Professor Bush's current project, The Floating World, proposes a revisionist history of japonisme as not only an exoticist representation of Old Japan but also an aesthetic of self-representation informed by, precisely, Japanese modernization. He reframes European aesthetic uses of Japan—some familiar, some now obscure—as part of a global response to the prospect of a non-European modernity and its consequences for “the world.” This talk will provide an overview of the book with detailed discussions of Henri Rivière’s print series Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower (1902), Paul-Louis Couchoud’s Sages and Poets of Asia (1916), and Wim Wenders’s film Tokyo-ga (1985).

Christopher Bush is associate professor of French at Northwestern University, were he co-directs Global Avant-garde and Modernist Studies and co-edits Modernism/modernity. His books include Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford, 2010), The Floating World: Japoniste Aesthetics and Global Modernity (Columbia, under contract) and several planned projects on the historical avant-gardes.