Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology - Couverture rigide

Thomas, Julia Adeney

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0520228545 ISBN 13 : 9780520228542

Editeur : University of California Press, 2002

Synopsis

Julia Adeney Thomas turns the concept of nature into a powerful analytical lens through which to view Japanese modernity, bringing the study of both Japanese history and political modernity to a new level of clarity. She shows that nature necessarily functions as a political concept and that changing ideas of nature's political authority were central during Japan's transformation from a semifeudal world to an industrializing colonial empire. In political documents from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, nature was redefined, moving from the universal, spatial concept of the Tokugawa period, through temporal, social Darwinian ideas of inevitable progress and competitive struggle, to a celebration of Japan as a nation uniquely in harmony with nature. The so-called traditional "Japanese love of nature" masks modern state power.

Thomas's theoretically sophisticated study rejects the supposition that modernity is the ideological antithesis of nature, overcoming the determinism of the physical environment through technology and liberating denatured subjects from the chains of biology and tradition. In making "nature" available as a critical term for political analysis, this book yields new insights into prewar Japan's failure to achieve liberal democracy, as well as an alternative means of understanding modernity and the position of non-Western nations within it.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Julia Adeney Thomas is Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and winner of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians' award for best article of 1999.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of California Press
• Date d'édition: 2002
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0520228545
• ISBN 13: 9780520228542
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 254
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible