Abstract:

This study compares various modes of literary censorship in Japan and the United States from the 1920s to the 1960s under imperialism and democracy, employed by occupiers and inflicted on the occupied. Considered as a "minor literature," banned fiction and poetry serve not only as marginalized others to be catalogued and assimilated into the realm of the readable, but also as traces that suggest the contours of the unreadable and unwritable. Three broad themes destabilize notions of radically identifiable modes of suppression and enable my comparison: how the archivization of censorship reveals the explicit and implicit components of historical censors; how sedition and obscenity--the two major criteria for literary censorship during the period--were internalized and resisted by the censored; and how official state censorship forms a continuum with self-censorship, critical scorn, and canon formation. Drawing on an array of Japanese and American literary and historical sources--including collections of censors' examination copies, statistical analyses of book production and sales, literary manuscripts, trial records, and police reports--I propose that any study of marginal literatures must also recognize the continued construction and reconstruction of new margins by critical discourses. "Pages Crossed" argues the ethical necessity of reading the literary casualties left behind in the path of a violence to texts that transcends war and its political institutions.