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Lafcadio Hearn’s writings provide a radically different understanding of literary cosmopolitanism from Wilde’s. This chapter studies Hearn’s attempts to translate and transpose aestheticism onto a global stage. It argues that Hearn’s works compound a commitment to preserving cultural differences with essentialism, exoticism, and even, paradoxically, elements of cultural nationalism. Hearn’s early translations of Théophile Gautier’s fantastic stories created a dialogue between metropolitan European aestheticism and the cosmopolitan culture of nineteenth-century New Orleans. In his writings on Japan, Hearn employed literary impressionism and ghost narratives (some of which look back to Gautier) to interrogate his own authority as Western essayist and to capture the peculiar temporality of turn-of-the-century Japan, a country caught between traditional culture and modernization, nationalist and cosmopolitan tendencies. In Japan, Hearn also lectured extensively on British aestheticism, encouraging his students to draw inspiration from it for the creation of a cosmopolitan Japanese literature of the future.

This chapter analyzes Lafcadio Hearn, who may be seen as an early cultural hybrid and product of proto-globalization: of Greek-Irish origin, raised in Ireland and England, working as a journalist in the United States and the West Indies before settling in Japan (assuming both citizenship and the name of Yakumo Koizumi). It also evaluates Hearn's success as resting on a professional dexterity which mediates a fiction of Japan's cultural authenticity while accommodating anxiety over a growing industrialized nation state. His decidedly partial representation of Japan as a self-conscious creation invites reassessment as travel writing, both as a negotiation with a journalistic marketplace and as an aesthetic construct in its own right. Any just appraisal of Hearn, particularly of his Japan writings, may commend a nuanced, finely constructed style, which elevates sharp anecdotal detail and cultural reportage into an accomplished, humane oeuvre, of its time, but enduring.

This chapter focuses on the role played by literature in the widespread adoption of the European model of overseas imperialism, one of the more prominent and controversial processes of globalization at the turn of the twentieth century. More specifically, it examines the history of America's overseas expansion, with particular reference to its unique relationship with Japan. It also analyzes Jack London's Russo-Japanese War correspondence and Lafcadio Hearn's non-fiction books about Japan to highlight an example of what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls “alternative modernities”—the existence of modernized but non-westernized societies. Finally, it explains the relationship between “racialism” and “alternative modernities”.

This chapter focuses on the cosmopolitan flaireur, the sophisticated citizen of the world who relishes the fragrance of travel, represented by the historian and classicist John Addington Symonds and the journalist and critic Lafcadio Hearn, his junior by ten years. The smell of the human body is something that speaks intimately to the very nature of perfume, which references and alludes to corporeal odours as much as it camouflages them. Appreciators respectively of male and female body scents, both Symonds and Hearn write enthusiastically about the perfumes of the places they visit and the bodies they encounter there, but they are also keen consumers of the literature of other lands, both past and present, savoured by them for its release of distinctive male and female fragrances. This chapter focuses on the cosmopolitan flaireur, the sophisticated citizen of the world who relishes the fragrance of travel, represented by the historian and classicist John Addington Symonds and the journalist and critic Lafcadio Hearn, his junior by ten years. The smell of the human body is something that speaks intimately to the very nature of perfume, which references and alludes to corporeal odours as much as it camouflages them. Appreciators respectively of male and female body scents, both Symonds and Hearn write enthusiastically about the perfumes of the places they visit and the bodies they encounter there, but they are also keen consumers of the literature of other lands, both past and present, savoured by them for its release of distinctive male and female fragrances.

This chapter explores Lafcadio Hearn’s non-fiction folklore writing. Hearn wrote several non-fiction folklore books that detailed folk entities such as ghosts. When Hearn stayed in Japan, the non-fiction book he wrote about Japan gave detailed description of Japanese folklore, and this allowed the Weste to get a glimpse into the elusive Japanese culture.

This chapter situates “The Story of Chūgōrō” within the context of both Hearn’s escape from Western civilization and a growing fascination in America with Japanese art and culture. Hearn’s age witnessed not only a flourishing of Gothic and vampire literature but also, in the wake of the opening of Yokohama, the crescendo of Japonisme. In his re-writing of the old Japanese tale, Hearn circumvents Transylvanian terminology and references to the Gothic. Instead, he foregrounds the story’s Japanese-ness. What is “startling” and “strange” for Hearn’s turn-of-the-century readers is not necessarily that the protagonist of his story falls prey to a blood-loving seductress, but rather Japan itself, considered to be the exotic per se. With her similarity to the Western vampire, the bloodthirsty female proves to be a familiar figure in the midst of the unfamiliar—a figure mediating between East and West, partaking of what could be called a form of the “transcultural supernatural.”

