Nora Usanov-Geissler, M.A.

The subproject investigates the genesis and development of nanban byōbu (folding screens featuring representations of the arrival of European merchant ships) as a pictorial form employed in littoral contact zones in the Japanese archipelago from the late 16th to the mid-17th century. It also analyses the ways in which these forms of visualization of cultural contact scenarios evolved in the 18th century in screens and hand scrolls in the specific case of Nagasaki. The seaport in southwest Kyushu provides a concrete topological point of reference in the investigation of the narrative of a Japanese isolation during the Edo period (1615–1868) – a narrative that continues to colour the country’s cultural history and politics of identity even today.

In our analysis of the correlations between Nagasaki, a littoral locality profoundly characterized by transfer processes, and the visual processes of translation shaping visual culture, we assume an area of negotiation that, in a relativization of the centralizing efforts of the shogunate, is multilateral in orientation and multilingual in organization. It is to be suspected that the same multifunctionality extends to the sphere of the visual media concerned.