Anglophone Scholarship Research Articles

Post-World War II perspectives on Choi Seung-hee: ideological blind spots in Asia-based and Anglophone scholarship

ABSTRACT During and before World War II, Japanese colonial rule cast a profound impact on the cultural and artistic landscapes of its colonies. Choi Seung-hee (1911–1969), a prominent cultural figure from the pre-war period, skillfully navigated the delicate balance between her roles as a representative of Korean national dancer and an emblematic figure within the Japanese empire. Her dual identity elicited diverse public reactions, ranging from slander to praise. In South Korea, post-Korean War, ideological divisions led to the marginalization of artists like Choi who moved north, ambiguously referred to as “Choi X.” In North Korea, autocratic rule infused her evaluations with strong nationalism. In China and the Soviet Union, Cultural Cold War ideologies impacted her assessments. Japan’s perspective reflected its post-colonial introspection and issues. In contrast to the ideologically saturated research in Asian contexts, contemporary Anglophone scholarship on Choi, transcending nationalist confines, nonetheless exhibits distinct limitations. This study primarily scrutinizes the diverse perspectives reflected in Choi research, drawing upon news reports, visual materials, academic studies, and personal observations in China, South Korea, and Japan. The aim is to chart the trajectory and representative viewpoints of Choi research in post-World War II Koreas, China/Soviet Union, Japan, and the Anglophone scholarship. Through literature review and critical analysis, this research underscores how nationalist, socialist, Aesthetic Orientalist, Sinocentric and (Pan) Asian political/non-political ideologies have shaped perspectives on Choi amidst the Cultural Cold War and decolonization. Moreover, it reveals how transnational ideological constructs and dominant research paradigms have shaped and reshaped Choi’s image.

“Like Seeking out a Lost Friend”: Reconsidering “Pioneer” Arab Feminists and Their Networks as Part of a/the First Wave

AbstractContemporary Arab feminist writers such as Margot Badran and Mona Eltahawy describe their personal discovery of Arab “pioneers.” This label positions “pioneers” as exceptional figures, which untethers their legacy from contemporary Arab feminists, and from one another. Drawing on the Warwick Research Collective's concept of “combined and uneven development,” this essay rethinks how we understand the first wave to account for the feminist histories in al-mashreq, and therefore reimagines the feminist wave model to account for waves of transmission, of emotion such as inspiration drawn from solidarity with other women. Through analysis of Anglophone scholarship and biographies, translated autobiographical writings of “pioneers,” and analysis of L'Egyptienne magazine, this article offers a new way of framing the work of “pioneer” feminists as part of a wide network of collaborators, and a wave of feminist activism that is locally and globally imbricated. This paper examines women's journals and salons which contribute to a period of “invisible feminism” from 1860 to the early 1920s. The endeavors of three “pioneer” figures, Huda Sha'rawi (Egypt, 1879–1947), Anbara Salam Khalidi (Lebanon, 1897–1986), and May Ziadeh (Palestine/Lebanon, 1886–1941) are then discussed through the lens of their influential friendships with other women.

The making of paper money in early modern Japan

AbstractThis article explores the conception and execution of paper currency schemes in Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868). Paper currency was widely used as a form of local money in early modern Japan, but has received close to no attention in Anglophone scholarship even amid a recent upsurge in interest in the global history of money. From the perspective of monetary history, Tokugawa paper currency presents an intriguing puzzle. Even as paper currencies repeatedly collapsed in value, they remained in common use as an essential component of the early modern monetary system. Using the case of Sendai domain, a large fiefdom in northeastern Japan, the article argues that the monetary practices and expectations of ordinary subjects transformed paper money, created through partnerships between the samurai ruling class and powerful merchant financiers, from a tool meant to serve the interests of state finances into a low‐denomination currency convenient for everyday transactions, resulting in the bills’ surprising longevity as a form of small change. Drawing on approaches that centre the role of non‐state and marginal actors in the making of money, it sheds new light on the political economy of late Tokugawa Japan and offers new insights into the global history of money.