Chapter one places music in the context of late 19th-century Euro-American japonisme. The focus is on American perceptions of and reactions to Japanese music encountered in Japan in the second half of the 19th century. Sources include published and unpublished correspondence and diaries of Americans (from Salem sailors to scholars to Gilded Age socialites) who traveled to Japan as well as travel books, scholarly journals, newspapers, and novels set in Japan. The chapter presents the earliest songs, musicals, and plays representing Japan and Japanese music to the American public. Bostonian Japanophiles are central as are American music educators who worked in Japan. The context in which Japanese music was first heard in the U.S., particularly at World Expositions, is explored. These early and primarily negative reports indirectly reveal contemporaneous American musical values and unintentionally marked Japanese music as an ideal model for later modernist composers.

George Washington Cable and Lafcadio Hearn are treated in detail here. While not Creoles themselves, they are among the most important English-language authors of nineteenth-century Creole Louisiana, and their arrival on the literary scene marked the ascent of English as a literary language there. Cable’s short fiction, including Madame Delphine, is reviewed and his novel Les Grandissimes, concerning the period just after the Louisiana Purchase was signed, receives lengthy examination. The Bras-Coupé episode is singled out for study, and the caste system is noted in particular. A defaming pamphlet by Adrien Rouquette on Les Grandissimes gets careful attention. Hearn’s journalistic career in New Orleans and his novel Chita: A Memory of Last Island, are summarized, the latter in connection with hurricane literature.

Japanese music played a central role in the formation of American musical modernism. This chapter focuses on the position of Japanese music in the careers of Henry Eichheim and Henry Cowell. For Eichheim, Japan had “a poetry no other country seems to possess.” Inspired by the writings of Lafcadio Hearn, Eichheim traveled to Japan between 1915 and 1928 and composed multiple pieces based on Japanese material. Japan was of central importance throughout Cowell’s life. In the 1930s Cowell studied shakuhachi with Kitaro Tamada who later wrote poignantly to Cowell from his Japanese American Internment Camp. Cowell traveled to Japan in 1957 and 1961 during the Cold War and composed several Japanese-inspired works, including for koto. Juxtaposing the musical journeys of these two composers and proselytizers highlights the roles Japanese music played for those Americans who sought to sound “ultra modern” in the twentieth century.

Page’s first large-scale ballet, La Guiablesse, is most famous for its casting of a twenty-three-year-old Katherine Dunham. Produced for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, A Century of Progress, the ballet featured Page as the She-Devil, opposite an otherwise all-black cast. Later, Page asked Dunham to assume the title role and to restage the ballet for the Chicago Grand Opera; then, the mentor turned the performance rights to the ballet over to her mentee. La Guiablesse was quite a feat of intercultural communication: a Martinique folk tale recorded by Lafcadio Hearn, an immigrant European American folklorist; envisioned as a ballet scenario by Page, a globe-trotting Midwestern choreographer; given life as a ballet score by William Grant Still, an African American composer with classical and jazz roots; and made into choreography in a process that blurred authorship between white choreographer and black performer and her troupe. This chapter “re-choreographs” the ballet through an intertextual reading of the original folktale, the music score and recording, the ballet scenario, the choreographer’s notebook, and Chicago reviews and press coverage, considering the subtext of the ballet within the frame of what each of the collaborators brought to the project. Page’s previous excursions into world dance, Hearn’s cross-cultural studies of folklore, Still’s trajectory as a composer who strove to fuse musical classicism with African American idioms of the blues and jazz, and Dunham’s education and early successes figure into the picture, as do the contexts of the Harlem Renaissance and the Chicago jazz scene of the period.

The conclusion re-evaluates the paradox of the cosmopolitan subject as citizen of nowhere, with fresh examples from essays by Oscar Wilde and Lafcadio Hearn. It argues that a critical interrogation of cosmopolitanism is more necessary than ever at a time of rising nationalism.