Tanner Humanities Center

Cindi Textor, Associate Professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Utah, will give a public talk this spring drawing from her research on transnational Japan. Her scholarship examines Japan not as an isolated culture, but as a site where ideas and empires meet, focusing especially on the enduring legacies of Japanese imperialism and its intersections with American and other western empires. Her first book, Intersectional Incoherence: Zainichi Literature and the Ethics of Illegibility (University of California Press, 2024), analyzes moments of incoherence and unintelligibility in the work of Koreans in Japan, challenging conventional approaches to literary representation.

She is now at work on a second book that explores how modern Japan has engaged with and reconfigured white supremacist ideology, often through processes of translation. This new project argues that, even in a population largely considered non-white, white supremacy can operate and thrive when whiteness is ambiguous or provisional.