Fukuzawa, Liberalism, and the Imperial Temptation

Abstract This review essay juxtaposes Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Bourgeois Liberalism by Minhyuk Hwang with Progress, Pluralism, and Politics by David Williams, both published in 2020. Although the two books are motivated by different concerns and are likely to attract different audiences, I show that they can be read together to throw light on the complicated relationship between liberalism and empire from a comparative angle. On the one hand, I draw on Williams’s book and other recent works in the history of political thought to criticize some aspects of Hwang’s discussion of Fukuzawa. On the other hand, I draw on Hwang’s book and other studies on Fukuzawa to tease out the implications of Williams’s book for an important issue that has been marginalized in the recent Anglophone scholarship on liberalism and empire: the imperial temptation for non-Western liberals.

On the French Origins of Samuel Moyn’s the Last Utopia

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to provide an account of an important yet overlooked source of inspiration in Samuel Moyn’s contributions to the historical turn in the field of human rights studies. It examines the impact of an earlier French debate that occurred within a reflection group for political thought, headed by the French historian François Furet, on Moyn's scholarship. A notable similarity between the French debate that emerged in the late 1970s and the historical turn in Anglophone scholarship a couple of decades later is the emphasis on the temporal dimension of human rights. However, the French debate placed greater emphasis on the effects of human rights on a society's capacity to orient itself temporally, while Moyn and his intellectual adversaries primarily addressed genealogical questions. The article highlights the different temporal aspects of the human rights debate emphasized by these two debates: as a politico-temporal issue (as seen in the French debate), and primarily as a historiographical problem (as exemplified by Moyn’s approach).

Print Internationalism's Uneasy Adjacencies

Print Internationalism's Uneasy Adjacencies

Intimate Archives

This article activates an archive of love letters written during the Second World War, using practice-as-research techniques to explore resilience and intimacy in periods of invasion. Originally found in a cardboard box in the house of the author’s deceased grandmother, the correspondence was archived at the Archive for Autobiography in France. It contains one letter for each day of the war between the newly-wed Marguerite and Alfred Bucquet, who was sent to the warfront. Spurred by the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the archive was activated as part of a seminar on performing memory, hosted by artist-scholar María José Contreras Lorenzini in New York University. In devising an embodied response to the archive, questions on who within a familial lineage can engage with war-trauma arose, leading to reflections on Marianne Hirsch’s scholarship on post-memory. Interviews, personal archives and oral recounts allowed the creation of a rich study of the two protagonists, as well as a sense of the zones of oblivion that reside within the second and third generation. This paper also expands on the little-known anglophone scholarship of French scholar and founder of the Archive, Philippe Lejeune, who penned the ‘autobiographical pact’. This article engages with Lejeune’s ideas of truth-telling within an intimate repertoire and through a close reading of the letters, an opportunity to complexify the ‘pact’ by reading between the lines of highly mediated recounts of war trauma. This article aims to use memory as a method to engage with the present, generating strategies of resistance and resilience. It emphasizes the importance of the autobiographical archive as a legitimate object of study, and how intimate objects create cartographies of care and persist within the archive a way for the past to be remembered through resilience.

Johann Friedrich Herbart: Grandfather of Analytic Philosophy by Frederick C. Beiser

