Japan and Japonisme: The Self and the Other in Representations of Japanese Culture

Japan and Japonisme: The Self and the Other in Representations of Japanese Culture explores Japan’s engagement with and responses to Japonisme, and presents new perspectives on the history and enduring influence of Japonisme as a cultural discourse. The term "Japonisme" has come to encapsulate the West’s interests in Japanese arts and culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Japonisme contributed to Japan’s global reputation as an artistic nation, but it also produced persistent stereotypes about the Japanese, such as the image of "geisha." This pioneering anthology also demonstrates how Japan has espoused the modern Western fascination with its arts and culture to create and promote its national cultural identity. Japan and Japonisme introduces innovative studies on Japonisme by leading experts in the field, and covers the visual arts, art criticism and exhibitions, fashion, literature, horticulture, and popular culture in France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Table of Contents:
Foreword, Acknowledgments, Notes to Readers, List of Illustrations, Introduction: Japonisme Reconsidered, Part I Histories of Japonisme as a Discursive Field 1. The Development of Japonisme Studies: A Retrospective, Viewed Obliquely 2. Ernest Chesneau, The First Critic of Edgar Degas’s Japonisme 3. On the Marginalization of Japonisme in Western Art History 4. The Evolving Perception of Japonisme in Japan, 1900–1940 5. Japonisme Through the Eyes of the Japanese : The History of Its Reception in Japan, 1870s–2010s Part II Japan as the Agent of Japonisme 6. Japan’s Other National Museum : The Commodity Exhibition Hall and Japonisme as Industrial Policy 7. From Japonisme to Japanism (Nihonshugi): Yone Noguchi’s Writings and Poems on Ukiyo-e 8. Japanese Government Travel Posters in the 1930s: A New Japonisme by the Japanese Part III Transnational Modalities of Japonisme, Past and Present 9. Morning Glories in Anglophone Japonisme—Gardening, Haiku, and Zen 10. From Mousmé to Shōjo: The Representation of the Cute Japanese Girl in French Media 11. Celebration or Condemnation? Appropriating Claude Monet’s La Japonaise in Contemporary Japan and the United States 12. Globalizing the Kimono : Analyzing Contemporary Culture through the Lens of Japonisme Studies, Afterword, Index

About the Author :
Noriko Murai is professor of modern Japanese art history at Sophia University, Tokyo. Her publications in English include Journeys East: Isabella Stewart Gardner and Asia (2009), Inventing Asia: American Perspectives Around 1900 (2014), and Japan in the Heisei Era (1989–2019): Multidisciplinary Perspectives (2022).