‘Les Français ne savent pas où me mettre’: Placing Michaël Ferrier’s petits portraits from Japan

Extract

Much of Michaël Ferrier’s writing has dealt with Japan, and yet his work does not really fit within the tradition of Japonisme, at least not when strictly defined as a style in nineteenth-century art. Ferrier himself views Japonisme as a trend associated with modernity and aesthetic revolution in architecture and visual art but linked to literature that is often seen as outmoded today.¹ Recently, however, scholars writing in the Journal of Japonisme — a forum that emerged in 2016 to revive, expand, and update conversations across the arts and across cultural traditions — understand Japonisme as a much broader cultural phenomenon, an evolving tradition with elastic spatial and temporal boundaries and a significant legacy that continues to be seen across the arts.² The ‘Japonismes 2018: les âmes en résonance’ events in Paris, which celebrated 160 years of diplomatic relations and cultural exchange between Japan and France, show a similarly plural understanding of Japonisme, including electronic music and hip-hop dance performances alongside traditional visual art exhibits. Despite the broadening horizons of Japonisme studies, scholarly discussions in the renascent subfield intersect little with those around global France to consider how work dealing with Japan from contemporary francophone writers might figure in a common discourse. Global France can be understood here as the circulation of French cultural productions beyond the Francosphere and as a mode of cultural analysis that looks beyond the boundaries of the French language and France as a nation. Laurent Dubois and Achille Mbembe argue that such a reconfiguration of the cultural imaginary is a necessary action for the survival of French and francophone studies.³ With its analysis of Ferrier’s writing from Japan, this article extends the geographical and cultural boundaries of global France by turning attention to Japan as a non-colonial site of contact and by interrogating the monolingual emphasis in debates about the Francosphere.⁴