Reviewed by: Johann Friedrich Herbart: Grandfather of Analytic Philosophy by Frederick C. Beiser Nabeel Hamid BEISER, Frederick C. Johann Friedrich Herbart: Grandfather of Analytic Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. xii + 321 pp. Cloth, $85.00 This volume is the newest installment in Frederick Beiser's emerging series of intellectual biographies of nineteenth-century German figures who are relatively little known in the Anglophone world. Following monographs on Hermann Cohen (2018) and David Friedrich Strauß (2020), Beiser's latest subject is Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), a contemporary of Schelling and Hegel best known in his century as a founder of scientific psychology and an educational theorist. Beiser's motive for presenting Herbart to today's Anglophone readers, however, has to do with neither of those dimensions of his legacy. His claim on Herbart's behalf is bold: that he was the one who "first outlined . . . our modern conception of the purpose and method of philosophy." According to Beiser, Herbart was the first to advance the idea that "philosophy is primarily an analysis of concepts, that it is a second-order logical enterprise that examines concepts rather than a first-order empirical discipline (physics, biology) that uses them." Thus, he bestows upon Herbart the moniker indicated in the book's subtitle: "If Russell and Frege are the fathers of analytical philosophy, Herbart is its grandfather." Beiser supports his central genealogical thesis with several specific claims that would draw Herbart into the orbit of contemporary philosophical naturalism: that Herbart conceived philosophy as an examination of the logic of the sciences; that Frege borrowed Herbart's slogan, "reworking of concepts" (Bearbeitung der Begriffe) to describe the business of philosophy; that Herbart upheld a sharp fact/value [End Page 543] distinction; and that he formulated a "method of relations" for the analysis of concepts derived strictly from the given. Most importantly, perhaps, given the received story of the origins of analytic philosophy as a reaction to (British) German Idealism, Beiser frames Herbart as an early opponent of the speculative systems of Fichte and Schelling, and as the source of an alternative development of transcendental idealism that anticipated the later neo-Kantian movement. Whether Herbart's claim to ancestry is convincing remains for his putative descendants to judge. To specialists in the history of nineteenth-century philosophy, Beiser's pitch to analytic philosophers risks appearing reductive. Indeed, a striking feature of Herbart's reception is its ambivalence. During the time when he was widely read, authors as varied in their intellectual orientations as Wilhelm Dilthey, Ernst Mach, and Matthias Jakob Schleiden contended with Herbart as, in turn, a progenitor of psychologism, a pioneer of the application of mathematics to mental phenomena, and a dogmatic scholastic, all before Frege leaned on Herbart to propose conceptual analysis as the distinctive task of philosophy that would save it from irrelevance in the face of the forward march of the positive sciences. Meanwhile, Herbart's most compelling claim to distinction, that he initiated (along with Jakob Friedrich Fries) a naturalistic alternative to the Fichte-Schelling-Hegel school of post-Kantian philosophy, has been defended previously, including in Anglophone scholarship (notably by Gary Hatfield in The Natural and the Normative). Beiser's attempt to give Herbart a place in the genealogy of analytic philosophy comes at the inevitable cost of evading some of the tensions in Herbart's work that account for his complex influence. Beiser's story—told in the lucid, engaging style we have come to expect from him—spans the length of Herbart's life and career. It also provides a clear overview of all major aspects of his teaching—from metaphysics and psychology, to pedagogy, ethics, and aesthetics. The narrative is divided into thirteen chapters. The first four cover Herbart's childhood in Oldenburg, student years in Jena, and his time in Interlaken as private tutor to an aristocratic Swiss family, which proved crucial for his lifelong interest in pedagogical theory. The next three turn to Herbart's first academic post in Göttingen and his decisive break with his teacher, Fichte, which led to his early efforts to formulate an alternative metaphysics and ethics, the latter notably infused with a Romantic idea of...

What Is Latin American History?

What Is Latin American History?

Gendered Economy: Sociality and the Lesbian Consumer Market in China1

The gay consumer market is often treated as a homogeneous entity, and Anglophone scholarship has given scant attention to lesbian consumers. This paper examines gendered distinctions within the Chinese gay market by asking how the lesbian consumer market is organized differently from its gay male counterpart and why some types of businesses thriving in the gay male market are likely to fail in the lesbian market. Based on interviews with entrepreneurs and business professionals, supplemented with ethnographic and media data, this study indicates that certain types of commerce existing in the gay male consumer market do not dovetail with lesbians' preferred ways of socializing associated with women's risk perception. Unlike previous scholarship that simply characterized the lesbian market as “underdeveloped,” this research demonstrates that opportunities for the lesbian and gay male markets exist in different types of trade and business. Although the concept of the pink economy is theoretically grounded in sexual orientation, China's pink market demonstrates how gender plays a key role in shaping the lesbian consumer market.

Lotman in the Anglophone world: General trends, two new anthologies and a Companion

This article reconstructs the main foci and changes in the reception of Juri Lotman’s work and Lotman-related scholarship in the Anglophone world. The first part of the article presents a brief critical overview of the history of the translations of Juri Lotman’s works into English and of Anglophone scholarship on Lotman from 1973 to the present. The second part of the article considers more closely three volumes entirely dedicated to Lotman’s work which have most recently been published in English: the anthologies of translated texts by Lotman Culture, Memory and History: Essays in Cultural Semiotics (2019, ed. Marek Tamm) and Culture and Communication: Signs in Flux. An Anthology of Major and Lesser-Known Works by Juri Lotman (2020, ed. Andreas Schönle) as well as The Companion to Juri Lotman: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (2022, eds. Marek Tamm and Peeter Torop).

