A new three-day academic workshop is organised by the Waseda Brussels Office from September 4th to September 6th, 2023.
This new workshop aims to explore new possibilities in the study of modern Japanese culture within current scholarly debates on comparative modernity beyond the Japan/West dichotomy. Our project aims to bridge the disciplinary gap between Edo and Meiji, attempting to integrate early-modern cultural formations in an organic view of the development of discourses on Japanese modernity. We also intend to open up new spaces of dialogue beyond Japanese Studies, through the participation of invited presenters from the European Research Council project “Modernizing Empires: Enlightenment, Nationalist Vanguards and Non-Western Literary Modernities”, that is conducting a comparative look at the cultural reforms, linguistic renewal and literary renaissance in the empires of Russia, Turkey and Japan in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Through a series of case studies around aesthetics, visual culture, literature, art, performance, media and publishing culture, we will question how emergent notions of aesthetics were articulated and formally registered around the formation of cultural fields such as literature or art in modern Japan. These processes are important not only to trace the formation and dissemination of new aesthetic idioms, but also to bring out the fault lines and temporalities of political imaginaries that the discourse of modernization created and sustained for Japanese culture, as well as to understand how they shaped both ideological discourses and communities of practice among artists, critics, and the nascent modern mass audience.
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