the ethnographic politics and poetics of photography, skin and race in the works of yoko tawada ...

327 Pages·2012·1.52 MB·English

THE ETHNOGRAPHIC POLITICS AND POETICS OF PHOTOGRAPHY, SKIN
AND RACE IN THE WORKS OF YOKO TAWADA

by

JEREMY REDLICH

B.A., The University of Victoria, 2000
M.A., The University of British Columbia, 2005

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF
THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

in

THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

(Germanic Studies)

THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

(Vancouver)

October 2012

© Jeremy Redlich, 2012
ABSTRACT

This dissertation is a literary studies analysis of select German-language prose, poetry
and essays by the contemporary Japanese author Yoko Tawada. In this study I utilize and expand
upon Tawada‘s own concept of ‗fictive ethnology‘ as a highly critical and self-reflexive literary
approach that can be located throughout her texts. I argue that this fictive ethnological or
counter-ethnographic literary technique is what directs the political charge behind Tawada‘s
poetics. My focus then is on how Tawada‘s texts as cultural critiques undermine binary
distinctions of ‗otherness‘, destabilize the position and authority of the author/narrator
representing the other, and reveal the ideology and power structures behind representing,
constructing and classifying difference. Unlike the descriptive and textual model of ‗writing
culture‘ that engraves and freezes culture into words, Tawada‘s fictive ethnological texts stress
the fluid and performative dimension of culture and identity. Therefore, I also demonstrate how
these texts are much more about inventing, rather than finding, the self, and about denaturalizing
taken-for-granted assumptions about cultural, ethnic and racial differences that are anchored in
essentialist, biological and binary logics, than they are an indictment of ethnography or
ethnology as research disciplines.
The core chapters of this study braid together representations of photography, skin and
race and their variegated deployments in Tawada‘s texts, and then explicate their ideological
underpinnings. Photography, skin and race, as textual and visual representations, metaphors and
themes, are fundamental to how Tawada‘s protagonists are commodified and racialized as
ethnographic objects; how they self-identify and are read by others according to restrictive
cultural literacies; and how they are classified and made meaningful according to their bodies,
especially when these bodies are seen as racially and ethnically marked. Yet, Tawada‘s texts do
not simply represent bodies and identities as they already are, but rather the processes, rituals,
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discourses and social practices that make them intelligible as raced, gendered, or ethnically
marked beings. Each chapter therefore highlights, in connection to theories of gender and racial
performativity, how Tawada‘s texts convey the quotidian, repetitive and ritualistic performance
of gendered, racial and ethnic identities, but also how these identities are transgressively
(mis)performed against the script.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT..........................................................................................................................................ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS...................................................................................................................iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...…….....……………......................…….....…...........……………......vi

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
1.1 Goal and Method…...……………....……………............................................................................. 1
1.2 Secondary Scholarship on Tawada.……...............….....................................……………………..20
1.3 Selection of Primary Sources............................................................................................................26
1.4 Chapter Overviews ..........................................................................................................................28

CHAPTER TWO: COUNTER-ETHNOGRAPHY AND PHOTOGRAPHY IN YOKO TAWADA‘S
DAS BAD
2.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 41
2.2 Focusing on the Materiality of the Text: Ein Gedicht für ein Buch .............................................. 43
2.3 The De-Contextualized Image: Photographic Images in Das Bad ................................................ 56
2.4 The Rhetoric of the Image and the Paradox of the Photograph ..................................................... 65
2.5 Objectification and Commodification of the Photographic Subject ............................................. 72
2.6 The Photograph, the Mirror and Processes of Identification in Das Bad ....................................... 77
2.7 Death and the Photographic Medium.............................................................................................. 88
2.8 Authenticity and the Tourism Photograph...................................................................................... 92
2.9 The Predatory Camera: Colonizing the Photographic Image......................................................... 97
2.10 The Myth of Representing Essence ............................................................................................ 108
2.11 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 119

