Michelle Liu Carriger

Spectacular Japan articulates impact of circus on the visual and performing arts in Japan and the West. The book brings together Japanese woodblock prints, kimono, costume, circus posters, and photographs, that visualize Japan’s history of street theatre, side shows, and circus. These works of art are drawn principally from The Ringling’s internationally renowned circus and Asian art collections, with loans from other institutional and private collection. Spectacular Japan comprises 5-7 essays, a catalogue of 6 sections, and a chronology.

A richly illustrated exploration of fashion and its capacity for generating controversy and constructing social and individual identitiesClothing matters. This basic axiom is both common sense and, in another way, radical. It is from this starting point that Michelle Liu Carriger elucidates the interconnected ways in which gender, sexuality, class, and race are created by the everyday act of getting dressed. Theatricality of the Closet: Fashion, Performance, and Subjectivity between Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan examines fashion and clothing controversies of the nineteenth century, drawing on performance theory to reveal how the apparently superficial or frivolous deeply affects the creation of identity. By interrogating a set of seemingly disparate examples from the same period but widely distant settings--Victorian Britain and Meiji-era Japan--Carriger disentangles how small, local, ordinary practices became enmeshed in a global fabric of cultural and material surfaces following the opening of trade between these nations in 1850. This richly illustrated book presents an array of media, from conservative newspapers and tabloids to ukiyo-e and early photography, that locate dress as a site where the individual and the social are interwoven, whether in the 1860s and 1870s or the twenty-first century.

A richly illustrated exploration of fashion and its capacity for generating controversy and constructing social and individual identities Clothing matters. This basic axiom is both common sense and, in another way, radical. It is from this starting point that Michelle Liu Carriger elucidates the interconnected ways in which gender, sexuality, class, and race are created by the everyday act of getting dressed. Theatricality of the Closet: Fashion, Performance, and Subjectivity between Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan examines fashion and clothing controversies of the nineteenth century, drawing on performance theory to reveal how the apparently superficial or frivolous deeply affects the creation of identity. By interrogating a set of seemingly disparate examples from the same period but widely distant settings—Victorian Britain and Meiji-era Japan—Carriger disentangles how small, local, ordinary practices became enmeshed in a global fabric of cultural and material surfaces following the opening of trade between these nations in 1850. This richly illustrated book presents an array of media, from conservative newspapers and tabloids to ukiyo-e and early photography, that locate dress as a site where the individual and the social are interwoven, whether in the 1860s and 1870s or the twenty-first century.