A floating sense of selves : Kikou Yamata's mediation of Japan

Abstract

Born in Lyon to a French mother and a Japanese diplomat, Kikou Yamata (1897-1975) has authored a substantial number of texts in diverse genres, some written in Japanese, the majority in French. This talk undertakes to read Yamata's literary legacy from three standpoints: her role as a cultural mediator; her position as a woman writer and her subsequent reappraisal of the reified Oriental femininity and, finally, her coming to terms with her French-Japanese identity. These three standpoints are, in fact, closely intertwined, for they all converge towards various types of othernesses: woman as sexual other, Japan as topographical other and hybridity as racial other. We shall therefore attempt to ascertain the extent to which Yamata's writings may convey an innovative perspective on the long-standing East-West politics of othering and its inferred motifs at work in literary fiction and elsewhere. Also, we shall investigate the theme of floating self in Yamata's writings, with a view to assessing its potential to break free from the dialectics of hegemony and alienation subsumed in the traditional East-West representation.