CHAPTER THREE: A HAUTNAH INVESTIGATION OF SKIN IN THE WORKS OF YOKO
TAWADA
3.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 122
3.2 Writing on the Body: ―Der Schriftkörper und der beschriftete Körper‖ ...................................... 123
3.3 Reading Foreignness on the Face: Physiognomy in Verwandlungen ........................................... 132
3.4 Masks, Masquerade and Performativity in Tawada‘s Texts...........................................................145
3.5 Learning to Read Differently: Encounters with Strangers in ―Das Fremde aus der Dose‖ ....... 149
3.6 Techniques of Defamiliarization: Making the Skin Visible ..........................................................155
3.7 Re-Mapping Skinscapes: Metaphors of Geographical and Bodily Boundaries in ―Eine Hautnahme‖
and ―Wo Europa anfängt‖.................................................................................................................... 160
3.8 Puncturing the Bodily Envelope: The Vulnerability of Skin as Material and Metaphor............... 180
3.9 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 197

CHAPTER FOUR: (UN)SETTLING BOUNDARIES: INTERROGATING SKIN COLOUR, RACE,
AND ETHNICITY IN SELECT TEXTS BY YOKO TAWADA
4.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 200
4.2 Tongues in Yoko Tawada‘s African Texts ………………………………………………….…...211
4.3 Language as Boundary and Belonging: The Role of Afrikaans in ―Bioskoop der Nacht‖…........ 224
4.4 Space, Race and Segregation: Constructing Difference through Racial Policies of Apartheid in
―Bioskoop der Nacht‖……………………………………..………………………………………… 243
4.5 Making ‗Whiteness‘ Visible: The Power of (In)visibility in ―Bioskoop der Nacht‖.....................263
4.6 Reconceptualizing Race in ―Eigentlich darf man es niemandem sagen, aber Europa gibt es nicht‖
..............................................................................................................................................................276
4.7 Conclusion.................................................................................................................................... 287
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CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION - TAWADA‘S TEXTS AS CULTURAL CRITICISM............ 291

BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................. 300

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I hereby offer my sincere and enduring gratitude to the faculty and staff in the
Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies at the University of British
Columbia. The financial, intellectual and emotional support that I received over the years has
allowed me to finally accomplish my goal, and for this I will be forever grateful. Particular
thanks go to my dissertation committee members Dr. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (my experience
co-teaching with Geoff was one of the highlights of my academic career) and Dr. Illinca Iurascu
(I really appreciated her comments and help with my defense), and especially to my supervisor
Dr. Markus Hallensleben, who was patient, supportive and understanding throughout the whole
writing process. Your questions and feedback, insight and enthusiasm, were extremely useful to
me, and I thank you for all the time and commitment you invested in seeing my project through
to completion.
Over the course of my graduate studies at the University of British Columbia, many
graduate students came and went, and I would just like to recognize (former) Department of
CENES colleagues Guido Schenkel, Lydia Jones and Ingrid Petro for being wonderful
colleagues and friends. Vancouver‘s loss is Berlin‘s gain.
I would also like to acknowledge and thank the Department of Germanic and Slavic
Studies at the University of Victoria, which is where my interest in German literature, culture
and history was born. Special thanks go to Dr. Peter Gölz, Dr. Matthew Pollard and Dr. Rodney
Symington for your inspirational teaching and valuable guidance.
Finally, special, deeply heart-felt thanks are owed to my wife, and my mother and father.
Without your unwavering support, in every sense, I would not have been able to achieve this
degree. You have always stood by me, in high and low times, and this has not gone
unrecognized. I owe all three of you a lifetime of gratitude.
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CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
1.1 GOAL AND METHOD
The following is a study of the self-reflexive, deconstructive and defamiliarizing literary
techniques employed in select German language texts by the Japanese-born contemporary author
Yoko Tawada, and how these techniques reveal the ideological investments and relations of
power underpinning constructions of the self and representations of the ‗other‘ in Tawada‘s
writing. In order to accomplish this I am focusing on Tawada‘s numerous and multifarious
textual depictions and problematizations of photography, skin and race, how these three literary
tropes are approached from a kind of ‗fictive ethnological‘ narratorial perspective, and how they
intersect and affect one another in Tawada‘s texts. I also analyze how, through their codification
as natural, self-evident and common sense reflections of reality, Tawada interrogates the role
photography, skin and race serve in the constitution, perception, classification and crystallization
of identities in a western context.
The de-mythifying and de-essentializing post-structural cultural criticism in select
writings by Roland Barthes is significant in Tawada‘s texts and so too will it be in my analyses,
as already in the opening lines of Barthes‘s Empire of Signs do we witness core thematic and
theoretical impulses informing and directing Yoko Tawada‘s literary technique. The lines read:
If I want to imagine a fictive nation, I can give it an invented name, treat it
declaratively as a novelistic object, create a new Garabagne, so as to compromise
no real country by my fantasy (though it is then that fantasy itself I compromise
by the signs of literature). I can also – though in no way claiming to represent or
to analyze reality itself (these being the major gestures of Western discourse) –
isolate somewhere in the world (faraway) a certain number of features (a term
1
employed in linguistics), and out of these features deliberately form a system. It is
this system which I shall call: Japan.
Hence Orient and Occident cannot be taken here as ―realities‖ to be compared and
contrasted historically, philosophically, culturally, politically. I am not lovingly
gazing toward an Oriental essence – to me the Orient is a matter of indifference,
merely providing a reserve of features whose manipulation – whose invented
interplay – allows me to ―entertain‖ the idea of an unheard-of symbolic system,
one altogether detached from our own.1 (Empire of Signs 3)
Evidence of Roland Barthes‘s influence in Yoko Tawada‘s writing can be found throughout her
oeuvre in explicit and implicit examples of form, content, themes and messages. From his work
on the rhetoric of the image and reading the photographic paradox, to revealing and debunking
the mythologies and ideologies underlying representational and signifying practices, to his de-
essentializing semiotic readings of ‗Japan‘ as a fictive nation and host of an empty, non-
referential ‗empire of signs‘, Tawada‘s texts frequently incorporate, reflect on, interrogate and
critique Barthes‘s highly provocative, and sometimes problematic, cultural and semiotic theories.
The following literary analyses will highlight some of the various Barthes sources and theory
with which Tawada‘s texts are in dialogue, yet, as scholars like Sabine Fischer, Andrea Krauß,
Christina Kraenzle and Claudia Breger have all indicated,2 it is Barthes‘s Empire of Signs in

