廃墟をめぐるナラティブ - 代弁する炭鉱とされる炭鉱 -

Abstract

In May 2011, Sakubei Yamamoto’s documentary picture of coal mines was registered as a memory of the world by UNESCO. In July 2015, 23 composing properties including Miike Coal Mines, which are located over 8 prefectures (comprising 11 cities), were registered as a world cultural heritage by UNESCO, a case of a “serial nomination” with the same historical background. These coal mines, which used to serve as a place for producing fuel sources, are now a place for tourism. This shift reflects the local people’s conception of the coal mines as “negative legacy.” In this article, we note that the narrative of contemporary coal mines is regarded as a testament of Japan’s glory history, and revisit the issue of representing coal labors within the theory developed by Antonio Gramsci and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. During the era of Meiji Industrial Revolution, work in coal mines was represented as a basis for modernizing the country under the forcible controls and the ideology of submission. In the proletarian literature which raises the problems of coal labors, by contrast, it was narrated under the ideology synonymous with the guidance for a revolution. We propose to view the mine workers who submitted to complex ideologies as subalterns, and reveal the causes of difficulty in representing coal labors. We also explore the means of narrating coal labors based on representations lurking in literary texts.