Daniela Kato PhD - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Daniela Kato PhD

The Dark Mountain Project, 2023

In the mountains of Japan there grows a red-leaved plant whose aromatic and bitter leaves have fl... more In the mountains of Japan there grows a red-leaved plant whose aromatic and bitter leaves have flavoured the country's cuisine for thousands of years. Daniela Kato forages for shiso's deep time and folktale roots, and discovers its regenerative powers for both body and soul within a rigid agrarian culture.

Garland Magazine - Issue #30 Taste-makers, 2023

Daniela Kato writes about the foraging practices that she shares with a village community under t... more Daniela Kato writes about the foraging practices that she shares with a village community under the mountain’s shadow.

The Dark Mountain Project, 2022

How can you find depth and meaning in a disconnected industrialised food culture? In our latest D... more How can you find depth and meaning in a disconnected industrialised food culture? In our latest Dark Kitchen series, exploring the uncivilised larder in times of breakdown, we head into the forests of Japan, as writer and researcher Daniela Kato goes in search of the adzuki-washing mountain crone.

Ekphrasis, 2020

This article proposes eco-intermediality as a cross-fertilization between what has been the hithe... more This article proposes eco-intermediality as a cross-fertilization between what has been the hitherto predominantly thematic orientation of ecocriticism and the more form-oriented concerns of intermediality studies. To explore the transformative potential of this eco-intermedial conceptual framework, I focus on the 2013 manga adaptation of Hōjōki by the Japanese visual artist Mizuki Shigeru. Hōjōki (1212) is a medieval essay written by the Japanese poet-monk Kamo no Chōmei and bearing witness to a string of environmental disasters that overtook Kyoto at around the end of the twelfth century. The combination of a poignant environmental theme with a long history of translations and adaptations makes this work particularly amenable to an eco-intermedial approach. My main argument is that the post-Fukushima adaptation by Mizuki is a game-changer in such history, inasmuch as the artist brings his unique environmental imaginary and the distinctive formal affordances of manga to bear on Chōmei's text, so as to convey the sense of a world where objects and phenomena are endowed with agency and thus outside full human control. The ultimate aim of the present article is to highlight the far-reaching ecological implications of the intermedial textures that Mizuki creates in his manga Hōjōki to express an environmental imaginary hinged on material agency and empathy.

ISLE - Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2019

ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2019

Recent years have seen a plethora of fairy-tale adaptations for both adults and children that the... more Recent years have seen a plethora of fairy-tale adaptations for both adults and children that thematize human-animal interactions, interspecific transformations, and human-animal hybrids in various forms of media such as literature, film, television, and visual and performing arts. Fairy-tale criticism has responded to this emerging canon of animal-themed fairy-tale adaptations based most notably on "Little Red Riding Hood," "Beauty and the Beast," and "The Little Mermaid" from feminist, postcolonialist, cultural materialist, and other perspectives.

Studies in Travel Writing, 2018

This article focuses on the travelogues that Emily Georgiana Kemp and Yosano Akiko wrote, less th... more This article focuses on the travelogues that Emily Georgiana
Kemp and Yosano Akiko wrote, less than two decades apart, on
their journeys in Northeast China: The Face of Manchuria,
Korea and Russian Turkestan (1911) and Travels in Manchuria
and Mongolia (1928), respectively. Led by an interdisciplinary
exploration of critical theory in cultural translation, visual studies,
feminist geographies and postcolonial travel writing, it compares
and contrasts the distinct ways in which Kemp and Yosano
approach the ethics of the traveller/travellee encounter, the
aestheticisation of cultural difference in the colonial theatre as
well as the entangled relationship between the verbal and the
visual representations of travel and place, and thereby bear
witness to the storm of geopolitical change then sweeping the
region. While noting significant differences between the
circumstances of Kemp’s 1911 travelogue and Yosano’s 1928
account, the essay explores the ethical and affective implications
of their shifting positionalities in this particularly contested
contact zone.

Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 2014

This paper is an exploration of the ecopoetics of Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts (1966) within the c... more This paper is an exploration of the ecopoetics of Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts (1966) within the context of current critical discussions on the relations between modernist abstract art and nature, with particular reference to the concept of biomorphism and its trajectory in English art history and criticism throughout the twentieth century. It also draws on Tim Ingold’s ideas concerning the interactions between the inscriptive practices of writing, drawing and painting, and the ways of imagining, seeing and inhabiting the world they entail on the part of viewers to show how Briggflatts shapes a biocentric worldview that binds the poem and the phenomenal world together in an ongoing movement of growth and transformation that is life itself.

