Graduate Course Pages > Orientalism, Modernism, and the Special Case of Japan

December 22: Discussion / review about the citation of sources in a spoken presentation, in preparation for student presentations in January.

Have a good holiday!

December 15: Disucssion of the concept of the Liberal Arts, intended as contextualization for student presentations in January.

December 8: Completion of the discussion of Yoshioka. The December 15 meeting will include an overview of procedures for final student presentations. The presentations themselves will be January 12 (a national holiday, no classes officially, but we shall meet nonetheless) and Jamuary 19.

December 1: Continued discussion of Yoshioka.

November 24: Discussion of the first part of the Yoshioka essay, “Japan, Colonized?” We’ll continue discussion of Yoshioka in the December 1 seminar meeting.

November 17: Discussion of the representations of paintings and other artefacts in Christine Peltre’s Orientalism in Art (New York: Abbeville, 1998) and Siegfried Wichmann’s Japonisme (New York: Park Lane, 1985). Homework: Yoshioka Hiroshi, “Samurai and Self-Colonization in Japan.” Individual students were assigned to prepare summaries of individual sections of the essay.

November 10: We finished the main body of the theoretical work of the seminar in discussion of the ways that Orientalism exemplifies a discourse, in the Foucauldian sense of the term. I was pleased with the ready acceptance and understanding of the concept. We shall now turn to the ways the discourse of Orientalism have played out in the “special case” of Japan. Accordingly, students are to have read at least the first section of The Legacy of Seclusion before the November 17 seminar. If you are feeling ambitious you might also look at the second section, available here.

The subject of the November 17 seminar will be the absence of Japan in Orientalist discursive constructions and a preliminary account of the results of this absence, including the discourse of Japonisme, particular examples of which, drawn from the visual arts, will be presented.

The next reading for the seminar will be Yoshioka Hiroshi’s “Samurai and Self-Colonization in Japan” (1995), which will be provided next week.

October 20: Note was made at the beginning of the class that because of the number of Monday holidays in the term we may have to omit some of the scheduled lectures. If this happens, as seems likely, it will be the Modernism section that goes, and so the course at this stage may be thought of as being mainly about “Orientalism and the Special Case of Japan.”

In this regard, students are reminded that I will not be able to attend the class next week, October 27, and also that the following week, November 3, is a national holiday. The class will next meet, then, on November 10.

The lecture and discussion of October 20 addressed the three interdependent meanings of “Orientalism” that Edward Said outlines in introduction to the 1978 book that is the center of our work at the beginning of the course. The first and most “readily accepted” meaning of Orientalism (note that this was certainly true when Said’s book appeared)

is an academic one. . . . Anyone who teaches, writes about or researches the Orient—and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist—either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism (p. 2).

Second, and “related to this academic tradition,”

Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident” (p. 2).

And third, Orientalism

can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient (p. 3).

The focus of the lecture and discussion was the second designation, particularly the concepts of an “ontological distinction” and an “epistemological distinction.” We shall turn in the November 10 meeting to the third designation. This will require familiarity with Said’s use of the concept of a “discourse” that he and others attribute to Michel Foucault, and this will lead us to discussion and analysis of the inter-relation of power, representation, and knowledge.

Given that we will not meet again for three weeks, I would like to ask students to take the time to read material related to our discussions. In addition to sections I and II of Said’s introduction to Orientalism (pp. 1-9 in the English text), please read also the first thirteen paragraphs of “Orientalism, Absence, and Quick-Firing Guns: The Emergence of Japan as a Western Text,” by your instructor, available here. This will begin to move us toward the “special case of Japan” of the title of the course.

In your reading of sections I and II of Said’s introduction, this worksheet and the first five questions of this worksheet may be of help. Please note that I am not assigning responses to these questions, only suggesting that they may be of help in framing your understanding of the introduction to Orientalism.

Finally, I would like to say that student responses in the October 20 meeting were excellent. Particularly good were Miyako Hirata’s help with the concept of “worldliness,” the argument (in the honorific sense of the word) between EunAe Kim and Naoki Yamamoto about whether cultural difference is ontological and epistemological or historical (we shall return to this), and the marvelous comment at the end by Suzuki Kaori that modern Japan has turned an Orientalist gaze upon Japan’s own historical past.

October 6: For their short presentations on an article linked from the Edward Said page, each of three students present chose Said’s last Preface to Orientalism, and each gave an admirable reading of the work. Miyako Hirata contextualized Said’s life and work with a report on the obituary by Ohashi Yôichi in the Asahi shinbun. Suzuki Kaori focused particularly on Said’s insistence on the responsibilities of scholars and public intellectuals. EunAe Kim gave a brief overview of the history of the Palestinian / Israeli conflict, and raised the issue of Said’s theory of power relations.

These presentations were followed by a lecture introducing Said’s concept of the “worldliness” of texts, of writers, and of readers. This will be continued and connected with the concept of Orientalism in the October 13 seminar.

September 29: Introduction to the course and to the concept of Orientalism. The October 6 seminar will include a summary overview of the theoretical underpinnings of Edward Said’s famous work on the subject. Homework: read as much as possible off of the Edward Said page at this site. Prepare a five- to ten-minute discussion of at least one of the items linked from that page.