October 29, 2018/ 8:45 AM - 6:00 PM

Royce Hall Room 314 Humanities Conference Room

23rd Annual Japan Studies Conference

This conference seeks to show how the materiality of objects problematizes conventional understandings of Japan or, conversely, how studies of Japan may reconfigure dominant interpretations of materiality as a category of scholarly discourse. While the immaterial— ideologies, social perceptions, taboos, beliefs, and all manner of cognitive tendencies—tends to guide the formation of worldviews, materiality can reflect, reify, and alter those formations in observable ways. To this end, panelists may conceive of materiality as a cooperatively constructive phenomenon that patterns individual experience. Initial investigative questions may include, but are not limited to: How do material objects either reflect or invert the spectrum of experience? How do material production, use, and exchange alter social parameters such as class or audience, or affiliations such as sectarian or political identity? In what ways do these processes influence ideology or doctrine? How do expressions of materiality complicate historical divisions between premodern and modern eras?

We perceive of materiality as a broad category with a variety of attendant constituents—visual art, the body and its sensorium, objects of literary production, elite regalia, religious paraphernalia, media, material technologies, and so forth. These material constituents implicate their creators, users, and observers as actors in a network of experiences. Likewise, production, replication, consumption, and exchange are only a few of many modes of material interaction populated by these very actors. In this way, we perceive of materiality as part and parcel to the construction of the Japanese experience, both modern and premodern, precisely because of this intimacy shared between objects, actors, and the interactions between them.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Dr. Reginald Jackson, Assistant Professor of Premodern Japanese Literature (University of Michigan)

Dr. Jackson will also host a workshop linked to the conference theme during the following day, October 30, in Bunche Hall 10383. All conference presenters are encouraged to attend.

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Download file: Poster-Design-Final-kp-ce4.pdf