Residual Futures

Franz Prichard (PhD UCLA) is assistant professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. This would be his first book.Franz Prichard is assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University.

Alexander Zahlten, Harvard University:
This book provides a deeply fascinating view into a crucial trajectory that has not received enough attention in the study of media or visual arts in general, much less of Japan. The transition of media culture from the 1960s to the 1980s is deeply consequential for our situation today, and Prichard lays it out in surprising and lucid ways, always keeping an eye on the possibilities it contained. Immensely informative, this book will make a tremendous contribution to work on visual arts and to the study of the contexts of Japan.

Akira Mizuta Lippit, University of Southern California:
This original, provocative, and timely study expands the horizon of Japan studies, as well as literary and visual cultural studies, onto a complex urban terrain that is at once cosmopolitan and dystopic. Residual Futures renders a future-present that is formed in the atomic residues of the postwar planet, but also along a fault line that opens onto a future that has already come and gone.

Thomas Lamarre, McGill University:
Residual Futures traces connections between the rapidly changing cityscape of Tokyo in the 1960s and 1970s and transformations of the mediascape of literature, cinema, and photography. Prichard adroitly shows how the new mediascape strove to inhabit a strange new set of linkages inadvertently afforded by the concerted efforts to remake both city and country. Residual Futures calls attention to the unforeseen possibilities emerging from the tangled infrastructural skein of mediascape and cityscape.

Marilyn Ivy, Columbia University:
Franz Prichard's Residual Futures is a thrilling exploration of the literary and visual remaking of the urban landscape of Cold War Japan. It offers us radically new ways to think about the interrelationship of urban ecologies, media forms, aesthetics, and politics--not only in Japan of the 1960s and ’70s, but here and now.