Search Results

This chapter examines the aesthetic nationalism of Okakura Kakuzō (Tenshin), with particular emphasis on his notion of a unitary Asia. In Meiji Japan, Okakura’s ideas were part of an ideological current that held strongly to nationalist ideas. However, his ideas later came to be associated with what may be retrospectively regarded as “ultranationalism.” This chapter first considers aesthetic nationalism as a theoretical concept before discussing the issues raised by the contradiction in Okakura’s thought by analyzing one of his texts, The Ideals of the East (1903). It then explores Okakura’s views about Japanese art as well as the implications of his concept of a unitary Asia and its intellectual basis in opposing the “West.” It also assesses the relationship of Okakura’s thoughts to contemporary intellectual currents, along with his awareness that artistic creativity must be based on a forward-looking art history. Finally, it describes the notions of cultural continua used by Okakura to understand Japan, China, and India, and how his writing fits into our current understanding of the postcolonial.

This chapter begins by providing some general insights on the conflicting genealogies and epistemologies of Asia and then moves on to concretize the discussion by focusing on Okakura Tenshin's pan-Asianism through a reading of his seminal texts in relation to his curatorial practice. Even as Okakura's Asian ideals are asserted with uncomplicated bravado, one can see how they are submerged in the deceptions of an insufficiently acknowledged, if febrile form of Japanese nationalism. It considers his analogy of the Nation as Museum, described as the Japanese Museum of Asian Civilization. Even if one accepts that Okakura was a nativist and imperialist, this chapter tries to account for the fact that he was intensely loved and admired even by those who had every reason to be alert about the excesses of Empire.

This chapter reflects on the adequacy of the word ‘cosmopolitanism’ to describe the universal avocations of both Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin. While both Tagore and Okakura presented themselves to rapt audiences as representatives of ‘India’ and ‘Japan’ respectively, they also seemed to transcend their specific national origins as seers of the world who happened to speak exquisite English. After providing some kind of empirical counter to the different ways in which cosmopolitanism is being reclaimed today at a theoretical level, this chapter proceeds to complicate how Tagore and Okakura negotiated their unquestionably privileged world and examines the cosmopolitics of dress and language.

This chapter begins with the libretto of The White Fox, Okakura Tenshin's last creative experiment, throwing out a few questions on love and friendship. It looks at the masculinities of Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura, in their very different life practices and relationships with women and other men, teasing out a few problems leading to the elusive dynamics of masculinity. It also examines homosociality and the modalities of friendship. Finally, it examines their foreign friends and the effect of war on their relationships.

This chapter deals with nationalism in a confrontationist mode. It raises some critical questions around Rabindranath Tagore's silence in relation to Okakura Tenshin's representation of Asia. It considers Tagore's envisioning of swadeshi through one of his most powerful essays, ‘Swadeshi Samaj’, and Bharatbarsha, another motif in Tagore's rhetoric that is drawn from the larger archetypes of the swadeshi movement. Tagore's anti-nationalism continues to bewilder, if not outrage, his most respectful critics, in addition to his more sceptical devotees. From a philosophical reflection, Tagore's views on the nation gradually hardened from the idealization of samaj in the swadeshi period, through the failure of the swadeshi movement, into his withdrawal from the ethos of nationalism.