The remarks of the speakers will be brief. Most of our time will be dedicated to discussion — voluble and free-ranging. No formal parade of solitary star-turns but stimulating commotion.
MORNING SESSION:
Mary Elizabeth Berry, Department of History, UC Berkeley | Does Power Trump Wealth in the Urban World?
Commoners in Edo made up fifty percent of the population but were confined to fifteen percent of the space. Starting with that fact, I shall muse on a number of the material realities — from zoning to policing — that made most Tokugawa-period cities uncommonly explicit statements about the power of rulers. (I doubt that we can find comparable statements in early modern societies elsewhere.) And, then, I shall contradict myself.
Matthew McKelway, Department of Art History, Columbia University | Can We Trust a Painter? Vision and Invention in the the Representation of Cities
Debates among historians and art historians have generated productive questions about the interpretation of genre paintings, the extent of their representational claims, and their utility as documents for understanding the material world. Where are the borders between artistic invention and historical documentation and how do we identify them? How do we assess what we see in a work such the Funaki Rakuchū Rakugai screens, a celebrated work now designated a National Treasure?
Kären Wigen, Department of History, Stanford University | Experiencing Time in the Landscape, Representing the Past in Maps
The elusive agent of time — stories from the past, hauntings of the dead, connections with personal events -- can totally color our visual field as we project emotional lives onto physical landscapes. Hope, dread, landmarks that remind us of failures or lost dreams … all can make the same landscape bright or bleak. Can we learn from the history of the emotions in visual studies?
And can we factor in the forces that militate against grandiose plans: decay, erosion, rust, fatigue, apathy, disaster? A longstanding aesthetic in Japan drew poetic attention to the evanescence of life and called on the built environment as witness, and not just metaphorically: earthquakes and fire and flood cross-cut human designs and left big scars. Passing by ruins in the landscape every day might remind ordinary people that even grand families could die out. A subversive message for a regime that posed as stable and everlasting.
AFTERNOON SESSION:
Julie Nelson Davis, Department of the History of Art, University of Pennsylvania | The Imagery of the Floating World in Context: Politics and Consumption
While prints were one of the genre’s most successful forms—and many of these were cheap, mass produced, and popular--ukiyo-e also included paintings, illustrated books, and broadsheets that were often in tension with Tokugawa policy (and subject to censorship). Their audiences, moreover, were broad, including daimyo and the samurai elite as well as commoners. This talk will raise questions of method, materiality, and historiography by returning these works to their context.
Timon Screech, Department of the History of Art, SOAS, University of London | The 'Journey to the East’ in Contemporary Painting
The famous works of what today we call Heian literature were part of the painterly canon for much of Japanese history. But Ise monogatari became especially important to the Edo shogunate. This was because of its Azuma-kudari section, where the protagonist travels through Mikawa, Shizuoka, and on to the Kanto Plain By chance, this tenth-century journey was echoed in the Tokugawa family's own geographical trajectory. As a result, those sections of Ise were much invoked and represented.
Marcia Yonemoto, Department of HIstory, University of Colorado | Seen from the Road: The Built Environment in the Literature of Travel
How did writers of travel accounts and guidebooks of Japan’s major cities and roads perceive the built environment? How did they “gloss” the landscapes through which they passed? And to whom or what (if anyone or anything) did they ascribe “authorship” or authority over those landscapes? I will draw on three early Edo-period travel accounts: Nakagawa Kiun’s Kyō warabe (1658), Kikuoka Senryō’s Edo sunago (1732), and Asai Ryōi’s Tōkaidō meishoki (1661) to address these questions.
MORNING SESSION:
Mary Elizabeth Berry, Department of History, UC Berkeley | Does Power Trump Wealth in the Urban World?
Commoners in Edo made up fifty percent of the population but were confined to fifteen percent of the space. Starting with that fact, I shall muse on a number of the material realities — from zoning to policing — that made most Tokugawa-period cities uncommonly explicit statements about the power of rulers. (I doubt that we can find comparable statements in early modern societies elsewhere.) And, then, I shall contradict myself.
Matthew McKelway, Department of Art History, Columbia University | Can We Trust a Painter? Vision and Invention in the the Representation of Cities
Debates among historians and art historians have generated productive questions about the interpretation of genre paintings, the extent of their representational claims, and their utility as documents for understanding the material world. Where are the borders between artistic invention and historical documentation and how do we identify them? How do we assess what we see in a work such the Funaki Rakuchū Rakugai screens, a celebrated work now designated a National Treasure?
Kären Wigen, Department of History, Stanford University | Experiencing Time in the Landscape, Representing the Past in Maps
The elusive agent of time — stories from the past, hauntings of the dead, connections with personal events -- can totally color our visual field as we project emotional lives onto physical landscapes. Hope, dread, landmarks that remind us of failures or lost dreams … all can make the same landscape bright or bleak. Can we learn from the history of the emotions in visual studies?
And can we factor in the forces that militate against grandiose plans: decay, erosion, rust, fatigue, apathy, disaster? A longstanding aesthetic in Japan drew poetic attention to the evanescence of life and called on the built environment as witness, and not just metaphorically: earthquakes and fire and flood cross-cut human designs and left big scars. Passing by ruins in the landscape every day might remind ordinary people that even grand families could die out. A subversive message for a regime that posed as stable and everlasting.
AFTERNOON SESSION:
Julie Nelson Davis, Department of the History of Art, University of Pennsylvania | The Imagery of the Floating World in Context: Politics and Consumption
While prints were one of the genre’s most successful forms—and many of these were cheap, mass produced, and popular--ukiyo-e also included paintings, illustrated books, and broadsheets that were often in tension with Tokugawa policy (and subject to censorship). Their audiences, moreover, were broad, including daimyo and the samurai elite as well as commoners. This talk will raise questions of method, materiality, and historiography by returning these works to their context.
Timon Screech, Department of the History of Art, SOAS, University of London | The 'Journey to the East’ in Contemporary Painting
The famous works of what today we call Heian literature were part of the painterly canon for much of Japanese history. But Ise monogatari became especially important to the Edo shogunate. This was because of its Azuma-kudari section, where the protagonist travels through Mikawa, Shizuoka, and on to the Kanto Plain By chance, this tenth-century journey was echoed in the Tokugawa family's own geographical trajectory. As a result, those sections of Ise were much invoked and represented.
Marcia Yonemoto, Department of HIstory, University of Colorado | Seen from the Road: The Built Environment in the Literature of Travel
How did writers of travel accounts and guidebooks of Japan’s major cities and roads perceive the built environment? How did they “gloss” the landscapes through which they passed? And to whom or what (if anyone or anything) did they ascribe “authorship” or authority over those landscapes? I will draw on three early Edo-period travel accounts: Nakagawa Kiun’s Kyō warabe (1658), Kikuoka Senryō’s Edo sunago (1732), and Asai Ryōi’s Tōkaidō meishoki (1661) to address these questions.