Tenshin Okakura Kakuzo and Sister Nivedita: On an Intellectual Exchange in Modernizing Asia

The lecture focuses on the cultural exchange between Japan and India in the early 20th century. Tenshin Okakura Kakuzō’s (1862-1913) stay in India in 1901-1902 led to his friendship with Swami Vivekanada (1863-1902), Rabindranatha Tagore (1861-1941), and others. Okakura also interacted with Sister Nivedita (1867-1911)—who celebrated the new Bengal nationalist painting at the beginning of the 20th century—while he prepared his first book in English, The Ideals of the East (1903). The lecture examines the ways in which their interaction contributed to their thinking on national identity in a colonial context.

Shigemi INAGA, Professor at International Research Center for Japanese Studies and the Graduate School for Advanced Studies, Kyoto, Japan, is currently a Kluge Scholar at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Prof. Inaga’s many publications include Kaiga no tasogare (Twilight of Painting: Edouard Manet’s Posthumous Struggle for Glory, 1997) and Kaiga no tōhō: Orientalism kara Japonisme e (The Orient of Painting: From Orientalism to Japonisme, 1999).

 

This two-day symposium honors the work of Henry DeWitt Smith II, professor of Japanese history at Columbia and currently director of the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies. Each of 19 presenters was asked to select a single object or image and analyze it in detail, physically, historically, and symbolically, to suggest what it offers for new directions in the study of visual and material culture in Japan. One of the central themes of the symposium lies in the relationship between the visual and the material, since no image or object can exist without both. The presenters will have read one another’s papers in advance, but at the symposium will offer brief introductions of their chosen objects and images. Comments and general discussion will take up the second half of each panel.

Preregistration is not required for this symposium.

Organizers: Jordan Sand (sandj@georgetown.edu) and
Greg Pflugfelder (gmp12@columbia.edu)

Co-sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.