Care, Kin, Crack-Up - Fukushima and the Intrusion of Gaia

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. How does environmental crisis become the impetus for a kind of caring that is also intense thinking? Faced with Fukushima, how do people make sense of nuclear enormity? Care, Kin, Crack-Up examines Japanese literature and activist narratives to show people at their most creative when struggling to engage ecological catastrophe as the “intrusion of Gaia.” Margherita Long explores the transformation of crack-ups (kurui, or madness) into art and thought, tracing how kurui is bound up with questions of care and kin. Reframing historical debates about Japan’s postwar peace constitution, military sexual slavery, and Minamata mercury poisoning, this book opens environmental humanities in feminist directions, drawing on ideas from Indigenous studies, disability studies, and Deleuze.