"A spectacle of infinite sadness" : decoloniality, affect, and postwar Japanese calligraphy

Coming from a decolonial standpoint, this project argues that rhetoricians must actively seek out marginalized voices while shifting our approach to theories and methods to allow for more self-reflexive analyses. I analyze Japanese post-war calligrapher Inoue Yūichi’s Ah Yokokawa Kokumin-gakkō via affect theory as an example of how rhetoricians might attempt such an analysis. We must delink ourselves from analytic practices that ignore cultural difference for the sake of maintaining the borders of rhetoric. This ignorance of cultural difference leads to its violent erasure via uninformed analyses or to the further exclusion of marginalized cultures by refusing to incorporate Other voices into the canon. Ultimately, an encounter with an Other provides the opportunity to reify conventions, on the one hand, or the opportunity to reevaluate assumptions on the other. This project’s analysis advocates for the latter. Specifically, this analysis aims to open a space where conversations about methodological practice, relations to other cultures, and calligraphy can take place within the field of rhetorical studies and beyond.