Colloquium organized by Sophie Basch (professor at Sorbonne Université, senior member of the IUF), Michael Lucken (professor at Inalco, honorary member of the IUF), William Marx and Jean-Noël Robert (professors at the Collège de France).
Japonism revolutionized 19th-centuryaesthetics. This Western passion for the arts of Japan continued into the inter-war years, with the spread of Japonology. But what remains of Japan's aesthetic influence after Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The reconstruction of its image often wipes the slate clean, either deliberately or through ignorance, of the many aspects of Japonism and the achievements of Japonology, just as the new formalisms remain dependent on the prejudices of the previous generation and contemporary breakaway ideologies. The aim here is not to take stock of the image of Japan in the West from 1945 to 1975, which has already been partially studied, but to look at what remains - transformed, distorted, contested, evacuated - of 19th-century Japonism (of which Paris was the center), its achievements and its prejudices, in these three decades (in which Paris remained a pole).
A part of "neo-Japanism", refusing to follow in the wake of historical Japonism, played the card of purity and liberating violence, thus appearing as an instrument of catharsis. Another, more subtly subversive current, on the contrary, plays on continuity in an ironic approach that multiplies filters, quotations, mediations, decantations, reflections and echoes. Japonism is returning to France by ricochet, via the United States or Japan itself. With the necessary hindsight, it is now possible to conduct an archaeology of this period, to place it within a broader trend over a longer period of time, to identify its resonances, and to interpret its discordances and concordances.
It is in this light that we will analyze, in a dialectical perspective, the evolution of literary and artistic discourse from the post-war period to the end of the 1970s, and the rise of Japanese cultural industries, which marked the start of a new imaginary.