This interdisciplinary event invites scholars of Russia and Japan to address the topic of Russo-Japanese cultural relations as a challenge to traditional binary views on the knowledge exchange between West and East as that between “colonizer” and “colonized,” seen exclusively through the prism of political and ideological hierarchies and power relations.
The case of Russia and Japan allows insight into a history with a different transnational dynamic—one which was conducive to cross-fertilization and formation of knowledge. This dynamic is polyvalent, multidirectional, complex, mutually enabling and constructive in its very dis-junctures and mis-understandings. Our premise is that the categories of “East” and “West” are themselves multi-layered and polyvalent, ridden with complex intellectual and social tensions and internal conflicts of interests which never allow the poles to translate into each other in a literal word-by-word binary fashion but always require a series of intentional and unintentional readjustments.