Reconfiguring Modernity
Regular price
€61.50
A01=Julia Adeney Thomas
asia
Author_Julia Adeney Thomas
biology
Category=JBCC9
Category=JPF
Category=NHF
colonial empire
colonialism
competition
east asia
empire
environment
environmentalism
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
feudalism
harmony
industrial revolution
japan
japanese colonialism
japanese history
japanese imperialism
japanese literature
japanese studies
liberal democracy
meiji history
modern japan
modernity
natural world
nature
nonfiction
physical environment
political authority
political power
politics
prewar japan
progress
social darwinism
state power
technology
tokugawa
tradition
Product details
- ISBN 9780520228542
- Weight: 544g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 08 Jan 2002
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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' 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.
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.
