Reading Race across Languages and Disciplines in the Early Works of Mori Ōgai
Time: Friday, October 4th, 3-5pm CT
Location: Room 319, Center for East Asian Studies (1155 E. 60th St)
Abstract: This paper examines race as a phenomenon in the works of Mori Ōgai, a canonical author of Japan’s Meiji Era. Mori also studied medicine abroad in Germany as part of the Japanese army. Past English-language studies of Mori have generally ignored the issue of race, focusing more on topics like national subjectivity. To investigate how race manifests in Mori’s works, I focus on his writings related to his time abroad in Germany, specifically his medical essays and studies written in Berlin and Munich from 1884 to 1888, and his 1890 story “Maihime” (“The Dancing Girl”) written upon his return to Japan and based on his time abroad. I propose that across his early scientific and literary works, Mori is grappling with race in the form of a European gaze upon East Asia, and that this gaze is, by its nature, hybrid. Thomas Lamarre, citing the work of Bruno Latour, has argued that Mori’s science and literature can be read together by acknowledging that modernity proliferates countless hybrids while simultaneously working to conceal and separate them. Not only do these categories include academic disciplines such as “literature” and “science” but also languages such as “Japanese” and “German.” For this reason, this study also takes into account Mori’s writings in the German language, not only those in Japanese. In his articles on medicine and hygiene, Mori confronts regimes of knowledge that assumed that Japanese were members of the inferior “Mongoloid” race. In doing so, Mori is confronting scientific racism as a gaze upon East Asia, attempting to prove that Japan is a “civilized” nation despite the physical difference of Japanese from Europeans. I subsequently read “Maihime” as an exploration of racial subjectivity, reconsidering the racial dynamics of the Japanese narrator, Toyotarō, and his German lover Elis. I conclude that Mori confronts racism in his scientific and literary works through appeals to quantitative data, social relations and affect. In doing so, Mori allows for the existence of “quasi-subjectivities” and “hybrids” as described by Latour.
Presenter: Simon Tsuchiya Lenoe is currently a first-year PhD student in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His primary research areas include modern Japanese literature, race studies, Asian diaspora literature, and German-Japanese transnational exchange. He received an M.A. in Humanities from the University of Chicago in 2024 and a B.A. in German Studies from Carnegie Mellon University in 2021.
Discussant: Hoyt Long is a Professor of Japanese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. He has research and teaching interests in modern Japan, with specific interests in the history of media and communication, cultural analytics, sociology of literature, book history, and environmental history.
Please go HERE to access Simon’s paper.