Pelimusiikin tutkimus Japanissa ja muualla

Game music scholarship in Japan and elsewhere: Differences and similarities, gaps and bridges
 Japan is a notable producer of video games and game music on an international scale. Considering the global prominence of Japanese game music, however, remarkably little academic research on the topic has taken place within Japan itself – especially when compared with recent, abundantly growing Anglophone academic interest in game music. For example, there are no Japanese conferences or scholarly journals devoted to the research field, and the number of Japanese scholarly articles addressing game music remains just under 30 at time of writing. What explains this difference from Anglophone scholarship, and what are the leading paradigms of game music research in Japan today?
 This article seeks to answer these questions by observing the research field in Japan. After introducing and classifying the main paradigms of existing scholarly research, the essay goes on to argue that, due to certain conventions of Japanese academia, addressing only scholarly publications is insufficient to cover all relevant expert discussions on game music in the country. By next addressing non-academic discourse on the topic, the essay shows that non-scholarly literature occupies a significant role in determining the paradigms of game music research in Japan. As a concrete example, the article addresses the possibilities and limitations of a dominant paradigm that focuses on the history of game music from a technology-centric viewpoint. Finally, the essay discusses how academic and non-academic – as well as Japanese and Western – discourses could benefit each other.

Mana Kia. Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism

Mana Kia. <i>Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism</i>

Coming to Terms with “Engaged Buddhism”: Periodizing, Provincializing, and Politicizing the Concept

Whatever happened to “Engaged Buddhism”? Twenty years after a flurry of publication placing this global movement firmly on the map, enthusiasm for the term itself appears to have evaporated. I attempt to reconstruct what happened: scholars turned away from the concept for its reproducing colonialist understandings of traditional Buddhism as essentially world-rejecting, and they developed alternate discourses for describing Buddhist actors’ multifarious social and political engagements, especially in contemporary Asia. I describe the specific rise and fall of the term in Anglophone scholarship, in order for scholars to better grasp the evolution of contemporary Western, Anglophone Buddhisms, to better understand what Buddhists in Asia are in fact doing with the term, and to better think through what it might mean politically for us as scholars to deploy the term at all. In particular, I identify “Academic Engaged Buddhism” (1988–2009) as one hegemonic form of Engaged Buddhism, a Western Buddhist practitioner-facing anthological project of Euro-American scholars with potentially powerful but unevenly distributed effects on Buddhist thought and practice around the world.

Editors’ Introduction

We are delighted to present this special issue of the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures.Instead of the usual set of scholarly articles, this issue brings together new editions and translations of primary texts with new research guides, ranging from well- to little-known figures from the medieval religious world. First, Ana Rita Parreiras Reis offers an edition of the heretofore unedited Treatise Against Fleshly Affections, an anonymous fifteenth-century Middle English text found in London, British Library, MS Royal 17 C xviii, which may have originated at Syon Abbey. Second, Andrew Fogleman translates Jean Gerson’s Sermon on Angels, a text that reveals some of the origins of Gerson’s later (and better-known) thought on the discernment of spirits. Next, Clarck Drieshen’s article explores manuscript evidence that suggests that a visionary text from Hampole Priory may in fact be an English adaptation of Continental sources, rather than an original production of the Priory, and suggests new areas of comparative material research in medieval women’s visionary texts. Finally, Andrew Halpin and Claudio Peri provide an extensive bibliographic survey on Jacopone da Todi, highlighting the importance of international scholarship to a fuller understanding of his poetry.While each piece collected here is concerned with distinct texts and is not inherently related to the others, all suggest exciting new opportunities for research into later medieval Christianity, in particular on areas that have long been the subject of study: Syon Abbey, discretio spirituum, the presumably English origins of the Hampole revelation, and Jacopone da Todi’s mystical verses. Reis speculates that the Treatise may have been affiliated with Syon Abbey, which would offer new insights into that community; Fogleman’s translation illuminates Gerson’s well-known thoughts on the validity of visionary experience; Drieshen challenges received assumptions regarding the source of a visionary text; and Halpin and Peri argue for the inclusion of both European and Anglophone scholarship in the study of a well-known Italian mystic. Alongside these new editions, translations, and approaches, we are pleased to present our inaugural special review essay: in “Denying Sameness, Making Race: Medieval Anti-Judaism,” Samantha Katz Seal surveys several new books focused on different aspects of medieval Judaism, illuminating emerging work in an important area of medieval religious culture. Additional book reviews survey new theoretical approaches, new interdisciplinary readings of visual culture, and new work on religious literatures and cultures from Ireland to Iceland. With this special issue dedicated to new bibliographic, editorial, methodological, and translation work, we aim to expand the JMRC’s offerings to medieval studies, making room for considerations of method alongside new scholarship, and inspire new approaches to all areas of medieval religious cultures.

