Loving John Ruskin

This chapter visits the United Kingdom with a Japanese literary tourist in the 1920s, Mikimoto Ryuzo. It searches alongside him for vestiges of Victorian art critic and social theorist John Ruskin's utopian sentiment in an interwar period from which such ideas have been wholly absented—Ruskin's complex ideas, spoken out of context and somewhat garbled, amounting to little more than passionately articulated commonplaces. In the spirit of Mikimoto's radical quaintness, the chapter next explores the convergence of Marx and Ruskin in Japan, contemporary writers on related themes whose historical coincidence in the London of the 1860s neatly frames the problem of historical major/minorness. Marx is generally considered a major writer to the extent to which he is excised from the context of Victorian Britain; Ruskin is a major writer only within that context, but rarely treated as major in the intellectual histories of Europe. Throughout Mikimoto's intellectual formation, and through his own engagements with style, this chapter attempts to catch a glimpse of a minor Marx and a minor Ruskin.

Quaint, Exquisite

From the opening of trade with Britain in the 1850s, Japan occupied a unique and contradictory place in the Victorian imagination, regarded as both a rival empire and a cradle of exquisite beauty. This book explores the enduring impact of this dramatic encounter, showing how the rise of Japan led to a major transformation of Western aesthetics at the dawn of globalization. The book provides a radical new genealogy of aesthetic experience in modernity. It argues that the global popularity of Japanese art in the late nineteenth century reflected an imagined universal standard of taste that Kant described as the “subjective universal” condition of aesthetic judgment. It features illuminating cultural histories of Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, English derivations of the haiku, and retellings of the Madame Butterfly story, and sheds critical light on lesser-known figures such as Winnifred Eaton, an Anglo-Chinese novelist who wrote under the Japanese pseudonym Onoto Watanna, and Mikimoto Ryuzo, a Japanese enthusiast of the Victorian art critic John Ruskin. It also explains the importance and symbolic power of such material objects as W. B. Yeats's prized katana sword and the “Japanese vellum” luxury editions of Oscar Wilde. The book provides essential insights into the modern understanding of beauty as a vehicle for both intimacy and violence, and the lasting influence of Japanese forms today on writers and artists such as Quentin Tarantino.

Stitched Networks

This essay investigates how the art of Liberian quilters functioned in diplomatic and social contexts; that is, how women visual artists actively shaped cultural diplomacy in nineteenth and twentieth century transatlantic history. Such an examination inserts an absent historical voice--a female West African international traveler--into the corpus of black women traveling internationally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The essay traces the development of quilting, the gentile??? Victorian art, as the Liberian diplomatic gift and asks how and why quilting retains this role after the civil war at the end of the twentieth century. By focusing on an artistic tradition absent from scholarship on Liberian material culture, this essay offers female perspectives on the establishment of a new nation.

The Discriminatory Legal Barrier of Partner Consent in Victorian ART Law: EHT18 v Melbourne IVF

In September 2018, the Federal Court of Australia found that a Victorian woman did not need her estranged husband’s consent to undergo in vitro fertilisation treatment (IVF) using donor sperm. The woman, who was 45 years of age, made an urgent application to the Court for permission to undergo IVF using donor sperm. In a single judge ruling, Griffiths J held that the requirement in the Assisted Reproductive Treatment Act 2008 (Vic) (‘ART Act’) for a married woman to obtain the consent of her husband discriminated against the woman in question on the basis of her marital status in contravention of the Commonwealth Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth) (‘SD Act’). His Honour declared the Victorian law in this instance ‘invalid and inoperable’ by operation of section 109 of the Commonwealth Constitution to the extent it was inconsistent with the Commonwealth law. Although the declarations by the Federal Court were limited in their terms to the circumstances of the case, the judgment raises broader issues about equity of access to assisted reproductive treatment (ART) in Victoria. The issue of partner consent as a barrier to access to ART was specifically raised by an independent review of the ART Act in Victoria. The Victorian Government released an interim report late last year as a first stage of the review, which canvasses some options for reform. This raises a broader question as to whether prescriptive legislation imposing detailed access requirements for ART is necessary or even helpful.