John Clark
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824834418
- eISBN:
- 9780824871239
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824834418.003.0010
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Rustom Bharucha
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780195682854
- eISBN:
- 9780199081585
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195682854.003.0002
- Subject:
- Sociology, Culture
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Rustom Bharucha
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780195682854
- eISBN:
- 9780199081585
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195682854.003.0004
- Subject:
- Sociology, Culture
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Rustom Bharucha
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780195682854
- eISBN:
- 9780199081585
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195682854.003.0005
- Subject:
- Sociology, Culture
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Rustom Bharucha
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780195682854
- eISBN:
- 9780199081585
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195682854.003.0003
- Subject:
- Sociology, Culture
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Rustom Bharucha
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- October 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780195682854
- eISBN:
- 9780199081585
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195682854.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Culture
This book explores the convergence of different notions of Asia through the meeting between Rabindranath Tagore and the Japanese art historian and curator Okakura Tenshin in Calcutta in 1902. Set ...
More
This book explores the convergence of different notions of Asia through the meeting between Rabindranath Tagore and the Japanese art historian and curator Okakura Tenshin in Calcutta in 1902. Set against a panoramic background, it draws on the intersections of the late Meiji period in Japan and the Swadeshi movement in Bengal, weaves through an intricate tapestry of ideas relating to pan-Asianism, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and friendship, and positions the early modernist tensions of the period within-and against-the spectre of a unified Asia that concealed considerable political differences. In addition to countering the imperialist subtext of Okakura's The Ideals of the East and The Awakening of the East against Tagore's radical critique of Nationalism, it inflects the dominant tropes of postcolonial theory by highlighting the subtleties of beauty and the interstices of homosociality and love. Spanning geographical boundaries, across the cities of Tokyo, Boston, and Calcutta, the book offers new insights into the ways in which the Orient travelled within and beyond Asia, stimulated by emergent modes of vernacular cosmopolitanism.Less
This book explores the convergence of different notions of Asia through the meeting between Rabindranath Tagore and the Japanese art historian and curator Okakura Tenshin in Calcutta in 1902. Set against a panoramic background, it draws on the intersections of the late Meiji period in Japan and the Swadeshi movement in Bengal, weaves through an intricate tapestry of ideas relating to pan-Asianism, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and friendship, and positions the early modernist tensions of the period within-and against-the spectre of a unified Asia that concealed considerable political differences. In addition to countering the imperialist subtext of Okakura's The Ideals of the East and The Awakening of the East against Tagore's radical critique of Nationalism, it inflects the dominant tropes of postcolonial theory by highlighting the subtleties of beauty and the interstices of homosociality and love. Spanning geographical boundaries, across the cities of Tokyo, Boston, and Calcutta, the book offers new insights into the ways in which the Orient travelled within and beyond Asia, stimulated by emergent modes of vernacular cosmopolitanism.
J. Thomas Rimer (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824834418
- eISBN:
- 9780824871239
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824834418.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
Research outside Japan on the history and significance of the Japanese visual arts since the beginning of the Meiji period (1868) has been a relatively unexplored area of inquiry. In recent years, ...
More
Research outside Japan on the history and significance of the Japanese visual arts since the beginning of the Meiji period (1868) has been a relatively unexplored area of inquiry. In recent years, however, the subject has begun to attract wide interest. This period of roughly a century and a half produced an outpouring of art created in a bewildering number of genres and spanning a wide range of aims and accomplishments. This book discusses in depth a time when Japan, eager to join in the larger cultural developments in Europe and the United States, went through a visual revolution. This book suggests a fresh history of modern Japanese culture—one that until now has not been widely visible or thoroughly analyzed outside that country. The book explores an impressive array of subjects: painting, sculpture, prints, fashion design, crafts, and gardens. The works discussed range from early Meiji attempts to create art that referenced Western styles to postwar and contemporary avant-garde experiments. There are, in addition, substantive investigations of the cultural and intellectual background that helped stimulate the creation of new and shifting art forms, including chapters on the invention of a modern artistic vocabulary in the Japanese language and the history of art criticism in Japan, as well as an extensive account of the career and significance of perhaps the best-known Japanese figure concerned with the visual arts of his period, Okakura Kakuzō (Tenshin).Less
Research outside Japan on the history and significance of the Japanese visual arts since the beginning of the Meiji period (1868) has been a relatively unexplored area of inquiry. In recent years, however, the subject has begun to attract wide interest. This period of roughly a century and a half produced an outpouring of art created in a bewildering number of genres and spanning a wide range of aims and accomplishments. This book discusses in depth a time when Japan, eager to join in the larger cultural developments in Europe and the United States, went through a visual revolution. This book suggests a fresh history of modern Japanese culture—one that until now has not been widely visible or thoroughly analyzed outside that country. The book explores an impressive array of subjects: painting, sculpture, prints, fashion design, crafts, and gardens. The works discussed range from early Meiji attempts to create art that referenced Western styles to postwar and contemporary avant-garde experiments. There are, in addition, substantive investigations of the cultural and intellectual background that helped stimulate the creation of new and shifting art forms, including chapters on the invention of a modern artistic vocabulary in the Japanese language and the history of art criticism in Japan, as well as an extensive account of the career and significance of perhaps the best-known Japanese figure concerned with the visual arts of his period, Okakura Kakuzō (Tenshin).