The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction: Path Literature and an Interpretation of Buddhism by Michihiro Ama

Reviewed by: The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction: Path Literature and an Interpretation of Buddhism by Michihiro Ama Charlotte Eubanks (bio) The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction: Path Literature and an Interpretation of Buddhism. By Michihiro Ama. State University of New York Press, 2021. xii, 342 pages. $95.00, cloth; $33.95, paper. Whereas his previous scholarship focused on the development of Shin Buddhism in North America, approaching it from the vantage of denominational history and, to an extent, ethnic studies, with The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction Michihiro Ama embarks in a new direction. He proposes to consider Buddhism not only as a fact of sectarian affiliation and identification but also as a matter of narrative and aesthetic construction. The book attempts to read the Meiji-era (1868–1912) development of confessional narratives by reform-minded Shin Buddhist figures and the near-simultaneous explosion of confessional narrative realism in the Japanese literary realm as interconnected phenomena. Ama suggests that the same social and cultural forces that shaped the confessional literary forms of now-canonical authors—such as Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), Tayama Katai (1872–1930), and Shiga Naoya (1883–1971)—influenced the self-writing of religious reformers—such as Kiyozawa Manshi (1863–1903), Chikazumi Jōkan (1870–1941), and particularly Akegarasu Haya (1877–1954). Conversely, Ama also asserts that Buddhist narrative structures (the triad of "ground, path, and goal" [p. 2]) and practices fostering an aesthetic of seeing things "as they are" (ari no mama) can be discerned in the realist self-writing of all these men. The book begs the question, what is Buddhist literature? Or, to invert the terms, what is literary Buddhism? One range of answers, categorical and determinative in nature, might center proximity to institutional authority. In this view, a work's status as Buddhist literature might stem from biography (the author is a monastic, for instance), from genre (the work is a sutra or a collection of sermons), or from canonicity (the text is included in a fairly stable set of recognized works, such as the Tripitaka canon). A second range of answers, social and cultural in nature, would instead center questions of production and circulation. In this view, a work's claim to literary Buddhist status might be rooted in its regular inclusion (be it chanted, sung, read, or performed) in liturgical events, the context of its composition (for instance, a religious practice of composing one poem a day), or its intended audience (such as a short story published in a magazine marketed primarily to Buddhist lay believers). Then again, a third range of answers might center aesthetic qualities. Here, a work might be regarded as Buddhist literature if its contents deal with central Buddhist concepts (impermanence, for instance, [End Page 496] or nonattachment), if its narrative structure follows a nominally Buddhist trajectory (such as adopting temporal assumptions of karmically conditioned cyclical existence), or if its style seeks to enact Buddhist propositions about the nature of reality (resulting in a refusal to adopt a stable first-person voice, perhaps). Rather than adopt systematically any of the approaches I have outlined above, Ama's understanding of Buddhist literature, or "path literature" as he calls it, intermixes each of these potential definitions. On the one hand, Ama's study is part of a growing set of scholarship aimed at describing the modern lives of Buddhists, both clerical and lay believers, and analyzing the continuing influences and developments of Buddhism as a living religion in modern Japanese culture. In this sense, The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction can be read productively alongside recent scholarship on clerical marriage and the danka system of mandatory temple affiliation, insofar as the novels, short stories, and essays he examines contain numerous meditations on, and sometimes barbed critiques of, both practices. Ama's work also contributes to Anglophone scholarship on modern Pure Land and True Pure Land Buddhism by providing fairly extensive biographical information on several reformist leaders and Buddhist activists. On the other hand, The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction takes up Japanese literary scholars' long-standing interest in various forms of self-writing that accompanied and undergirded the emergence of European- influenced modes of novelistic literary realism. Here...

