Dans le cadre du cycle de conférences Current Research on East Asia, nous accueillons le jeudi 2 octobre prochain, Katarzyna Cwiertka, Professeure d’études japonaises à l’Université de Leyde.
Cette conférence a lieu en salle Léon Vandermeersch de l’UFR LCAO (481 C), bâtiment des Grands Moulins, de 17h00 à 18h30. https://u-paris.fr/lcao/cycle-de-conferences-current-research-on-east-asia/ Vous pouvez également la suivre sur le lien zoom suivant : https://u-paris.zoom.us/j/82935801024?pwd=cDJubHVoWmEwb1ZmclIxVUhlZUVHQT09ID de réunion: 829 3580 1024Code secret: 068941
From Vision to Texture: Taste and Food Perception in Contemporary Japan
Conférencière : Katarzyna Cwiertka (Université de Leyde)
Food is among the most potent ambassadors of Japanese culture. Japanese cuisine is celebrated worldwide for various reasons, but the beauty of presentation, in particular, tends to be placed in a spotlight and generally considered transtemporal. In reality, the focus on visuality is a relatively recent product of four independent processes. While aesthetics is certainly important in current discourses on food, the predominance of the visual register – often referred to as “ocularcentrism” – overshadows the fact that the appreciation of food in contemporary Japan is a multi-sensory affair, with the emphasis on texture clearly coming to the forefront in recent years. This typically involves ideophones, or words that depict sensory imagery and emotional evaluations of taste. Contemporary Japanese has a large inventory of such expressions that can describe in minute details how food tastes and feels. These words are now omnipresent in advertising and food packaging, on television, in manga and on social media. This lecture presents preliminary results of the multidisciplinary research project carried out by a team of experts from Leiden University and University of Helsinki, and funded by the Japan Past & Present (https://japanpastandpresent.org/en) a global information hub and repository that promotes research and teaching in the Japanese humanities across disciplinary, temporal, and geographic borders.
Katarzyna J. Cwiertka is Chair of Modern Japan Studies at Leiden University. Cwiertka is an established expert on food history of modern Japan and Korea, social history of consumption in Japan and the comparative cultural history of plastic. She is the founding editor of the journal Worldwide Waste and Global Food History. Cwiertka is the author of Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power and National Identity (Reaktion Books 2006), Cuisine, Colonialism and Cold War: Food in Twentieth Century Korea (Reaktion Books 2012), Himerareta washokushi (Shinsensha 2016), and Branding Japanese Food: From Meibutsu to Washoku (University of Hawaii Press 2020). She has also edited several volumes with a larger geographical focus, including Asian Food: The Global and the Local (University of Hawai‘i Press 2002), Critical Readings on Food in East Asia (Brill 2012), Food and War in Mid-Twentieth-Century East Asia (Ashgate 2013), and Consuming Life Post-Bubble Japan: A Trans-disciplinary Perspective (Amsterdam University Press 2018).
