Abstract

Race, class and empire in nineteenth-century England inflected understandings of japanned papier mâché, influencing both its brief popularity and its abrupt demise in the 1860s. Although the material was rarely used as an explicit signifier in nineteenth-century literature or theory, or indeed mentioned at all, its inclusion in the Great Exhibition suggests its cultural and industrial centrality. This article proposes that this disparity results not from an absence of meaning, but from too great a complexity and too clear a set of implications. As an imitation of an East Asian form, japanned papier mâché represented an Orientalizing fantasy; as a shiny black surface, japanned papier mâché tapped into both desires and anxieties surrounding racial Blackness; as a backdrop for depictions of recognizably British landscapes and architecture; and as a distinctively British industry, japanned papier mâché offered a kind of national identity-fashioning. Tying a ubiquitous but understudied material of the English mid-nineteenth century to broader histories of the British empire, this article demonstrates the tidy encapsulation of the fraught and complex 1850s and 1860s into the materiality, forms and failure of japanned papier mâché.

中文翻译：

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闪亮的黑色和白色的层次：日本化的PapierMâché，种族和大英帝国

摘要

19世纪英国的种族，阶级和帝国改变了对日本纸型玛奇的理解，从而影响了其短暂的知名度和1860年代的突然灭亡。尽管该材料在19世纪的文学或理论中很少被用作明确的指代物，甚至根本没有被提及，但将其包含在“大展览”中表明了其文化和工业中心地位。本文提出，这种差异不是由缺乏意义引起的，而是由过于复杂和含糊不清的含义造成的。作为东亚形式的模仿，日本制的纸莎草纸代表了一种东方化的幻想。作为光泽的黑色表面，日本纸制的玛切纸卷入了种族黑度周围的欲望和焦虑。作为描述公认的英国风景和建筑的背景；作为一种与众不同的英国产业，日本纸莎草纸提供了一种民族认同的时尚。本文将19世纪中叶的英国无处不在但未被广泛研究的材料与大英帝国的更广泛的历史相联系，证明了充满生气和复杂的1850和1860年代对日本纸型教皇的实质，形式和失败的封装。