The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought by Dennitza Gabrakova

Reviewed by: The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought by Dennitza Gabrakova Annmaria Shimabuku (bio) The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought. By Dennitza Gabrakova. Brill, 2018. 210 pages. €88.00, cloth; €88.00, E-book. The Unnamable Archipelago: Wounds of the Postcolonial in Postwar Japanese Literature and Thought by Dennitza Gabrakova is a unique delight. It is a study of Japanese literature published in English that bears the fruit of graduate study at the University of Tokyo rather than a program in the Anglophone academy. In a study on the "postcolonial," the reader is given the expected references to Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, [End Page 418] but yet is struck more profoundly by a sustained engagement with Japanese-language theorists such as Ukai Satoshi, Komori Yōichi, and Takahashi Tetsuya. In a study of the "postcolonial" in "postwar Japanese literature," one might assume a focus on texts emanating from the legacy of Japanese colonialism in Hokkaido, Okinawa, Taiwan, the Korean peninsula, and beyond. But this is not the case here. The texts are—I daresay—ineluctably Japanese, albeit in a radically different manner. They are "Japanese" in a way that the author might argue is "unnamable." In all of these ways, this work displaces the centrality of Anglophone scholarship with archipelagic thought infused into postwar literature in Japan. Archipelagic thought has been explored through the work of the writer Shimao Toshio who conceptualized Yaponeshia, or the merging of the words for "Japan" and "islands" (p. 157). Shimao was largely concerned with displacing the centrality of a purportedly homogenous Japan by engaging with the peripheral islands of Okinawa. Gabrakova, however, is more informed by the cultural anthropologist Imafuku Ryūta's world theory of the archipelago which she reads in a deconstructive vein. In her approach, engagement with islands does not reaffirm the continental stability of the writer but, rather, provides a reflection on the fragmentation and multiplicity that was always already there, within "Japan." The first two chapters provide a theoretical foundation for the middle three chapters, which examine literary texts. Chapter 1, "Archipelagic Thought and Theory's Gift," engages with Imafuku's theory of the world through the guntō or archipelago and the art critic Taki Kōji's notion of the same. Taki follows Kant's division of "the transcendental subject into several faculties representing islands" and examines the "movement between them" that he calls the "archipelago" (p. 20). Whereas the transcendental subject synthesizes these faculties in an act of self-determination, Gabrakova, via this constellation of theorists, is more interested in the generative power of the individual faculties, or islands themselves, and their intercourse. She is critical of iterations of Japan in which its archipelagic diversity is eliminated by synthesizing itself internally in the name of sovereignty that gives protection but also asks for conformity in return. Archipelagic thought, following Gabrakova's reading of Trinh T. Minh Ha, "give[s] without obligation or debt involved and, without expecting any form of return" (p. 14). This is the "un-give in giving" (p. 14) and points to "Japan strictly enforcing Article 9" as a "gift of a higher degree that cannot involve reciprocation but rather anticipates a dissolution of sovereignty" (p. 28). Chapter 2, "Translating Shame and the Wound of Ethnicity," operates as a "supplement to Imafuku's 'archipelago'" (p. 61). If the disjointed motion of the archipelago is the euphoric moment of the "un-give in giving," then this chapter examines the painful moment of shame when confronting the gendered and ethnic implications of the failure to erect a sovereign [End Page 419] national polity. Through a Ukai Satoshi–inspired reading of Ruth Benedict, Gabrakova argues that whereas guilt is rooted in abstractions of the moral, shame is located in bodies marked by ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. The "wound" or gaishō is literally an "external wound" (p. 47), or that passage where one is both wounded by the outside while also opened up to it. Quoting Ukai, she prioritizes the "poetics of translation" (p. 53) in thinking about ways to negotiate this wound. She invokes Ukai's question: "How could one...

History of Chinese Philosophy Through its Key Terms ed. by Yueqing Wang, Qinggang Bao, and Guoxing Guan

