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William Marotti


Associate Professor


Contact Information

Email    marotti@history.ucla.edu
Office  5365 Bunche Hall
Phone  310-825-4368

William Marotti teaches modern Japanese history, with an emphasis on everyday life and cultural-historical issues. He is also Chair of the East Asian Studies M.A. Interdepartmental Degree Program. He received his doctorate in 2001 from the University of Chicago’s Department of East Asian Civilizations and Cultures.

Prior to joining the UCLA faculty, William participated from 2001 to 2003 in the Project on the Cold War as Global Conflict at New York University’s International Center for Advanced Studies (as a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellow), and from 2003 to 2004 in the Expanding East Asian Studies project (ExEAS) of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. From 2004 to 2006, William taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the History department at UC Santa Cruz.

William's major research project to date culminated in his book, Money, Trains and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan (Duke University Press, 2013)(UCLA press release here). The study addresses the politics of culture and everyday life in Japan in the early 1960s, explored through a focus upon transformations in avant-garde artistic production and performance. The book examines the advent of this art-based activism in Japan in the late 1950s and early 1960s in its complex relation with an internationalized art world, mass culture, domestic protest movements, and evolving forms of state practice, law, and surveillance. It reflects upon the significance of this history for understanding the 1960s as a global moment, and the particular role of art and performance in these transformations.

William's current project, “The Art of Revolution: Politics and Aesthetic Dissent in Japan’s 1968” (under contract, Duke University Press), follows this work with an expanded consideration of the politics of the 1960s in Japan, and their articulation with the global phenomena of the decade. This study includes an examination of late 1960s Japanese political mobilization, focused upon the politics of violence, the problem of political subjectivation, and the distinct forms of activism arising in this period; this part of the larger study appeared in an earlier form in the February 2009 issue of the American Historical Review for their forum on "The International 1968" (see publications below for copies of this and other materials). Marotti also presented portions of his research on the global and local aspects of 1968 in the American Historical Association convention of 2018 in the first of six linked panels on "Fifty Years After 1968" (available here in the C-SPAN archives). Other portions of this work have been unfolded in a variety of venues, including art catalogs, journals ranging from boundary 2 to theater and dance, and in edited volumes (see Selected Publications below). Having worked through these different, interrelated aspects of the problem of 1968 in Japan, Marotti is drawing this work together and reworking it for the book in progress.

William’s broader research interests include post-WWII Japan, global history, the 1960s, Cold War, comparability, critical theory, everyday life, art and politics, performance, law and legitimation, and protest movements. He also serves as director for the Japanese Arts and Globalizations (JAG) multi-campus research group, whose activities may be found here:
www.jag.ucla.edu

Degrees

Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2001

A.B., University of Michigan, 1988

Selected Publications

Money, Trains and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan (Duke University Press, 2013).

(Reviewed in Art In America, November 2013; American Historical Review, June 2014 ("featured review"); Journal of Asian Studies, Feb 2015; Journal of Japanese Studies, Summer 2014; Comparative Studies in Society and History, July 2014; Pacific Affairs, March 2015; Visual Studies, June 2014; 『あいだ』 216号 (Oct 2014), Japan Forum, June 2015; Monumenta Nipponica 2015; Nihon Kenkyū, October 2017, Japan Times, July 20, 2013. Pictured in Hyperallergic's Top Ten list 2013)

Adapted excerpt:"Creative Destruction,"Artforum International (February 2013).

William Marotti, ed., Art and Street Politics in the Global 1960s: Nakajima Yoshio and the Global Avant-Garde (Routledge, 2023). 

"The Performance of Police and the Theatre of Protest," Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 35 no.2 (Spring 2021), 117-23. 

“The Perception of Violence, the Violence of Perception, and the Origins of Japan’s 1968,” The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ’68 (London: Verso, November 2020).

William Marotti, “The Problematics of Butoh and the Essentialist Trap - William Marotti (translated by the author),” The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance, ed. Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario (London: Routledge, 2018), 92-8.

“One Stop from Yoyogi: Shinjuku and the Politics of Violence and Ambiguity in Japan’s 1968,” 「代々木から一駅はなれて:日本の1968年における新宿、そして暴力と曖昧さの政治性」1968: Art in the Turbulent Age (exhibition catalog), ed. Mizunuma Hirokazu (Chiba: Chiba National Museum of Art, Japan, 2018), 24-34; 289-300 (in English and Japanese).

“Strange Illuminations: Matsuzawa Yutaka from Civilizational Synthesis to Anticivilization Uprising,” 「不思議な輝き: 松沢宥 文明的総合から反文明の蜂起」From Nirvana to Catastrophe: Matsuzawa Yutaka and his ‘Commune in Imaginary Space’ (exhibition catalog), ed. Yoshiko Shimada (Tokyo: Ota Fine Arts Tokyo, 2017), 8-24 (in English and Japanese).

