The Making of a Japanese Avant-Garde in Colonial Dairen, 1924–1937

In this article, I discuss how the Manchurian port city of Dairen became a cultural center for Japanese avant-garde literary and artistic production in the twenties and thirties. I examine the transnational flow of aesthetic and literary ideas between Tokyo and Dairen, and the economic and political...

Full description

Saved in:  
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Culver, Annika A. 1975- (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
Check availability: HBZ Gateway
Interlibrary Loan:Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany)
Published: 2007
In: History compass
Year: 2007, Volume: 5, Issue: 2, Pages: 347-361
Online Access: Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Description
Summary:In this article, I discuss how the Manchurian port city of Dairen became a cultural center for Japanese avant-garde literary and artistic production in the twenties and thirties. I examine the transnational flow of aesthetic and literary ideas between Tokyo and Dairen, and the economic and political factors enabling Japanese and Western avant-garde movements to flourish in this peripheral outpost of the Japanese empire. Notably, Dairen was the cradle of the Japanese surrealist movement in poetry, and later, provided a venue for an active group of surrealist artists. Though distanced from Tokyo, the central cultural and political locus of a rapidly expanding Japanese empire, Dairen served as an important crossroads in northeast Asia for trade, culture, and political ideology. Born out of Russian and Japanese imperialism, the free port of Dairen and its cosmopolitan cultural environment supported the complex historical conditions prompting a multi-faceted literary and aesthetic vision for the Japanese avant-garde.
ISSN:1478-0542
Contains:Enthalten in: History compass
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00411.x