Nous accueillerons le mercredi 12 mars 2025 James Farrer, professeur de sociologie à l’université Sophia et professeur invité à Sciences Po Paris. Cette conférence, intitulée A Cultural History of Japanese Restaurants Outside of Japan, aura lieu à Unversité Paris Cité, amphithéatre 12E du Bâtiment de la Halle aux Farines (4e étage, Esplanade Pierre Vidal-Naquet, 75013 Paris) de 13h15 à 14h45.
With more than 170,000 Japanese restaurants around the world, Japanese cuisine has become truly global. This talk summarizes the research process and principle results of The Global Japanese Restaurant: Mobilities, Imaginaries, and Politics (University of Hawaii Press, 2023). Drawing on archival sources and fieldwork in multiple languages, this co-authored and co-edited book centers on the stories of Japanese migrants in the first half of the twentieth century, and then on non-Japanese chefs and restaurateurs from Asia, Africa, Europe, Australasia, and the Americas whose mobilities, since the mid-1900s, have been reshaping and spreading Japanese cuisine. The talk traces five Japanese food fashions, from the long-forgotten Japanese tearooms that were in vogue in the late nineteenth century to the izakaya boom still visible in cities around the world. These examples show how the restaurant is a continually reinvented imaginary of Japan produced by restaurateurs, cooks, and servers of various nationalities and ethnicities acting as cultural intermediaries and interpreters of a new globalized Japanese cuisine.
James Farrer is Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo. His research focuses on the contact zones of global cities, including ethnographic studies of sexuality, nightlife, expatriate communities, and urban food cultures. Recent publications include The Global Japanese Restaurant: Mobilities, Imaginaries and Politics (with David Wank eds.), International Migrants in China’s Global City: The New Shanghailanders, Shanghai Nightscapes: A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City (with Andrew Field), and Globalization and Asian Cuisines: Transnational Networks and Contact Zones (ed.). He is a frequent contributor to media programming on urban life in Asia, including NHK World’s « Tokyo Eye 2020” and “Matsuko’s Unknown World” (Matsuko no Shiranai Sekai).
Information : Ken Daimaru (ken.daimaru@u-paris.fr) Nous vous remercions également de transmettre cette invitation à vos collègues, étudiantes et étudiants.
