Processional prints of the Kanda festival: popular visual culture and neighborhood identity.

This article considers the historical position of neighborhood identities in the city of Edo-Tokyo as represented in woodblock prints depicting the biennial procession of the Kanda shrine festival (Kanda matsuri). Through close analyses of two prints in which I attend to the commercial and local-geo...

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Published in:Japan Forum Vol. 32; no. 1; pp. 30 - 56
Main Author: Toback, Ezra
Format: Article
Published: Taylor & Francis Ltd Mar2020
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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        10.1080/09555803.2017.1411380
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        atl: Processional prints of the Kanda festival: popular visual culture and neighborhood identity.
      aug:
        au: Toback, Ezra
      su:
        Visual culture
        Neighborhoods
        Japanese prints
        Woodcutting (Printmaking)
        Art festivals
      sug:
        subj:
          Visual culture
          Neighborhoods
          Live theatres and other performing arts presenters with facilities
          Promoters of Performing Arts, Sports, and Similar Events without Facilities
          Festivals without facilities
          Promoters of Performing Arts, Sports, and Similar Events with Facilities
          Japanese prints
          Woodcutting (Printmaking)
          Art festivals
      keyword:
        Edo-Tokyo
        evidence
        Festival
        identity
        Kanda
        neighborhood
        publishing
        ukiyo-e
        Edo-Tokyo
        evidence
        Festival
        identity
        Kanda
        neighborhood
        publishing
        ukiyo-e
      ab: This article considers the historical position of neighborhood identities in the city of Edo-Tokyo as represented in woodblock prints depicting the biennial procession of the Kanda shrine festival (Kanda matsuri). Through close analyses of two prints in which I attend to the commercial and local-geographical contexts shaping their production, I argue that the multiple producers of these nineteenth-century works leveraged the neighborhood identities of target consumer audiences to remain viable in a competitive commercial publishing industry. They both responded to and, in turn, molded consumer expectations concerning the invocation of neighborhood identities in the iconography, morphology, and setting of the festival's popular representations. I read these prints against contemporaneous textual sources such as festival programs and festival-administration documents and maps, as well as secondary literature on the Kanda festival. In so doing, I aim to offer a methodology for employing popular visual art as a form of inflected historical evidence in the study of sacred and civic events in Edo-Tokyo that were grounded in local community participation.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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