Tatiana Sulovska

Tatiana examines avant-garde film, art, literature, and cultural criticism in post-war Japan, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, tracing the theorization of both state violence and political violence by non-state actors as a part of an imaginary that extends through the present and is thematically centered on the Japanese Red Army ("JRA"), a terrorist group that emerged from the 1960s protest movement. She also aims to restore the rightful place of Terayama Shūji at the center of the debate on political and state violence in the 1960s and 1970s, shedding new light on this cult figure, frequently cast as an apolitical provocateur by extant scholarships. Tatiana's dissertation discusses works by Terayama not yet considered in English-language monographs. This includes his essays describing his participation at the 1972 Olympic Spielstrasse (cultural events that paralleled the sports) and the Black September incident (the deadly hostage taking of Israeli athletes in Munich), alongside his writings on JRA members Okamoto Kōzō and Mori Tsuneo.

In her dissertation, Tatinana considers avant-garde cultural production, such as the collaborations between film directors Adachi Masao and Wakamatsu Kōji who together produced several films that addressed themselves to the JRA expressly, including the Japanese Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War, while innovatively framing such endeavors as history of thought conceptualizing political violence in the context of the Vietnam War and decolonization. The works she interrogates were conceived as inquiries into the legitimacy of state violence and its limits. Tatiana proposes that the JRA became the focal point of ongoing interrogations centered on the legitimacy of state and political violence, precisely because it chose violence as means of direct action. Additionally, she seeks to reconsider the 1972 Asama Sansō hostage-taking incident, conventionally framed as the end of the 1960s protest movement by narratives that would propose false equivalence between the student members of the JRA and the broad multi-year, multi-party protest movement as a whole.