パネル5：The Imagination of Disaster 2: Analyzing the Effects

・Leisure Performances, Representation of Local Identity, and Recovery from Disasters / Jon Griffin Donlon (Tokai University)
There is little question that leisure performances such as the Carnival of New Orleans [Mardi Gras], and the bull pushing festival in Niigata, Japan, often help knit together local community, reflect group identity and values, and act to enforce continuity of culture while at the same time fostering so-called “hybridity.” That is, these festive settings are species of liminal zones offering both insulation from change and mechanisms through which cultural change may be absorbed, altered, and otherwise “handled;” quite literally played with in order to suss out danger or utility.
In 2004, the region around Niigata, Japan was powerfully struck by a devastating earthquake. In 2005, New Orleans was inundated by the effects of Katrina. Then, in 2010, Louisiana was impacted by the great man-made disaster of the British Petroleum drilling rupture. In such cases, cultural performances can play an important role in the reemergence of the pre-existing human communities. This paper focuses on discussing how cultural performances such as these festive settings often function to create social capital (good will) and, especially in times of disaster, “discharge” much of this capital both to sustain a continuity of tradition and to negotiate with the “new,” or emerging circumstances.
I will briefly reprise earlier research on the two regions, explaining the role of the relevant leisure performances and establishing a little of each community’s cultural past. This paper outlines the previous natural disasters and explains how the BP man-made event has now affected Louisiana. I will discuss how, in both regions, there was strong controversy -- each community struggling with the idea of going forward with the leisure performances (the bull pushing festival in Niigata and Mardi Gras), with contrarian voices suggesting that the resources involved be directly invested rather than “indirectly” consumed via creation of community through cultural performance continuity.

・An Unnaming: The Haitian Earthquake Metaphor / Danielle Legros Georges (Lesley University)
In January 2010, Haiti suffered a devastating earthquake which nearly destroyed its capital Port-au-Prince; a quake in which an extraordinarily large number of children, women, and men lost their lives. More than one million quake survivors were made homeless; with many remaining so today.
Everywhere in Port-au-Prince remain signs of the earthquake: Debris not yet picked up by the government; exposed interior walls; the blue and white tarps and tents under which people live—under which girls and women are especially vulnerable to violence; the houses bearing such stamps as MTPTC 4 or MTPTC à démolir painted by the Ministry for Public Works to indicate the degree of a building’s structural solidity or compromise.
Haitians, refer to the earthquake as bagay la—“that thing.” If a metaphor is a transfer, then the shift from the term “earthquake” to “that thing” has us leaping from a precise and measurable natural phenomenon to an unnamed zone or space. We know what an earthquake is: a trembling of the earth; seismic waves that propagate in fluid or solid materials. What the newly-created Haitian metaphor does is signal to us not what an earthquake is, or what the January 2010 earthquake was—but what this earthquake means, has meant, and will continue to mean for Haitians.
My essay will examine the Haitian metaphoric representation of the earthquake—touching upon the politics of ruin so often associated with Haiti, as well as the aesthetic/poetic tradition from which the new metaphor springs.

・From Chernobyl to Fukushima: Do the Pedagogics of Disaster Exist? / Frédérick Lemarchand (University of Caen)
What does the panic caused by the increasing occurrences of incidents involving several Japanese reactors at the Fukushima nuclear plant after the earthquake show us? Citizens, media and some analysts consistently drew a parallel with Chernobyl, as both memory and signifier, and this comparison has become an issue for the authorities and politicians of nuclearized states. Where does this fear of comparison come from, and is this comparison reasonable? After 15 years of research in sociology and anthropology, years dedicated to make sense of and relay the experience of Chernobyl, not as regards the merely technical aspects of the event, but as regards the changes it caused in the lives of the Chernobyl inhabitants, I can’t resist having a closer look at the incident in Japan, using my personal experience of Chernobyl. The sad lesson learned in Fukushima will be, once again to show the limits of the notion of risk as the computational approach of what is threatening us. Catastrophe, as both occurrence and experience is hard to pinpoint in models of theories and numbers. Opening new imaginaries of vulnerability, regaining our ability to imagine, and to imagine the worst is an emergency.

・When We Ourselves Tremble: Tawada Yoko’s Leçons de Poétique & the Othering of Disaster / Paul McQuade (Sophia University)
Tawada Yoko has been heralded as one of the most important Japanese writers of the contemporary global world. Born in Japan, she currently resides in Germany, and has garnered an impressive list of awards in both countries and in both languages. In the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster, Tawada was invited to give three lessons in poetics at the University of Hamburg. These lessons were then translated from the German into French, and collected alongside other essays in a book entitled Journal des jours tremblants: Après Fukushima (A Record of Trembling Days: After Fukushima). As yet, none of these essays exists in English, and only one in Japanese. This paper explores Tawada’s construction and critique of Japan’s historical road to modernity and its relation to its insularity and the Other and othering of the Occident. From there, it examines an essay which deals explicitly with the earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear crisis which has begun to go under the appellation of “3/11”. I examine “After Fukushima” in relation to the historical narrative of the previous essays, exploring the dynamics of a the transcendental effect of disaster, arguing that Tawada demonstrates how the ultimately ungraspable experience of disaster leads to the fall-back of othering, whereby Fukushima, like Hiroshima, becomes an isolated “island” of meaning. In doing so, I open to an English-speaking audience a perspective of the 3/11 disaster which challenges dominant cultural paradigms of self and Other, East and West, and the transparent dominance of those who survive.