The theme of the symposium is "Remnants," which I can only assume was dreamed up during some sort of beach-side drug-induced powwow. It's a typical term for academia in that you thought it referred to something fairly specific, something left over or a surviving remainder, but once you try to define what might be and not be a remnant you realize that the term could encompass literally everything. As the symposium's organizers themselves pointed out, the entire "field of art history can be conceived of as a discourse of the remnant."
So the challenge in submitting an abstract to a symposium about everything is how to make your paper topic sound like it fits the theme without (a) sounding like everyone else's abstract and (b) using the word "remnant" 15 times in one paragraph. I wanted my topic to relate to Japonisme, but I also wanted the opportunity to write about something new, something I hadn't had a chance to discuss yet in my seminar papers. So I returned to some images I had come across last year that depict Japanese women for a western 19th century audience.
Basically, the abstract points out that even though some scholars have argued that Japonisme (the western interest in Japanese arts and society beginning in the mid-19th century) helped objectify Japanese people as having certain essentialist characteristics, visual representations of Japanese people have rarely been analyzed for how they might have contributed to this problem. So my paper argues that images of Japanese people that circulated in the west represented them as remnants, that is, not just as the remains of another far away culture, but also as the remains of a long ago civilization. By constructing Japanese people as remnants of an "old" Japan that was still going on, Japan gets constructed as a place living in the past, as a decidedly non-western, non-modern place.