1 The fictional land Garabagne, to which Barthes refers in this quotation, and to which I will refer later in chapter
four with respect to Tawada‘s writing on South Africa, is in reference to the title of the Belgian author Henri
Michaux‘s Voyage en Grande Garabagne (1936). For Michaux, Garabagne was a fantasy space for an imaginary
travel narrative, and while Barthes actually did travel to Japan, his narrative is likewise fictitious – it is self-reflexive
writing and self-consciously inventive rather than an empirical study and interpretation of Japanese culture and
Japanese essence. Barthes makes no claims to revealing cultural ‗truths‘ and differences of Japan, though he does
fall into fairly simplistic, Eurocentric binaries when comparing European and Japanese bodies, and especially eyes
and faces. In particular see Empire of Signs 101-02 for Barthes exposition on the eyelid.
2 The list of Tawada scholars connecting Barthes‘s Empire of Signs to Tawada‘s work is long, and the names
provided above represent the most detailed investigations with respect to the notion of a ‗fictive ethnology‘ that will
feature prominently later. For insight into the connection between Empire of Signs and Tawada, see Fischer‘s
―Durch die japanische Brille gesehen‖ 63-65; Andrea Krauß‘s ―Tawadische Sprachtheorie‖ 64-67; Christina
Kraenzle‘s ―Limits of Travel‖ 246-48; and Claudia Breger‘s ―Mimikry als Grenzverwirrung‖ 63. Also, Ruth
Kersting‘s Fremdes Schreiben 9-12 and 74-91, Hiltrud Arens‘s ―Das kurze Leuchten unter dem Tor‖ 66, Linda
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particular that proves most consequential in influencing Tawada‘s literary approach and
perspective as a ‗fiktive Ethnologie‘ and ‗ethnologische Poetologie‘,3 and the understanding of
the ‗Orient‘ and ‗Occident‘ as discursive constructs (textually and visually produced), and not
homogenously frozen cultural or ethnic monoliths. The two terms ‗fiktive Ethnologie‘ and
‗ethnologische Poetologie‘ will serve as methodological ballasts in several of the textual analyses
to follow, informing my approach to Tawada‘s texts as critical ethno-graphies (in the sense of
critiques on writing culture and knowledge production of ethnicity, not critiques of ethnicities
themselves), or ―semiotic ethnocriticisms,‖ to quote Thomas Wägenbaur,4 and function as
analytical links between the three core chapters.
It is the distinctly ‗fictive‘ component to this analytically ethnological and experientially
ethnographic writing that is key to Tawada‘s critical poetics and politics, where ―the observing
narrator is as much a fiction as the constructed other‖ (Kraenzle, ―Limits of Travel‖ 248), and
which also interconnects Tawada‘s literary approach to Barthes‘s invention of a ‗fictive nation‘.
This pervasive fictitiousness is prevalent in her prose, poetic and essayistic texts, and not just in
the sense that these are fictional narratives and not autoethnographies or biographical travelogues
(although biographical details are often present), but rather the fictional also points to an
omnipresent representational and authorial instability, a resistance to realism as a
representational approach, and, perhaps most crucially, they narrate the performative qualities to

