Researching National Amnesia
We drew inspiration for this project from the work of curatorial activists Denise Murrell, Amy Lonetree, and Maura Reilly, who have each worked to spotlight palpable absences in art spaces that have been thus ignored, silenced and rendered invisible by mainstream complicity, ignorance, and willful amnesia. Compelled by Murrell’s bold endeavor to confront and question the absences perpetuated in existing scholarship, our project is driven first and foremost by the importance of historical research and scholarship (see our bibliography). Shedding light not only on what has been erased, we also delve into the reasons and contexts of why they have been erased, with hope to contribute to activist projects in Japan that are also fighting to bring these hidden narratives to light.
However, as American scholars centering Japanese narratives of art, we are also exercising caution as we take steps forward. As Reilly has aptly pointed out: additive, integrative, and revisionist approaches may succeed in offering broader, more comprehensive views of art history, but “a fundamental binary opposition is retained, which means that the Other will always necessarily remain subordinated." She warns us of revisionism that becomes a kind of homage, an attack that only serves to reify the hegemony of history. Despite their best intentions, the insertion of alternative regional narratives through the focused attentions of Area Studies has been criticized as “ghettoizing, segregating, and culturally and/or biologically essentialist.” It often ends up that rather than opening up the field, additive approaches to nonwestern art histories serve to pigeonhole narratives about ‘new’ sites of inquiry that inevitably gloss over discourses of inner diversity, ethnic marginalization, and peripheralism therein. To put it another way, the essentialization of alternative regional narratives not only perpetuates a teleological historical timeline, but also systematically silences internal difference. In this regard, Japan is no exception.
As a nonwestern region, Japan's artwork has long been highly essentialized and benchmarked for inclusion into Euro-American art narratives, and for this reason we feel strongly that foregrounding inner difference and marginalization therein is incredibly important. As such, our project is twofold: not only do we hope to spread awareness and highlight exhibitions that recuperate Japan’s suppressed national histories into the public eye, but our objective is also to contribute to the decolonization of ‘authentic’ understandings of Japanese art by bringing attention to artworks and exhibitions that engage with marginalized groups within the nation as a significant part of Japan’s national narrative.
Despite Japan's present day context of post-war, post-colonial, and post-occupation, much of Japan’s diasporic, indigenous and ethnic minority communities remain bound by a condition of ongoing violence. It is necessary to recognize this relationship as one that has been and remains colonial. As Lonetree asserts, refusing to name such internal subjugation (within a nation) as colonial allows historians and politicians to “take shelter in a passive voice, which permits one to say that ‘a wrong was done’ without naming the culprit.” The Japanese government continues to refute important histories that, if accepted into the public realm, could lead to resolution and forward progress for its marginalized groups. This total circumvention of responsibility showcases a system that simultaneously peripheralizes and exploits its indigenous and ethnic minority communities, resulting in a cumulative, generation-crossing, “historical trauma.”Our project thus aims to function as a form of what Lonetree calls “truth-telling,” highlighting artists and curators that are facing up to these histories as a way to contribute to the resolution and reparation for these communities.
Even with the best intentions of our project, we must keep in mind that community-oriented projects are incredibly rare in a Japanese context and the notion of a ‘curatorial activist’ is still an endeavor deemed fairly naïve, especially in the face of increasing censorship. While these six exhibitions do showcase forms of resistance, we must keep in mind Lonetree’s wariness of premature celebrations. As showcased by the censorship enacted even just within our project, museums continue to function as neoliberal sites of accumulation, gatekeepers of authority, and instrumental means for masking fundamental socio-political asymmetries and biases. For this reason, when considering the curatorial strategies used in the restricted context of Japan’s art scene, we find it useful to turn to art critic Seph Rodney’s recent words: “What does the work make possible now that wasn’t possible before? What does it give me that I did not have?" These pertinent questions have helped us situate these exhibitions within a larger context of Japan's national history, reading between the lines of what is allowed to be said and what is not.