Watsuji and Deleuze and Guattari in the Climate of Culture

Seth Jacobowitz, in his paper Watsuji and Deleuze and Guattari in the Climate of Culture, analyzes theories of cultural properties in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari\u27s A Thousand Plateaus alongside Watsuji Tetsuro\u27s prewar Climate and Culture. At stake in these investigations is the status of the West as a universalizing particular ratified by these authors in the instance of its own critique. We are confronted on the one hand with Deleuze and Guattari\u27s exoticized, Orientalist promise of an alternative economy of meaning derived from the Balinese term for plateau and the morphology of the rhizome and, on the other hand, by the human geography in Watsuji Tetsuro\u27s Culture and Climate, which explicitly places itself under the sign of racial science. Jacobowitz seeks to disclose how despite their articulation over and against Eurocentrism, these two theories in fact reify the cultural properties of the West and remap them on a global scale

O casulo claustrofílico: rumo a uma filosofia especulativa da perversão em Edogawa Rampo

Este artigo é uma versão traduzida do texto originalmente publicado em inglês na revista Japan Forum 32:2 (2020): 1-25

A bitter brew: coffee and labor in Japanese Brazilian immigrant literature

Transoceanic passage brought nearly 189,000 immigrants from Japan to Brazil between 1908 and 1941. They were often geographically isolated in Japanese “colonies” as coffee plantation workers and thus able to maintain their Japanese linguistic and cultural identity. A new imagined community coalesced in the several Japanese-language immigrant newspapers that also published locally produced serial fiction. This paper reads two representative works by Sugi Takeo, pen name of Takei Makoto (1909-2011), who was a prolific contributor of original content to the Burajiru Jihô newspaper. In the short stories, “Kafé-en o uru” (Selling the coffee plantation, 1933) and “Tera Roshya” (Terra rossa, 1937), it is the moonshine sellers who see steady profits from every race and type of immigrant laborer while the Japanese newcomers who naively dream of riches by bringing coffee to market reap only a bitter brew of poverty for their efforts.Transoceanic passage brought nearly 189,000 immigrants from Japan to Brazil between 1908 and 1941. They were often geographically isolated in Japanese “colonies” as coffee plantation workers and thus able to maintain their Japanese linguistic and cultural identity. A new imagined community coalesced in the several Japanese-language immigrant newspapers that also published locally produced serial fiction. This paper reads two representative works by Sugi Takeo, pen name of Takei Makoto (1909-2011), who was a prolific contributor of original content to the Burajiru Jihô newspaper. In the short stories, “Kafé-en o uru” (Selling the coffee plantation, 1933) and “Tera Roshya” (Terra rossa, 1937), it is the moonshine sellers who see steady profits from every race and type of immigrant laborer while the Japanese newcomers who naively dream of riches by bringing coffee to market reap only a bitter brew of poverty for their efforts

Hellenism, Hebraism, and the Eugenics of Culture in E.M. Forster\u27s Howards End

Seth Jacobowitz, in his paper Hellenism, Hebraism, and the Eugenics of Culture in E.M. Forster\u27s Howards End, explores how the culturalist principles of Hellenism and Hebraism theorized by Matthew Arnold as the basis of Englishness in Culture and Anarchy (1869) were incorporated into the text of E.M. Forster\u27s Howards End (1910) to show the close institutional and conceptual linkages Forster shared with Arnold. Further, Jacobowitz seeks to bring Howards End into dialog with Forster\u27s only major work of science fiction, The Machine Stops (1928), to address their mutual themes of eugenics, the racialization of class difference, and concerns over the burgeoning advances in industrial technology that threatened to reshape both English identity and landscape. If Howards End is already deeply preoccupied with the encroachment of modernity upon the blood and soil rooted in the English countryside, The Machine Stops present an apocalyptic vision where these ties have been all but eradicated. Working back from this cautionary tale written between the wars, and supported by our knowledge of their genocidal outcome, the implications of the rural retreat and Arnoldian cultural schema in Howards End become all the more historically incisive

Meiji at 150 Podcast, Episode 020, Dr. Seth Jacobowitz (Yale University)

In this episode, Dr Jacobowitz chronicles internal sources for Meiji Period developments in Japanese literary practices and techniques, placing Japan in dialogue with global trends and world history. We discuss literary innovations, Japanese immigration to Brazil, and the interaction of Japanese and Western literati and intellectuals.Arts, Faculty ofHistory, Department ofNon UBCUnreviewedFacult

Entrevista com o professor Dr. Seth Jacobowitz

Prof. Dr. Seth Jacobowitz é Professor Assistente no Departamento de Literaturas e Línguas do Mundo na Texas State University. Ele é Doutor em Literatura Japonesa pela Cornell University e fez seu pós-doutorado no Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies na Harvard University. Ele é o autor de "Writing Technology in Meiji Japan: A Media History of Modern Japanese Literature and Visual Culture" (Harvard Asia Center, 2016), que recebeu o Prêmio de Livro de Humanidades pela International Convention of Asia Scholars em 2017. Ele traduziu do japonês para o inglês o livro "The Edogawa Rampo Reader" (Kurodahan Press, 2008) e do português para o inglês a obra "Corações Sujos: a História da Shindô Renmei", de Fernando Morais (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021). Entre seus projetos atuais, destaca-se a obra "Japanese Brazil: Immigrant Literature and Overseas Expansion, 1908-1945", sob contrato com a Vanderbilt University Press. Anteriormente, ele lecionou na Yale University e na San Francisco State Universit