Abstract
In this paper, I focus on the extant textual and graphic documents produced by the Mexican writer José Juan Tablada during his journey to Japan in 1900. Sponsored financially by Revista Moderna, Tablada’s primary responsibility was to write chronicles and poems about his impressions of this foreign land. Alongside this duty, Tablada began to annotate his impressions in a personal diary; however, upon arriving at his first stop in the US, he stopped doing so and never resumed during this trip. He instead opted to sketch, draw, and color images on small pieces of papers depicting the people, sites, and objects seen. For this reason, my main objective is to decipher why Tablada switched from writing to drawing, and what advantages did the visual arts offer him? To answer these questions, I contextualize Tablada’s drawings with other artists’ carnet de voyage, utilized to record textual and visually their travels. From there, I draw upon Walter Benjamin’s essays and more recent interventions about memory, collecting, and mechanical reproduction to prove that it was Tablada’s intention to affectively take control over the image-making process, in other words, to create a one-of-a-kind memento, embedded with his personal fingerprint and experiences. Besides their affective attachment, these drawings situate Tablada as a mediator between seemingly distant elements, including geographical regions and artistic expressions. Therefore, his interdisciplinary approach encourages a reconsideration of the strict borders between disciplines like literature and art history, to inquire instead how they coexist and nourish each other.
Presenters
Jair Jauregui TorresGraduate Student, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of California, Berkeley, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Civic, Political, and Community Studies
KEYWORDS
Travel, Japan, Drawings, Carnet de voyage, Souvenir, Collecting
