Subversions of Ethnicity in Yokomitsu Riichi’s Neo-Sensationist Writings

This chapter examines Yokomitsu Riichi's urban fiction, as well as his modernist treatise, in the context of the rhetoric of urban renewal that emerged in the wake of the Great Kantō Earthquake. The earthquake, which precipitated a crisis in the ideology of progress that had fueled national modernization for the previous several decades, inflected the fervor over-consumption practices promoted in the language of daily life reform to focus much more intensively on the self and the spirit. Yokomitsu responded to this through his “Neo-Sensationist” (shinkankaku) literature. His essay of that title strategically employs Kantian phenomenology to complicate and subvert essentialist phenomenological models and expose the ideologies of ethnic purity they implied. His urban fiction employed perceptually disorienting language to narrate the experience of protagonists who become cognitively estranged from their environments. In this way, his fiction directly disputed the ethnic essentialism that was chauvinistically being posited as the foundation for a new imperial urban renaissance.

Marrying Up

Against the backdrop of President Bill Clinton's 1994 Crime Bill, this chapter interrogates hypergamy or marrying up and the figure of the gold digger in urban fiction novels/street literature such as Sister Souljah's The Coldest Winter Ever (1999) , Omar Tyree's Flyy Girl, (1997) and Teri Woods' True to the Game (1998) alongside hip hop lyrics by Public Enemy. This portion of the book establishes how these influential texts champion patriarchal control as they highlight the relationship between state violence and intimate partner violence.