Reviewed by: History of Chinese Philosophy Through its Key Terms ed. by Yueqing Wang, Qinggang Bao, and Guoxing Guan Alice Simionato (bio) History of Chinese Philosophy Through its Key Terms. Edited by Yueqing Wang, Qinggang Bao, and Guoxing Guan and translated by Shuchen Xiang. Singapore: Springer, 2020. Pp. xii + 439. Paperback 64,99€, isbn 978-981-15-2574-2. Recent anglophone scholarship on Chinese philosophy provides students and scholars with a great variety of introductory materials, especially when it comes to encyclopedias and manuals on the history of Chinese philosophical traditions. It is therefore increasingly difficult for scholars to produce innovative studies on the subject that can provide a significant and original contribution to the field, especially when addressing both specialists and enthusiasts. In this context, The History of Chinese Philosophy Through its Key Terms by Nanjing University’s Wang Yueqing 王月清, Bao Qinggang 暴庆刚, and Guan Guoxing 管国兴 certainly represents a valuable and innovative contribution. Instead of presenting the history of Chinese thought by sectioning it in terms of thinkers or schools of thought, as it is traditionally done in encyclopedic works, the book considers the historical and conceptual evolution of specific key terms which characterize the evolution of those philosophical traditions which form the broad and diversified framework of Chinese philosophy. The book is composed of thirty-seven chapters (varying from 8 to 18 pages in length), each of which is devoted to a detailed discussion of a specific key term in both its historical and conceptual evolution. The great majority of chapters discuss the evolution of terms within the broad historical framework ranging from classical thought to the end of the Qing dynasty. The book presents a detailed discussion of a great variety of Chinese philosophical concepts, ranging from the most well-known core notions, such as dao 道 (“Way”, first chapter), xin 心 (“heart-mind”, chapter five), and cheng 诚(“sincerity”, chapter eight), to other fundamental yet less discussed concepts such as xingershang xingerxia 形而上形而下 (“above physical form and below physical form”, chapter twenty), liyu 理 欲 (“principle and desire”, chapter twenty-nine), and xiaoyao 逍遙 (“unfettered and effortless”, chapter thirty-five), among others. The evolution of each concept is presented by discussing how different philosophers from different traditions and historical periods have rendered its meaning. This approach is particularly effective with regards to discussions of terms which are often considered as monolithic in significance such [End Page 1] as li 理 (“coherence”, chapter thirteen) or qi 氣 (“vital energy”, chapter fourteen), among others. Importantly, the different meanings of each key term are explained both across different thinkers and within the same philosophical system (for example, Confucius’ multifaceted notion of tian 天 as both “almighty commander” and ziran 自然, “self-so”, p. 38). This type of categorization allows the reader to appreciate the articulate development of the most central notions of Chinese philosophy in relation to different contexts throughout the centuries. By means of nuanced and differentiated analysis, in turn, philosophical traditions emerge as developing in conversation among each other, rather than in isolation. As a consequence, the central concerns which characterize the history of Chinese thought are highlighted systematically, together with their conceptual and argumentative specificities. While the remarkable density of each chapter makes this book a valuable source for scholars working in the field of Chinese philosophy, the authors also aim at addressing the broad audience (p. vii). The scope of the book has informed the authors’ methodology: while the genealogical account of the terms considered provides a picture of their “historical lines of evolution”, they explain, thematic comparisons are also employed in order to “highlight the unique contents of these philosophies” (p. vii). In addition, the authors occasionally provide “insightful comparisons with Western philosophy”, which are meant to “bring forth the original and multidimensional meanings of these terms” (p. vii). So while the genealogical and the comparative accounts can serve as aiding tools for researchers at all stages, the explanatory connections with Western philosophy are aimed at broadening the narrative of Chinese philosophical discourse in order to aid non-experts (or scholars of Western philosophy) in appreciating Chinese thought “in its own natural habitat” (p. vii). This methodology, however, is not employed without issues, as it might be inevitable for works with such a broad and ambitious...

Plato, Isocrates and Epistolary Literature

Working against the recent arguments against Plato’s authorship of the Seventh Letter in the Anglophone scholarship, this paper demonstrates the historical possibility that Plato wrote his letters for philosophical purposes, most likely in competition with Isocrates, who skilfully used the literary genre of letters for his rhetorical and philosophical purposes. Because Isocrates and Plato experimented with various writing styles in response to each other, letters and autobiographies may well have been their common devices. The paper concludes that we should respect the tradition that had included and respected the Seventh Letter as Plato’s own writing.

Minerva’s French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France

Minerva’s French Sisters pairs imaginative reconstruction with meticulous archival research in order to illuminate the lives of six women scientists of the Enlightenment. Practitioners of diverse STEM disciplines, from astronomy to mathematics to chemistry to anatomy, these women cannily navigated the homosocial worlds of Ancien régime science and found varying degrees of recognition and success ‘in the golden moment before the Revolution sent women back into their homes, disenfranchised and out of sight’. Well-known in their own day but probably unknown to each other and certainly little-known today (especially in Anglophone scholarship), they symbolize the successes and failures of the French Enlightenment to make the natural sciences a more hospitable place for women. The book develops across five chapters, each one offering a rich and lively biography of one of the six women, with the exception of the third chapter’s double portrait of the group’s two botanists. One of the...