“The Art of the Everyday, as Crisis: Objets, Installations, Weapons, and the Origin of Politics,” boundary 2, vol. 42, no. 3 (August 2015): 79-96

“Here or Somewhere: Thoughts on the Global Contemporaneity of Butoh”/ “Aquí o en algún lugar: reflexiones sobre la contemporaneidad global del butoh,” in “Raíces profundas de la danza,” special edition, Danza Cuerpo Obsession (2015): 50-60.

“Proletarian Who Possessed Objets: the 1960s Politics of Akasegawa Genpei,” in Akasegawa Genpei no geijutsu genronten: 1960 nendai kara genzai made = “The Principles of Art” by Genpei Akasegawa: From 1960s to the present (exhibition catalog), ed. Mizunuma Hirokazu, Matsuoka Takeshi, and Iwao Yoshinobu (Chiba: Chiba National Museum of Art, Japan, 2014), 14-21; 479-24 (in English and Japanese).

“The Untimely Timeliness of Nakajima Yoshio,” 「中島由夫:時代からずれた適時性」Nakajima Yoshio Syndrome - Art is always the next possibility, ed. Nakajima Yoshio Syndrome Committee, (Tokyo: Nakajima Yoshio Syndrome Committee, 2015), 8-17 (in English and Japanese).

“Challenge to Music: The Music group’s sonic politics,” in Tomorrow is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies , ed. Benjamin Piekut (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 109-138. 


“The Lives and Afterlives of Art and Politics in the 1960s, from Anpo/Anpan to Bigakkō,” in Anti-Academy, Alice Maude-Roxby, ed. Joan Giroux, (Manchester: John Hansard Gallery/distributed by Cornerhouse, 2013), 27-37.

"Japan 1968: The Performance of Violence and the Theater of Protest," American Historical Review (February 2009): 97-135.

"Sounding the Everyday: the Music group and Tone Yasunao’s early work," Yasunao Tone Noise Media Language, ed. Brandon LaBelle, Errant Bodies Press, Los Angeles/Copenhagen, 2007.

"Political aesthetics: activism, everyday life, and art’s object in 1960's Japan,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 7, 4 (2006).

Simulacra and Subversion in the Everyday: Akasegawa Genpei's 1000-yen copy, critical art, and the State," Postcolonial Studies 4, 2(July, 2001): 211-239


日本の1960年代前衛芸術運動と土方巽、即ち土方の舞踏を評価する諸問題Nihon no 1960 nendai zen`ei geijutsu undo to Hijikata Tatsumi, sunawachi Hijikata Tatsumi no buto o hyoka suru shomondai" [Hijikata Tatsumi and Japanese Avant-garde art movements of the 1960s; Problems in Evaluating Hijikata Tatsumi's Butoh], Choreologia 24, (2001): 48-5.3.

Roundtable discussion: James Elkins, Ed. What Do Artists Know? (forthcoming, Penn State U Press, 2012).

Review: Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity, Identity, and Body Culture in Modern Japan, by Dennis J. Frost. American Historical Review(April 2012): 504-5.

Review: Concerned Theatre Japan The graphic art of Japanese theatre 1960-1980,by David G. Goodman. Journal of Asian Studies 58, 4 (November, 1999): 1140-2.


舞踏の問題性と本質主義の罠 "Buto no mondaisei to honshitsushugi no wana" (The problematics of Butoh and the essentialist trap),
Shiataa Aatsu 8 (May 1997): 88-96.

60年代前衛芸術と土方巽 Rokuju nendai zen'ei geijutsu to Hijikata Tatsumi" (1960's Avant-Garde Art and Hijikata Tatsumi), Hijikata Tatsumi `98 Tsushin 2 (January 1998): 1.

From the Theatre Festival in Zagreb, Croatia," translation of Nishido Kojin, Kuroachia, zagurebu no engekisai kara," in Croatia 1996. Tourdays with Gekidan Kaitaisha, Miyauchi Tatsu, (Iokyo: Joho Senta shuppan-kyoku, 1997), 28.

