Ayelet Zohar, "The Curious Case of the Camel in Modern Japan: (De)Colonialism, Orientalism, and Imagining Asia" (Brill, 2022)

New Books in Japanese Studies · Dec 7, 2022 · 1h 39m

Ayelet Zohar’s The Curious Case of the Camel in Modern Japan: (De)Colonialism, Orientalism, and Imagining Asia (Brill, 2022) traces the use of camels in the visual vocabulary of Japan’s definition of itself in the world―especially vis-à-vis “Asia―from the Edo period to the present.” In other words, Zohar uses representations of camels as a lens to view the ways in which Japan has both attempted to leave or conquer Asia on the one hand and to find solidarity in a shared Oriental/Asian identity on the other.

The core of The Curious Case of the Camel is the last two centuries, beginning with the…