The postmodern is characterised by an incredulity towards the universal truths which mark modernity. Kuki Shuzo, like many intellectuals in Japan during the twenties and thirties, anticipates this discourse by attempting to confront the hegemonic claims and universal pretensions of modernity. Using the latest European methodologies, Kuki attempted to define a site of difference--a site that could escape the putative universality of Western modes of dealing with historical development and consciousness--through a particular reading of cultural artefacts, especially Edo poetry and painting. Yet Kuki would ultimately locate this special site within the temporal, spatial, and subjective boundaries of the modern nation implicating the geopolitics of modernity and providing an interesting context to study the complicity of art, ideology, and aesthetics in modern discourse.

No description available.

This dissertation examines the link between anarchism and agrarian thought in modern Japan through the investigation of the life and ideas of radical intellectual Ishikawa Sanshiro (1876-1956). I track its emergence from the time of Ishikawa's involvement in the socialist movement in the early 1900s to its development during his exile years in Europe between 1913 and 1920 and then after his return home through to the end of the Pacific War. I show how concern for the traditions and condition of farming communities informed a certain strand of non-violent anarchism premised on environmental awareness and cooperative principles fostered through the practices of everyday life. By rescuing from near historiographical oblivion a major dissenting figure of modern Japan, this study gives prominence to a distinctive anarchist intellectual contribution. I examine both the theoretical premises and related socio-political applications, highlighting Ishikawa's role for over five decades as a creative force of social change and a bulwark against authoritarianism. Thus, this work puts forward a more nuanced understanding of the movement of popular agrarianism that marked the interwar period, often pigeon-holed by historians as an adjunct of radical nationalism. I also probe the ecological critique embedded in Ishikawa's vision of the man-nature interaction, which remained vital over the decades and has direct relevance to presentday concerns. The tracing of Ishikawa's connections, both transnational and within Japan, provides the main methodological axis of this study. It appraises dissenting politics through the lens of actual praxis rather than categorization of ideological differences. Likewise, transnational connections are given agency as a mutually creative process rather than as a unidirectional transmission of ideas and values from West to East.

The aim of this paper is to trace the role Japan's print media played in the course by which the nation came to be imagined in the late nineteenth century, and once conceived, altered and expanded in the early twentieth century. By the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War (1905) a shift from a multiplicity of ideological articulations vis à vis the nation to a hegemony of "official" nationalism, which incorporated imperialism, had occured. How Japanese newspapers became an effective and powerful ideological institution which served to facilitate the hegemony of "official" nationalism is here examined. As the manner in which a culture communicates is a dominant influence on the formation of a culture's social and intellectual preoccupations, the monopoly of print in Meiji Japan makes an analysis of it a crucial first step in understanding how Japanese nationalism developed. Meiji newspapers evolved through four distinct phases: "pro-establishment," "political," "early commercial," and "fully commercial." In each succeeding stage of development, news was more finely strained. Print media's commercial coming of age had significant consequences: "official" nationalism became hegemonic, non-"official" nationalisms were effectively marginalized, and print came to play an increasingly central role in the body politic. An examination of editorial coverage of the war indicates the 1903-1905 period was pivotal to this development. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate