Description
Book SynopsisBeauty in the Age of Empire is a global history of aesthetic education focused on how Western practices were adopted, transformed, and repurposed in Egypt and Japan. Raja Adal uncovers the emergence of aesthetic education in modern schools and its role in making a broad spectrum of ideologies from fascism to humanism attractive.
Trade ReviewA hugely important book. Its groundbreaking methodologies—the global optics, the comparative frameworks based not on regionality but on shared conditions and synchronicities, the focus on embodied histories—have the potential to transform the field. -- Irena Hayter, University of Leeds * Journal of Asian Studies *
The book indeed presents a substantial account of the history of the proposed uses of aesthetics by the state and prominent educators in Egypt and Japan, and without a doubt one learns a great deal from Adal's comparative discussion. * International Journal of Asian Studies *
Raja Adal’s enchantingly original study analyzes the aesthetic education prescribed for children (in music, art, and calligraphy) in late nineteenth- and twentieth century Egypt and Japan as their educational policy makers sought to balance the sources of national tradition and the attractions of European modernity. Drawing on mastery of both Japanese and Arabic, this philosophically informed study lets us transcend any simplified categories of Western and non-Western civilizational projects. -- Charles Maier, author of
Once Within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging Since 1500Raja Adal’s exemplary
Beauty in the Age of Empire charts how aesthetics was used in modernizing societies like Japan and Egypt to ‘enchant’ citizens while reinforcing a changing political environment. Through national schools, a new curriculum inculcated in children a desire to support the value of national identity rather than affectively perform personal responses to artistic expression. Adal shows how this aesthetic education moved along the scale of singularity, from the one place of the nation, to the worldliness of ‘many places.’ -- Harry Harootunian, author of
Uneven Moments: Reflections on Japan's Modern HistoryBeauty in the Age of Empire is a unique and fascinating analysis that tracks complex genealogies of aesthetic education through colonialism, empire, and nation-building. It both provincializes Eurocentric histories of the aesthetic and provides a deeper understanding of the cultivation of modern childhood. -- Jessica Winegar, author of
Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary EgyptExamining three forms of aesthetic education in modern Egypt and Japan,
Beauty in the Age of Empire reveals how similar ideals and anxieties accompanied the project of forming national subjects in countries compelled into nation-making by Western imperialism in the nineteenth century. In lucid and straightforward prose, Adal guides readers into the “global archive” of modern schooling. Striking parallels and new insights abound. This is a vivid and fresh approach to global modernity. -- Jordan Sand, author of
House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880-1930Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Note on Names
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Modern School as a Global Archive
Part I: Music, Calligraphy, and the Education of the Inner SelfInterlude: How Culture Travels: A Global History of the Piano
2. Music Education and the Uses of Aesthetics
3. Writing Education and the Location of Aesthetics
Part II: From Mimesis to Art: Drawing Education and the Rise of the Independent SubjectInterlude: Mimesis and Seduction in National Anthems
4. The Mimetic Moment: The Age of Global Mimesis and Representational Mimesis
5. The End of Global Mimesis: The Rise of the National Subject
6. The End of Representational Mimesis: The Rise of the Individual Subject
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index
