Across Anti-Imperial Metropolises: Nonstate Approaches to Modern Japan-France History (Two-day International Conference)
Convener(s): Toma-Jin Morikawa-Fouquet
Speaker(s): For more information, visit here.
Day 1: Nissan Lecture Theatre, Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies, University of Oxford
Day 2: Conference Room, Maison Française d'Oxford
Register here.
This conference examines the transnational formations of anti-imperial knowledge between two metropolises in Japan and France from a non-state historical perspective. In doing so, what emerges are not the urban bastions of modernity or postmodernity culminating in the recent 2020 Tokyo and 2024 Paris Olympics, but the synchronicity of alternative spatialities and temporalities that dislodge Tokyo and Paris from “modern” narratives of historical progress. Just as Paris was an “anti-imperial metropolis” so too was Tokyo. Although Goebel's work situates interwar Paris as a hub for anti-colonial nationalists, both of these metropolises also fostered non-state alternatives. Accordingly, this conference adopts a transnational historical approach not only to reveal connections across Japan and France, but also to unveil alternative intellectual and cultural visions that are obscured when the primary objective is to explain the post-imperial proliferation of nationalism and nation-states. In doing so, the conference dislodges national and imperial history by presenting a fresh perspective on the intellectual and cultural history of modern Japan–France.
Until now, transnational histories on the comparisons and connections between Japan and France (and the wider West) have been based on the shared global experience of modernism or modernity. The “opening” of Japan by U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853 and the “Leave Asia, Enter the West” (datsu-a nyū-ō) adoption of Western civilizational discourse by Fukuzawa Yukichi have thus far marked the beginning of “modern” Japan and the writing of modern history—understood in terms of state-building and the development of capitalism, or “Japan as West.” Japan’s emulation of modern state apparatuses became the basis for its comparisons with other Western states and their policies. Accordingly, the overcoming of Japanese exceptionalism and national history in historiography has thus far been to subsume Japan to a Western and/or globally conjunctural conception of modernity.
While frameworks of “alternative,” “multiple,” and “Oriental” modernities purport to depart from treating modernization as Westernization, they similarly fall into a Western framework insofar as they focus on the reconfiguration of modern state apparatuses that ultimately derive from the historical experience of the West. These “indigenous” or “post-colonial” approaches carry the additional risk of reifying essentialist categories of national culture, civilization, and East versus West, which are long-standing tropes in studies of Japan and France. Studies on (self-)orientalism and (self-)occidentalism in the modern era—ranging from naval officer Pierre Loti, writer Nagai Kafū, Japonisme, the Goncourt Brothers, Impressionism, Western-style paintings (yōga), and so forth—have highlighted the asymmetrical power relations, mutual exoticisms, “cultural encounters,” and “hybridization” between “Japan as East” and the “West” in a manner that ultimately reinforces this dualism. Through this lens, imageries of Japan's France and France's Japan function as sites through which each side projects onto the other the qualities it perceives itself to lack.
The transnational nonstate approach of this conference starkly contrasts with the subsumption of Japan to a hegemonic conception of modernity (Japan as the West) and reification of national culture and borders (Japan versus the West). What emerges from this nonstate method is not a clash with the incommensurate “other” or a “hybridization” of otherwise separate entities, but a transnational anti-imperial current with commensurate ideas, connections, and exchanges that escape a globally conjunctural conception of modernity. These not only demonstrate previously obfuscated intellectual and cultural phenomena but also present a qualitatively new way of writing modern history beyond empire and nation-states in a way that uproots Western civilizational discourse. This conference counterintuitively centers Japan and France not as essentialized entities but to zoom in on alternative possibilities that emerged from the connections between two anti-imperial metropolises. Furthermore, the triangulation of Tokyo-Paris with other anti-imperial spatialities, temporalities, and knowledge will certainly appear, including but not limited to Shanghai, Hanoi, Mexico City, Domme, Akita, and Hokkaido. Such competing visions operating outside of hegemonic spatial and temporal configurations present a qualitatively different intellectual and cultural formation of knowledge occurring on the nonstate level that overcomes the central paradigms of modern history.
