East Asian Humanities Workshop: "Botanical Imagination: Rethinking Plants in Modern Japan" by Jon Pitt

Please join us for the second EAHW of the winter quarter, featuring Jon L. Pitt on his new book, Botanical Imagination: Rethinking Plants in Modern Japan.

Botanical Imagination explores the complicated legacy and enduring lure of plant life in modern Japanese literature and media. Using critical plant studies, Jon L. Pitt examines an unlikely group of writers and filmmakers in modern Japan, finding in their works a desire to "become botanical" in both content and form. For nearly one hundred years, a botanical imagination grew in response to moments of crisis in Japan's modern history.

Pitt shows how artists were inspired to seek out botanical knowledge in order to construct new forms of subjectivity and attempt to resist certain forms of state violence. As he follows plants through the tangled histories of imperialism and state control, Pitt also uncovers the ways plants were used in the same violence that drove artists to turn to the botanical as a model of resistance in the first place. Botanical Imagination calls on us to rethink plants as significant but ambivalent actors and to turn to the botanical realm as a site of potentiality.

Jon L. Pitt is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the translator of Hiromi Ito's Tree Spirits Grass Spirits.

About the Series

Sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, the East Asian Humanities Workshop aims at promoting intra- and inter-departmental communication among faculty, graduate students, and visiting scholars who share research and teaching interests in East Asia in the Stanford community. In particular, it is intended to foster stronger ties between EALC faculty and graduate students across the China-Japan-Korea programs as well as greater cross-disciplinary exchange among East Asian Studies scholars across the humanities and social science disciplines, including literature, linguistics, history, art history, religion, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and political science. It is also intended to enhance graduate student professionalization. The workshop meets, on average, twice a month during the academic year and engages in a variety of activities determined by its participants.