Nuclear Futures in the Post-Fukushima Age

This groundbreaking volume explores new artistic forms that emerged in German-speaking Europe and Japan in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. Considering the cultural specificity of post-3.11 literature, poetry, theater, and film, while also attending to moments of crossing, hybridity, and transference, Nuclear Futures in the Post-Fukushima Age offers a critical model for examining the intertwining of transnational connection and ecological contamination in a global present marked by renewed nuclear threat. Bringing together incisive readings by eminent scholars of Germany and Japan as well as a newly translated work by Yoko Tawada, the volume offers a comparative humanities approach that is essential for reframing debates about environmental crisis and nuclear risk.

Hester Baer is Professor of German and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research and teaching focus on German literature and culture in the 20th and 21st centuries, film history, feminist media studies, and environmental humanities. Her recent publications include the monograph German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism (2021) and the edited volume Babylon Berlin, German Visual Spectacle, and Global Media Culture (2024). She currently serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of The German Quarterly.

Michele M. Mason is an Associate Professor of Japanese literary and cultural studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, whose works include Reading Colonial Japan: Text, Context and Critique and Dominant Narratives of Colonial Hokkaido and Imperial Japan: Envisioning the Periphery and the Modern Nation State. She has dedicated herself to anti-nuclear studies, education, and activism, which is embodied in her co-produced short documentary film entitled Witness to Hiroshima (2008) and a monograph in progress on the legacy of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.