Current Courses by Term

2022 Fall Quarter

Seminar: Japanese History

2023 Winter Quarter

Seminar: Japanese History

Previous Courses by Term

2019 Winter Quarter

Seminar: Japanese History

2018 Fall Quarter

Seminar: Japanese History

2018 Spring Quarter

Topics in History: World History

2018 Winter Quarter

Postwar Japanese History through Film

Topics in History: Theory of History

2017 Fall Quarter

Fiat Lux Freshman Seminars

2017 Spring Quarter

Fiat Lux Freshman Seminars

2017 Winter Quarter

Fiat Lux Freshman Seminars

Capstone Seminar: History -- Japan

Topics in History: Japan

2016 Fall Quarter

Postwar Japanese History through Film

Advanced Historiography: Theory of History

2016 Spring Quarter

Advanced Historiography: Japan

2015 Spring Quarter

Modern Japanese History, 1850 to 1945

Capstone Seminar: History -- Historical Theory

Advanced Historiography: Japan

2015 Winter Quarter

Fiat Lux Freshman Seminars

Variable Topics in Japanese History

Topics in History: Theory of History

2014 Winter Quarter

Japanese History: Modern, 1868 to Present

Seminar: Japanese History

2013 Fall Quarter

Seminar: Japanese History

2013 Spring Quarter

Fiat Lux Freshman Seminars

Topics in History: Japan

2013 Winter Quarter

Japanese History: Modern, 1868 to Present

Topics in History: Japan

2012 Winter Quarter

Introduction to Asian Civilizations: History of Japan

Fiat Lux Freshman Seminars

Advanced Historiography: Theory of History

2011 Fall Quarter

Japanese History: Modern, 1868 to Present

Capstone Seminar: History -- East Asia

Topics in History: Japan

2011 Spring Quarter

Introduction to Asian Civilizations: History of Japan

Fiat Lux Freshman Seminars

Capstone Seminar: History -- East Asia

Topics in History: Japan

2011 Winter Quarter

Japanese History: Modern, 1868 to Present

Topics in History: Japan

2010 Fall Quarter

Topics in History: Japan

2010 Spring Quarter

Introduction to Asian Civilizations: History of Japan

Capstone Seminar: History -- East Asia

Topics in History: Japan

2010 Winter Quarter

Advanced Historiography: Theory of History

2009 Spring Quarter

Introduction to Asian Civilizations: History of Japan

Topics in World History

2009 Winter Quarter

Japanese History: Modern, 1868 to Present

Undergraduate Variable Topics Research Seminars: History -- East Asia

2008 Winter Quarter

Japanese History: Modern, 1868 to the Present

Undergraduate Variable Topics Research Seminars: History -- East Asia

Topics in History: Japan

2007 Winter Quarter

Japanese History: Modern, 1868 to the Present

Undergraduate Variable Topics Seminars: East Asia

Topics in History: Japan

2006 Fall Quarter

Undergraduate Variable Topics Seminars: East Asia

Topics in History: Japan

Previous Courses by Course

HIST 285B
Seminar: Japanese History

2019 Winter Quarter

2014 Winter Quarter

HIST 285A
Seminar: Japanese History

2018 Fall Quarter

2013 Fall Quarter

HIST C214
Topics in History: World History

2018 Spring Quarter

HIST C187O
Topics in History: World History

2018 Spring Quarter

HIST 201Q
Topics in History: Theory of History

2018 Winter Quarter

2015 Winter Quarter

HIST 173D
Postwar Japanese History through Film

2018 Winter Quarter

2016 Fall Quarter

HIST 19
Fiat Lux Freshman Seminars

2017 Fall Quarter

2017 Spring Quarter

2017 Winter Quarter

2015 Winter Quarter

2013 Spring Quarter

2012 Winter Quarter

2011 Spring Quarter

HIST 201M
Topics in History: Japan

2017 Winter Quarter

2013 Spring Quarter

2013 Winter Quarter

2011 Fall Quarter

2011 Spring Quarter

2011 Winter Quarter

2010 Fall Quarter

2010 Spring Quarter

2008 Winter Quarter

2007 Winter Quarter

2006 Fall Quarter

HIST 191R
Capstone Seminar: History -- Japan

2017 Winter Quarter

HIST 200Q
Advanced Historiography: Theory of History

2016 Fall Quarter

2012 Winter Quarter

2010 Winter Quarter

HIST 200M
Advanced Historiography: Japan

2016 Spring Quarter

2015 Spring Quarter

HIST 191P
Capstone Seminar: History -- Historical Theory

2015 Spring Quarter

HIST 172C
Modern Japanese History, 1850 to 1945

2015 Spring Quarter

HIST 171
Variable Topics in Japanese History

2015 Winter Quarter

HIST 172C
Japanese History: Modern, 1868 to Present

2014 Winter Quarter

2013 Winter Quarter

2011 Fall Quarter

2011 Winter Quarter

2009 Winter Quarter

HIST 9C
Introduction to Asian Civilizations: History of Japan

2012 Winter Quarter

2011 Spring Quarter

2010 Spring Quarter

2009 Spring Quarter

HIST 191G
Capstone Seminar: History -- East Asia

2011 Fall Quarter

2011 Spring Quarter

2010 Spring Quarter

HIST 214
Topics in World History

2009 Spring Quarter

HIST 191G
Undergraduate Variable Topics Research Seminars: History -- East Asia

2009 Winter Quarter

2008 Winter Quarter

HIST 172C
Japanese History: Modern, 1868 to the Present

2008 Winter Quarter

2007 Winter Quarter

HIST 191G
Undergraduate Variable Topics Seminars: East Asia

2007 Winter Quarter

2006 Fall Quarter