UCLA

This dissertation aims to unpack the critic Hanada Kiyoteru (1909–1974)’s conceptualization of mass organization throughout the wartime and postwar periods, focusing on his formalist approach. Hanada is known for leading the theory of avant-garde art (abangyarudo geijyutsu) in postwar Japan. His idea of avant-garde art consists of the proximity between art and politics, the renewal of realism, a critical break with surrealism, and contiguity between mass movements and artists. While these ideas were widely shared among literary critics, artists, and filmmakers who engaged with radical politics during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Hanada’s writings have only recently begun to receive scholarly attention due to the abstractness of his ideas and the anecdotal and interdisciplinary nature of his writings. My dissertation provides a perspective to understand the interdisciplinary discussion of politics and art around Hanada by scrutinizing his trajectory of conceptualizing mass organization, focusing on his interest in form/matter/object as method. I historicize Hanada’s writings on mass organization in three historical junctures: the wartime, the immediate postwar, and around 1960. Preceding scholarship tends to contextualize Hanada’s writings alongside postwar radical politics, but I argue that his writings on mass organization started within the context of national mobilization during the wartime, and that it also inherits the discussions on the proletarian cultural movement in the interwar period. I examine Hanada’s continued and modified conceptualization of mass organization in the immediate postwar period and around 1960, and its proximity to discourses on modern art. I read Hanada’s writings as an intersection where discussions about art and politics in the literary field cross paths with discourses of modern art, and I present his formalist conceptualization of the masses as a way to rethink the historical periodization and categorization of cultural history in 20th century Japan.