Books by Daniela Kato PhD

Traduire les Voix de la Nature / Translating the Voices of Nature, eds. Kriistina Taivalkoski-Shilov and Bruno Poncharal, Editions quebecoises de l'oeuvre, 2020

Bringing together the concept of environmental imaginary and current approaches to translation th... more Bringing together the concept of environmental imaginary and current approaches to translation that emphasize the situatedness and agency of the translator, this essay analyses a collaborative project between Minakata Kumagusu and Frederick Victor Dickins. In the early 1900s they engaged in a translation of Kamo no Chōmei's Hōjōki (1212), a Japanese medieval work that bears witness to a series of environmental disasters. Minakata's and Dickins' differing renditions of key passages of the text provide insights into the specific ways that distinct environmental imaginaries are set in motion through translation and crucially hinge on the eco-political agency of the translator.

Re-Orienting the Fairy Tale: Contemporary Adaptations across Cultures, edited by Mayako Murai and Luciana Cardi, Wayne State University Press, 2020

This chapter explores the ecological dimensions of Carter’s literary fairy tale and offers an eco... more This chapter explores the ecological dimensions of Carter’s literary fairy tale and offers an ecofeminist interpretation of a fairy-tale forest as a borderland that lies beyond the nature-culture dichotomy.

Representing the Exotic and the Familiar: Politics and Perception in Literature, John Benjamins, 2019

Perhaps more than any other contemporary cultural form, the fairy-tale adaptation is a privileged... more Perhaps more than any other contemporary cultural form, the fairy-tale adaptation is a privileged site for questioning the boundaries between the familiar and the exotic at multiple levels. "Adaptation" is used in a broad sense here, to refer to the ways that contemporary works of literature and art revise and reimagine conventional expectations of fairy-tale representations. According to fairy-tale scholar Cristina Bacchilega, adaptation can no longer be regarded as a literature-centred practice involving the exclusive connection between two texts at a time. Adaptation is a transformative practice that weaves multiple texts with one another, translating them across media, genres and languages in a much broader intertextual dialogue. And such dialogue unfolds amidst the materiality of culture and its asymmetrical power dynamics, meaning that it goes well beyond the comparison of multiple versions of recognizable fairy tales to address as well ideas of womanhood, motherhood, marriage, nuclear family, and so on, across a range of critical discourses and everyday practices. 1 Contemporary visual artists in particular are drawn to the polymorphic qualities and possibilities of fairy tales, often finding in them a doorway into complex, dark issues of our time. As Jack Zipes explains, in a globalized world that appears to have gone haywire, the idyllic and escapist impulses that were prevalent in artistic renderings of fairy-tale realms from the nineteenth century through the 1960s are no longer tenable. 2 Ever since, this perception of a world out of joint has led visual 1.

Women in Transit through Literary Liminal Spaces, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Much has been written in the past two decades on the gendered significance of travel writing by m... more Much has been written in the past two decades on the gendered significance of travel writing by mid-and late nineteenth-century women for a rethinking of their freedoms and constraints within what has been the single main dichot-omy motivating feminist scholarship since its very outset, that between public and private spheres. It is certainly not for their rarity that nineteenth-century women's travels and their writings remain of interest to literary criticism today. Ever since the publication of Shirley Foster's Across New Worlds (1990) and Sarah Mills's Discourses of Difference (1991), two groundbreaking analyses of women's travel writing in the period of high imperialism, various studies have shown how key factors such as Western imperial expansion opened up new opportunities for a growing number of middle-class Western women of some independent means to travel to the remotest parts of the world and write accounts of their experiences. The motivations for this increased mobility, however, included more than just wifely or daughterly duties to husbands or fathers who were colonial officials or officers. Projects such as missionary and philanthropic work, scientific research, the quest for health, or the lure of the foreign and 'uncivilized' as a way of escaping the constraints of domesticity at home and searching for a new identity away show that travel was increasingly seen as a source of empowerment by many of those women seeking to expand their horizon of knowledge and arena of agency at a time when institutions of learning and professional independence were still generally closed to them (Blunt 1994: 34-8; Smith 2001: 15-19). By exercising in situ their observational powers and learning about foreign customs, languages, social institutions and natural environments, women traditionally confined by their patriarchal culture to the domestic sphere and its requisite immobility began more and more boldly to trespass on 'the constitutive masculinity of the traveller' (Smith 2001: 17). The awareness