Nuclear Futures in the Post-Fukushima Age

Hester Baer is Professor of German and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research and teaching focus on German literature and culture in the 20th and 21st centuries, film history, feminist media studies, and environmental humanities. Her recent publications include the monograph German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism (2021) and the edited volume Babylon Berlin, German Visual Spectacle, and Global Media Culture (2024). She currently serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of The German Quarterly.Michele M. Mason is an Associate Professor of Japanese literary and cultural studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, whose works include Reading Colonial Japan: Text, Context and Critique and Dominant Narratives of Colonial Hokkaido and Imperial Japan: Envisioning the Periphery and the Modern Nation State. She has dedicated herself to anti-nuclear studies, education, and activism, which is embodied in her co-produced short documentary film entitled Witness to Hiroshima (2008) and a monograph in progress on the legacy of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.

• Introduction.-Nuclear Futures: Intertwined Histories and Imaginative Visions in Post-Fukushima Japan and Germany.-Hester Baer and Michele M. Mason.-From Half-Lives to Eternal Life: On Contamination and Isolation in Yoko Tawada’s Post-3.11 Eco Texts .-Jeremy Redlich.-Animal BabelYoko Tawada.- translated by Doug Slaymaker.-The Fractured Looking-glass: 20th-Century History in Post-Meltdown Japanese Theater.-Justine Wiesinger.-Our Fukushima, Our Earth: Nuclear Protest Poetry Following Fukushima.-Jeffrey Angles.-Fission, Food, and Family: Alina Bronsky’s Baba Dunja’s Last Love and the Possibility of “Bad Environmental” Narrative .-Bradley Boovy.-Slow Violence in Japan’s Nuclear Future: Kirino Natsuo’s Baraka .-Rachel DiNitto.-Of Culture and Contamination: Adolf Muschg’s Returning Home to Fukushima (2018).-Katharina Gerstenberger.-Filming the Phantasms of Fukushima: Relationality and Repair in Doris Dörrie’s Fukushima, Mon Amour (2016) .-Hester Baer and Michele M. Mason.-Quantum Narratives and Zen Moments: Thinking Nuclear Pasts and Futures .-Emily E. Jones.-Epilogue .-Hester Baer and Michele M. Mason.