Description:

Fake Comedy: Memory, Futurity, and Hope in Nagasaki

In novels such as Holy Water and Ground Zero, Nagasaki Seirai Yuichi, the Nagasaki-based novelist and prestigious Akutaga Prize winner, has long examined how people experience, and live with, multilayered memories associated with place. The son of atomic bomb survivors, Seirai served as the director of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum from 2010-2019. In his novels about the atomic bomb, Seirai has moved away from forms of narrativization commonly deployed in atomic bomb literature, such as self-narratives based on atomic bomb survivors’ own personal experiences. Instead, Seirai fictionalizes his own life in the contemporary vicinity of the hypocenter of the bombing, as a window onto how people experience the fear and sorrow that unexpectedly resurfaces in mundane everyday moments. In this workshop, Seirai introduces his recent novel, Fake Comedy, a comedic take on the atomic bombing inspired by the Book of Job in which President Trump visits the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum.

Co-presented by Anthropology, History, and the Kaplan Humanities Institute. Made possible in part by a Peace Promotion grant from the City of Nagasaki and the Harris Lecture Fund.

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The 2019-2020 Humanities Dialogue: MEMORIALIZING

A year-long public conversation about commemorating, contesting, and claiming from humanistic perspectives.

What stories do monuments tell?
When is remembrance also a repression?
How does memorializing shape the present?
How do we negotiate collective and disputed memories?

Presented in partnership with multiple Northwestern departments and programs, the Memorializing Dialogue will include talks by distinguished scholars and artists from different disciplinary perspectives.