DEPARTMENT OF ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES

Patrick Noonan is a scholar of Japanese literature, film, and visual culture. His research and teaching focus on the aesthetics of cultural production within the context of modern Japan, including the cultural and social movements of the 1960s, modernist and avant-garde arts, political thought, media theory, and popular culture. At Northwestern since 2014, he received a BA in Modern Literary Studies from UC Santa Cruz and a PhD in Japanese literature with a Designated Emphasis in Film Studies from UC Berkeley.     

Professor Noonan’s research is broadly devoted to exploring the intersections between cultural form and the political and economic systems of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His first book project, Age of Disaffection: The Aesthetic Critique of Politics in 1960s Japan (under contract, Columbia University Press), reexamines the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the Japanese 1960s. Breaking with approaches that equate the politics of art with the tactics of political movements, it argues that disillusionment with leftwing radicalism, postwar democracy, and established modes of protest fundamentally transformed the politics of cultural production in the 1960s and subsequent decades. Fellowships from the Japan Foundation and the Kaplan Institute for Humanities supported the research and writing of this book.      

His second project, tentatively titled Recessionary Aesthetics in Post-Bubble Japan, explores how Japanese popular culture—from literature and cinema to manga and animation—has responded to economic crisis since the collapse of the asset price bubble in the early 1990s. With its connotations of passivity and latent possibility, “recessionary aesthetics” tracks the interplay between the abstraction of the material world within a financialized economy and the possibilities for renewed forms of collective life within a faltering economic system. A grant from the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies has supported research for this project.  

Noonan’s essays have appeared in scholarly venues such as The Review of Japanese Culture and Society, The Sixties, and Modernism/modernity. He has also collaborated on large-scale translation and editorial projects. He is the co-translator of Camera Obtrusa: The Action Documentaries of Hara Kazuo (Kaya, 2009), a compilation of the documentary filmmaker Hara Kazuo’s memoir and notes on the production of The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On. He is also co-editor (with Earl Jackson Jr.) of a special issue of Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies on the topic of genre in Asian cinema. Currently, he is a series editor of Comics Studies: Aesthetics, Histories, and Practices (De Gruyter), a book series aimed at expanding the field of Comics Studies by publishing research from around the world and across disciplines on forms of sequential art and narrative.  

At Northwestern, Noonan has core appointments in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and the Program in Comparative Literary Studies, and is an affiliate of the interschool PhD program in Rhetoric, Media, Publics. He offers undergraduate courses on the history of Japanese cinema, cybernetics and new media, activist art in Asia, and the relationship between culture and the economy. He has also offered graduate seminars on research methods in Asian Studies and Post-Fascist Aesthetics in Japan, Germany, and Italy. He emphasizes collaborative work in his teaching and has co-taught a course with Prof. Laura Hein (History) on the city in modern Japan and a course on neoliberal media cultures in Japan and the US with Prof. James Hodge (English). In 2017, he organized a two-day retrospective of Japanese Experimental Cinema at Block Cinema, which included a discussion with filmmaker Ōe Masanori and film scholar and curator Hirasawa Go. Noonan is currently co-lead of Northwestern’s Buffett Institute for Global Affair’s Catalyst Grant Group in Media Aesthetics, an interdisciplinary project that seeks to understand how contemporary media and information technologies shape the experience of everyday life.   

Books

Age of Disaffection: The Aesthetic Critique of Politics in 1960s Japan (under contract, Columbia University Press) 

Camera Obtrusa: The Action Documentaries of Hara Kazuo (Kaya, 2009)

Selected Publications

“An Avant-Garde of the Mind: Ōe Masanori and Psychedelic Cinema in the Global Sixties,”
The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture 14.2 (2021)

“Genre in Asian Cinema: An Introduction,” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 46.1 (2020). Special issues on “Genre in Asian Cinema.”

“Whither Politics? Photography and Protest in the ‘Provoke Era.’” Modernism/modernity Print Plus (July, 2017)

“The Alterity of Cinema: Subjectivity, Self-Negation, and Self-Realization in Yoshida Kijū’s Film Theory,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society Vol. 22 (2010)

 Yoshida Kijū, “My Theory of Film: A Logic of Self-Negation,” trans. Patrick Noonan, Review of Japanese Culture and Society Vol 22 (2010)