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The essays in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia illustrate how valuable the analytic of colonial modernity is to the rethinking of contemporary history. Although the modernity of non-European colonies is as indisputable as the colonial core of European modernity, scholarship on the region of "East Asia" has tried until recently to view colonialism primarily through the lens of British India, and has not fully registered pervasive discourses of colonialism and modernity in the Asia Pacific region.Demonstrating impatience with social science models of knowledge, the contributors show that binary categories focused on during the Cold War have lost their centrality in the project of history writing. Collecting articles previously published in the journal positions: east asia cultures critique, Tani Barlow suggests that general cultural critics have much to learn from a scholarship dedicated to rethinking the synchronicity of colonialism and modernity in "East Asia". Individual chapters address issues such as the making of imperial subjects in Okinawa, politics and the social body in colonial Hong Kong, discourses of disease and colonial embodiment in Pacific Islands under Japanese colonialism, and the politics of popular memory in South Korea.This is an invaluable collection for students and scholars of regional studies, International studies, Asian area studies, and cultural criticism.
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Tani E. Barlow, ed.
Summary
Includes essays illustrating how valuable the analytic of colonial modernity is to the rethinking of contemporary history.
