic of containment and risk control to precisely avoid change. Against this conservative approach, we propose to look once again the street as a stage, not a space of circulation but a space of practice, and aesthetics. After a screening of Kawashima Yūzō’s 1954 movie "Shitoyaka na Kemono" , Christophe Thouny will make a short presentation in Japanese on urban street politics from Kon Wajiro’s post-1923 urban ethnography - Modernologio to postwar situationism and tomasonism. This presentation will be followed by an open discussion with the audience.

Christophe Thouny is Associate Professor at Kyushu University. His field of interest covers East Asian media and urban cultures, Japanese literature, ecocriticism and queer theory. He is the co-editor of Planetary Atmospheres and Urban Life After Fukushima (Palgrave Mcmillian, 2017), a collective volume on cultural and urban politics of Fukushima Japan. He is currently working on several research projects, the neoliberal city and environmentalism in contemporary Japanese popular culture, a monograph on cartographic practices of urban spaces in Meiji and Taisho Tokyo discussing the work of Kon Wajirō, and postwar cultural criticism in the work of Yoshimoto Takaaki.