Since the (re)opening of Japan to the West in the mid-19th century, many French writers and artists have been fascinated by Japanese art and culture. Writers such as Pierre Loti, Paul Claudel and numerous impressionist painters tended to respond to Japan in an aestheticising and exoticist manner. This fascination, with its potentially Orientalist undertones, continued after the Second World War and up to the present time, but it was marked by a shift of focus towards the ‘infra-ordinary’, banal aspects of everyday life.
Examples of this move away from ahistorical japoniste responses include Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs (1970), which discusses stationery, food, packaging and train stations, and Jacques Roubaud’s Tokyo infra-ordinaire (2005), which focuses on Japanese public transport systems and toilets. The parameters of 19th- and 20th-century French cultural Japanophilia have been shifted by the emergence of a new discourse of the details of life in urban, postmodern Japan.
This conference will examine the evolution of French cultural understanding of Japan, encouraging debate on the function and specificity of responses to Japan in post-war French theory, literature, film and art. Writers and directors we are interested in include Philippe Forest, Gérard Macé, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Michaël Ferrier, Michel Butor, Chris Marker. Some of the questions we wish to address include: do post-1945 ‘Japonists’ perpetuate or repudiate the exoticist aesthetic idealism of authors such as Goncourt, Claudel and Malraux, who used Japanese aesthetics as a means to critique French modes of representation and conceptions of identity?
Does emphasis on the ‘infra-ordinary’ simply subsume Japanese otherness into a western category (the ‘everyday’) which is a major preoccupation in contemporary French culture (Lefebvre, de Certeau, Foucault)? How do recent French representations of Japan reflect contemporary French attitudes towards Japan as cultural, social and geo-economic entity? What are the stylistic and thematic characteristics of engagement with Japan in contemporary French culture?
With many areas of exploration, we expect this to be a productive and wide-ranging colloquium, and we hope to produce a publication following the event.
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