This November 8, 2022, talk by Alison J. Miller, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Art History and Director of Asian Studies at the University of the South (Sewanee, Tennesee), provides an introduction to the woodblock prints of the 1870s and 1880s with a focus on how the images worked to create and reinforce social conceptions of Meiji values and ideals.
During the early Meiji period (1868-1912), woodblock prints had an important role to play in circulating information among the general populace. Printed in a resplendent rainbow of colors the images show a fantasy of the Meiji urban landscape, and an ideal of what Meiji life could be. Sold as part of the vernacular publishing milieu, the prints give us insights into the interests of the populace, but as they were heavily censored, the images must be read with attention to the political climate in which they were made.
Dr. Miller specializes in modern and contemporary Japanese art, prints and photography, and the intersections of gender studies and visual culture. Her research has been funded by a Fulbright Fellowship, Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship, and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, among others. She has published in the Journal of Japanese Studies, TransAsia Photography Review, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA), and contributed to various public humanities projects and museum catalogues. She is co-editor and contributing author for The Visual Culture of Meiji Japan: Negotiating the Transition to Modernity (Routledge, 2021), and is currently finalizing her book manuscript Envisioning the Empress: The Lives and Images of Japanese Imperial Women, 1868-1952 (expected 2023).