6:30 pm (doors open at 6:00 pm) Admission: Free (please register at link)

Speaker: Professor Francesco Campagnola (Ghent University) with an introduction by Professor Thomas Keirstead (Chair, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto)

How did seventeenth and eighteenth century European documents, maps and journals represent Japan? How did the Republic of Letters – the self-proclaimed community of the scholars and the learned – imagine it well before the country was completely opened to the eyes of the foreigners?

With many unknown aspects – religion, history, geography, etc. – Japan became one of the last places to be put on the map of early modern European knowledge. This talk will analyze this long process of discovery and the role Japan played as an object of curiosity in the shaping of new and more comprehensive representations of the world. We will see the place Japan took in the rhetoric and the imagination of that age. Finally, we will examine how different actors and factions inside the community of the learned battled to include Japan in their theories and used the fragmented knowledge they had of it as a discursive tool against their adversaries.

This talk is co-presented with the Department of French at the University of Toronto and will be introduced by Professor Thomas Keirstead, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto.