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VisArt_04


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Ecocritical perspectives on meisho in the visual culture of early modern Japan 
Convenor:
Doreen Mueller (Leiden University)
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Discussant:
Fynn Holm (University Of Tübingen)
Format:
Panel
Section:
Visual Arts
:
Auditorium 1 Jan Broeckx
Sessions:
Friday 18 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels

Short Abstract:

This panel revisits the legacies of the meisho (famous place) paradigm from an ecocritical perspective in the wider field of image production in early modern Japan, from landscape prints to picture scrolls, and from broadsheets to maps.

Long Abstract:

This panel revisits the legacies of the meisho (famous place) paradigm in the visual culture of early modern Japan from an ecocritical perspective. Earlier scholarship has established that the meanings of place produced through its visual and textual representation as meisho were intrinsically polysemic, being derived from multi-layered cultural and historical associations. At the same time, meisho could also be a meaningful conduit for reflecting on the relationship between people and the nonhuman environment, and the historical dynamics this engendered. Taking account of the shifting meanings of place was particularly prescient in early modern Japan where urban and agricultural developments coincided with significant environmental events such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Past research has not sufficiently addressed the potential of meisho to accommodate intersecting historical and environmental realities. This panel therefore critically examines to what extent this potential was realised in the wider field of image production in early modern Japan, from landscape prints to picture scrolls, and from broadsheets to maps. Panel presenters will demonstrate how the malleability of meisho which was based on narrative strategies of registering, ordering, and re-arranging the cultural and historical significances of places could be used to obscure but also to foreground historical realities. The first presenter will discuss how the historical and poetic meanings of Uji were negotiated with its growing economic and cultural importance as a productive land of tea in narrative scrolls in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Moving to the late eighteenth century, the second presenter will explore how the poetic image of Mount Asama as “the smoking mountain” was adapted in response to its eruption in 1783 in maps and broadsheets. The third presenter will consider the invisibility of catastrophic environmental events tracing the processes of remediation of the historic idiom of meisho-e in nineteenth century ukiyo-e prints.

Accepted papers:

Session 1 Friday 18 August, 2023, -
Panel Video visible to paid-up delegates