Japan and the Specter of Imperialism

MARK ANDERSON is Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, USA.

"This study of the relation between the national and the modern in 'Ansei-treaty era Japan' is a bracing revision of late nineteenth-century intellectual history...This illuminating book not only criticizes the field but does something about it." Journal of Japanese Studies "Drawing heavily on analysis from post-colonial studies, Japan and the Specter of Imperialism gives a novel account of the relationship between Western imperialism and the spaces of Japanese national political cultures. The strength of this work lies in its analysis of the debates on what constituted a nation. These debates raged across a broad set of disciplines (literature, philosophy, social sciences, art, ethics), colonizing the imagination via the production of knowledge about history, peoples and places, whilst simultaneously contributing to the formation of an oppressive and territorially aggressive Japanese nation-state." Journal of Asian Studies

• Introduction The Ansei Treaties and the Specter of Imperialism John Luther Long's Madame Butterfly and Imperial Domesticity The Science of Making Men: Moral Fitness for Global Competition Imperial Aesthetics and the State in Meiji Japan Aesthetics and the Moral Capital of the Family State Liberal Governmentality and Melodramatic Resistance in Ozaki Koyo's Konjiki yasha Haga Yaichi's Institution of Classical Japanese Literature: National Community, Governmentality, and Colonial Domesticity