Description
Book SynopsisFew scholars have done more than Harry Harootunian to shape the study of modern Japan.
Uneven Moments presents a selection of Harootunian’s essays on Japan’s intellectual and cultural history from the late Tokugawa period to the present that span the many phases of his distinguished career and point to new directions for Japanese studies.
Trade ReviewHarry Harootunian is both a pioneer American scholar of modern Japanese history and a probing critic of mainstream analyses of Japan's turbulent past. This book is a brilliant summing up of his prolific career. -- Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago
To read forty years of Harry Harootunian’s bristling reflections on Japanese history and thought is to come face to face with the most fundamental questions of our own conditions of thinking about history and theory and also about the intellectual life writ large. Each of the essays in this volume demands that we contend with a fierce, exacting, and passionate mind. -- Alan Tansman, author of
The Aesthetics of Japanese FascismHarry Harootunian is a leading voice in Japanese intellectual history. It is no exaggeration to say that his work has shaped the field for the past forty years. These essays collectively provide an extended reflection on the intellectual and philosophical concerns that run through Harootunian’s oeuvre, including the relationship between culture and politics; the problem of temporality, history, and modernity; and the intertwined projects of critical theory and critical area studies. This book will become a classic. -- Louise Young, University of Wisconsin-Madison
The impact that Harootunian’s imaginative and critical rereading of early modern and modern Japan has had on Japan studies in the United States and elsewhere is unfathomably deep. Each and every essay contained in this volume is a landmark work and remains essential for our understanding of the long and precarious process of Japan’s metamorphosis into a modern society. -- Katsuya Hirano, author of
The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern JapanFor readers interested in the complex relationship between culture and politics in Japan and elsewhere, this is essential reading. * Japan Times *
Harootunian's scholarly essays operate on an elevated intellectual plain, but they're immensely rewarding for those who work through them. Rooted in the historical, the lessons they offer are more vital than ever in today's world. * PopMatters *
The text is a must read for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars working in Japanese or Asian history; Harootunian's ideas have aged well. * Choice *
Uneven Moments deserves to be read by any serious student and scholar interested in the formation of the modern world and Japan as world history * International Journal of Asian Studies *
Like Harootunian's many other works, Uneven Moments is undoubtedly destined to provoke lively debate and to inspire a large following both among and beyond the ranks of history and Japanese studies scholars. * Pacific Affairs *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Uneven Moments from Japan’s Modern History
Part I. Imminent Criticism and Academic Discourse: Area Studies1. Tracking the Dinosaur: Area Studies in a Time of “Globalism”
2. “Memories of Underdevelopment” After Area Studies
Part II. Cultural Form and Political Withdrawal: Tokugawa Japan3. Cultural Politics in Tokugawa Japan
4. Late Tokugawa Culture and Thought
Part III. Pathways to Modernity’s Present and the Enduring Everyday5. Shadowing History: National Narratives and the Persistence of the Everyday
6. Overcome by Modernity: Fantasizing Everyday Life and the Discourse on the Social in Interwar Japan
7. Time, Everydayness, and the Specter of Fascism: Tosaka Jun and Philosophy’s New Vocation
8. Allegorizing History: Marxism, Hani Gorō, and the Demands of the Present
9. Philosophy and Answerability: The Kyoto School and the Epiphanic Moment of World History
10. Reflections from Fukushima: History, Memory, and the Crisis of Contemporaneity
Part IV. Ideological Formation: Colluding with the Past11. Visible Discourses/Invisible Ideologies
12. The Presence of Archaism/The Persistence of Fascism
Previously Published Materials
Index
