Creole Japan; or, The Vagaries of Creolization

Ferrier, Michaël

doi:10.1215/07990537-2010-020

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 5 publications

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“…Concretely, this means studying multidirectional rather than unidirectional influence through a doubled, 'plural' identification with both France and Japan (Ferrier, 2009: 15-16). One chapter in the anthology, first pronounced in 2003 and later translated into English, is titled 'Creole Japan' (Ferrier, 2010b). In this paper, Ferrier argues for the application of créolité as a theory for understanding contemporary Japan, a nation normally assumed to be homogenous.…”

Section: Japan As a Site For Fissures And Re-organization Of Memorymentioning

confidence: 97%

An off-centre pendulum: Neo-Japonisme and contemporary French identity in Michaël Ferrier's Sympathy for the Phantom

2024

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This article analyses French novelist Michaël Ferrier's novel Sympathie pour le fantôme (Sympathy for the Phantom, 2010) as an instance of contemporary French neo- japonisme. Building upon the work of Edward Said, it argues that Ferrier's neo-japonisme inherits from the tradition of earlier French Orientalist romantic literature while disavowing this inheritance through a simultaneous application of universalist, social-science criticisms onto Japan. This universalism is then similarly discredited for its banality and ineffectiveness, leading the narrator to rediscover the original aesthetic, Orientalist vision of Japan through an adventure into the beautiful, anti-rational heart of the city. This rediscovery of authentic Japan is performed by the French flâneur through a planned promenade mediated by the night-time darkness, the choice of small alleyways, and alcohol. The confusion and disorientation experienced in this engineered authentic Japan is proclaimed to provide ready answers for French crises of value such as national historiography and immigrant memory. As the night clears, however, Japan returns to an ugly everydayness ready to be once again subjected to universalist critique. The swinging of this pendulum characterizes the style of Ferrier's neo- japonisme, which this paper refers to as "off-centre." Examples of this off-centre style are given in Ferrier's descriptions of Tokyo and the fictional character of Yuko, who transform from cosmopolites to premodern Japanese from day to night. Ferrier's literary use of Japan is also placed within the context of the novelist's larger œuvre. Understanding the structure and logic of neo-japonisme in Ferrier provides one example of how Orientalist discriminations persist in culture today, when Orientalist thought has become popularly and academically discredited.

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Section: Japan As a Site For Fissures And Re-organization Of Memorymentioning

confidence: 97%

An off-centre pendulum: Neo-Japonisme and contemporary French identity in Michaël Ferrier's Sympathy for the Phantom

2024

Preprint

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The Creolizing Turn and Its Archipelagic Directions

Kabir

2023

Postcolon. Lit. inq

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Recent years have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest across disciplines around the concept “creolization” even as there has been some pushback against this development in other academic quarters. This article contextualizes this state of art around “creolization” and presents an analytical overview of the term’s discursive history. First, I discuss the appearance of the term creole in several areas of the world as an epiphenomenon of the first wave of European expansionism from the fifteenty century onward. Second, I track the emergence of “Creole” as an analytical category within nineteenth-century philology and its further development within linguistics. Third, I focus on milestones in the move of “creole” to “creolization” as a category for theorists of culture. Finally, I discuss recuperations of creolization as a theoretical model, including my own work that articulates it together with theoretical approaches to archipelagos.

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