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ALLEGORIES OF TIME AND SPACE: Japanese Identity in Photography and Architecture. By JonathanM. Reynolds. Honolulu: University ofHawai'i Press, 2015. xxix, 316pp., [12]pp. of plates (Illustrations.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3924-6.
This volume occupies an unusual niche in academic publishing, somewhere between coffee-table book and scholarly monograph. Rather than choose a single artist or medium to analyze, sketching in the supporting details around it, Reynolds deftly weaves together strands of art history, intellectual history, and visual culture. Each chapter narrates a distinct "allegory" constructed in response to the unique anxieties of its particular historical moment. This rich mixture contributes to a deeper understanding of how photography and architecture participated in (rather than merely illustrated) the construction of Japanese identity. Over its five chapters, Reynolds' narrative traces a chronological progression of Japanese identity discourse from just prior to WWII to approximately 1990. Although each chapter could easily stand alone as a self-contained analysis of how the artist embodies a particular moment of identity construction, the broader arc of the five pieces together makes a more ambitious comment on the process of interplay between self and other, center and periphery, tradition and modernity in the making of contemporary Japanese selves.
Reynolds lays out his plan in the introduction, where he limits his ambit to the five different "case studies" which form the focus of each of the chapters. He takes as the starting point the moment of "historical free-fall" following WWII, when Japan's artists and intellectuals sought new bases for Japanese identity in the relationship between past and present,...