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Last week we looked at two influential formulations of what modernity might be: those of Marx and Kant, and explored how they might be manifest in a literary text.
This week, we'll consider the "Asian" element of the module's title. Marx and Kant implicitly see developments in Western Europe, whether in terms of consciousness or in terms of socioeconomic change, as forming a normative account of the modern. We'll extend this today by looking at one or two excerpts from European conceptions of modernity that make rhetorical use of "Asia" early in class discussion We'll also examine the first of your readings, Fukuzawa Yukichi's "Good-bye Asia," a famous text from Meiji Japan.
Moving forward, we'll consider whether there is something different about the encounter with the modern in Asia, and in countries outside the "West". Partha Chatterjee takes colonialism as his object of inquiry: most of Asia was colonized by European powers or Japan during a period at which rapid modernization occurred, and for Chatterjee this legacy of the intertwining of the colonial and the modern marks a crucial difference in "our modernity."
Lydia Liu's essay is more difficult because it appears at first glance to be extremely specialist, referring to a moment in Chinese history when Chinese intellectuals were translating ideas concerning modernity derived from Western texts, often via Japanese intermediaries, and trying to fit them onto existing social structures. The essay explores the way in which a vocabulary of the modern becomes translated across languages in Asia: how language itself participates in changes of consciousness. What I think is most crucial for us to look at is how flexible debate is at this time, and how this might help us, as Liu's final sentence suggests, guard against a contemporary "amnesia, a forgetting of the history of the past" (106).
We will then concretize our discussion by looking at a short story published in the Philippines in the early 1940s, just before World War 2, Nick Joaquin's "Three Generations." As we'll do repeatedly in this module, we'll have to make a large imaginative leap and, while keeping the large brushstrokes of the theoretical essays in mind, also concretize them in a very specific context. Two important connections with the other essays may be worth thinking through as a starting point:
Joaquin's context in the Philippines is, of course, different from either Liu's China or Chatterjee's Bengal. In order to understand histories of colonialism and language use in the Philippines, you may want to start--but not necessarily finish--with the Wikipedia entry on the history of the Philippines.
Last updated: 17 July, 2007