Baur‘s ―Writing Between Sensual Joy and Theoretical Interest in Language,‖ Ottmar Ette‘s ―Zeichenreiche: Insel-
Texte und Text-Inseln‖ 213-29, Florian Gelzer‘s ―Wenn ich spreche‖ 76-77, Walter Grond‘s Stimmen 91-99, and
Carola Hilmes ―Jeder Riß im Kopf‖ 324, represent the majority of works making this connection.
3 I will elaborate on both terms, but ‗fiktive Ethnologie‘ can be found in Tawada‘s ―Erzähler ohne Seelen‖ 24 and
‗ethnologische Poetologie‘ in her dissertation Spielzeug und Sprachmagie 14.
4 In his analysis of Tawada‘s ―Das Fremde aus der Dose,‖ Wägenbaur frames his reading of Tawada‘s texts as
‗semiotic ethnocriticism‘. He defines this term as ―Arnold Krupat has recently fused ‗ethnology‘ and ‗criticism‘ into
‗Ethnocriticism‘. He states ‗ethnocriticism is concerned with differences rather than oppositions, and so seeks to
replace oppositional with dialogical models‘. In the relative space between positivism or relativism, it searches for
relative truths: ‗As a critical discourse which claims to be both on and of the frontier, traversing middle ground
while aspiring to a certain centrality, descriptive and normative at once, it should come as no surprise that
ethnocriticism and the oxymoron have particular affinities‘.‖ Wägenbaur recognizes a particular ethnocritical
practice in Tawada‘s texts, which in representing the strange do not lose their strangeness. See Wägenbaur‘s
―Semiotic ethnocriticism‖ 343 for an outline of ethnocriticism.
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seemingly natural phenomena like race, gender, ethnicity and national belonging, found
throughout Tawada‘s texts. Yet this development of a fictive ethnology is also a key component
in her literary analyses as well. For example, in her dissertation Spielzeug und Sprachmagie in
der europäischen Literatur: Eine ethnologische Poetologie, Tawada most expansively employs
‗ethnologische Poetologie‘ as an analytical category and trope for literary investigation in
relation to representations of magic, masks, toys and dolls in texts by E.T.A. Hoffmann, Franz
Kafka and the French surrealist ethnographer Michel Leiris. She explains this concept of
‗ethnologische Poetologie‘ with:
In europäische Universitäten werden noch heute außereuropäische Kulturen als
Komplex erforscht, das heißt, Literatur, Eßkultur, Religionen und Management-
Strategien einer Kultur werden in einem einzigen Fach behandelt. Die Entstehung
solcher Fächer wie z.B. ‗Afrikanistik‘, ‗Indologie‘, ‗Sinologie‘ ist nicht von der
Geschichte des Kolonialismus und von dem sie konstruierenden ethnologischen
Blick zu trennen. Eine Umkehr dieses Blickes, eine Rückwendung dieses
‗ethnologischen‘ Modells auf die europäische Literatur jedoch verspricht eine
Bereicherung. Denn die Aufteilung der Gegenstandsbereiche in der Untersuchung
der ‗eigenen‘ Kultur und die damit verbundene disziplinäre Spezialisierung sind
nicht allein dadurch zu erklären, daß die Erforschung der ‗eigenen‘ Kultur der
Untersuchung ausgebildet hat. Vielmehr steckt darin auch eine Weigerung, die
abendländische Kultur, Wissenschaft und Technik ‗ethnologisch‘ zu betrachten.
Es gibt zwar das neue Fach ‗Europäische Ethnologie‘, aber diese beschäftigt sich
in erster Linie mit der Alltagskultur und schließt den Bereich moderner Literatur
weitgehend aus. Mein Begriff der ‗ethnologischen Poetologie‘ ist in keinem Fach
zu Hause, wohl aber artikuliert eher eine Sehnsucht und eine Notwendigkeit – sie
4