Wake Of Modernity Research Articles

‘In the End, There Was No End’: Colonial Modernism and Moral Perfectionism in Patrick White’s The Tree of Man

Abstract The modernism of Patrick White’s 1955 pastoral epic The Tree of Man is the focus of this study. The novel tracks the generational transition within one pioneering family around the time of the First World War in rural Australia, and its structure approximates the biblical pattern of edenic beginning, tragic fall, and eschatological recovery. Biblical motifs are evident in the novel’s treatment of natality and death, and in the way narrative landscapes are sign-posted with symbolic trees and riven by apocalyptic floods and fires that portend epiphany and judgement. My analysis of the novel draws on scholarship that characterises modernism in relation to settler colonialism, the temptations of scepticism, the negotiation of Christian inheritances, and the ambivalent ‘endings’ that occur in the wake of modernity’s ‘new beginnings’.

Reconnoitering the Impact of Education on Observance of Purdah (Veil)

The study was designed to explore perceptions of different stakeholders regarding the impact of education on the observance of Purdah in the wake of modernization. To examine the phenomena, the Survey methodology was used for investigation. The quantitative data was obtained through a five-point Likert scale questionnaire from different sampled groups i.e. intellectuals, lawyers, politicians, community leaders, and literary persons. The data was analyzed through univariate, bivariate, and multivariate analyses. The association between independent and dependent variables was measured through Chi-square (χ2) whereas multivariate analysis was employed while controlling marital status. The overall findings signposted a non-significant and positive relationship between increased schooling breaks down traditional values and norms, including family values and change in observance of Purdah. On another hand, a significant and positive relationship was identified between education as one of the important indicators of modernization in Pakhtun society and the dependent variable. Similarly, the relationship between modernization leads to the emergence of different types of education systems in Pakistan, and the observance of Purdah was noticed as significant and positive. The overall test statistics of the multivariate analysis revealed a highly significant, positive, and non-spurious relationship.

Rethinking the Literary Baroque

Rethinking the Literary Baroque James A. Knapp (bio) John Donne and Baroque Allegory by Hugh Grady. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Hardcover $105.00. Hugh Grady’s study of John Donne as a baroque poet takes Walter Benjamin’s early work The Origin of German Tragic Drama as its theoretical jumping-off point. The decision to read Donne and Benjamin together is strategic, as Benjamin the theorist developed at the same time that literary modernists rediscovered John Donne, hailing him as a poet relevant to the uncertainty of the moment in the wake of modernity’s advance in the early twentieth century. Donne’s aesthetic response to the seismic cultural upheavals that defined English culture at the turn of the seventeenth century spoke to the modernist curators of literature, including, most notably T.S. Eliot, Herbert Grierson, and Helen Gardner. The fact that Benjamin, among the most important thinkers of the modernist moment, was exploring seventeenth-century German drama at the same time that the English literary world was granting Donne new life as a poet suited to modernist aesthetics has not been explored in any detail by Donne scholars. Grady’s book seeks to fill that gap. The first chapter provides a long and detailed introduction to the study with two primary goals. First, Grady offers a careful review of the concept of the baroque as a critical, periodizing term. The history is complicated, as the term has never been fully accepted by [End Page 165] literary scholars, including even those comfortable with periodization. Grady recounts the efforts of René Wellek and later Frank Warnke to establish the baroque as a valuable literary critical term defining the shift in poetic sensibility that occurred around the turn of the seventeenth century in England. Borrowed from art history, the baroque referred to the stylistic mode that followed the Renaissance and preceded neoclassicism. Grady admits that the effort to adopt the baroque as the defining poetic mode in early seventeenth-century English literature was never fully successful. The fortunes of the term waned significantly after the advent of deconstruction and poststructuralist theory in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Despite its loss of currency, Grady lobbies for the term’s usefulness, arguing that it helps connect the shift from sixteenth-to seventeenth-century aesthetics to the advent of modernism and postmodernism in the twentieth century. The other primary accomplishment of the first chapter is to track Donne’s fortunes as a poet from the moment of his rediscovery with Eliot and the New Criticism through the era of high theory in the 1970s and 80s and up to the present. The account is lucid and concise, arguing that the New Critical championing of Donne as a poet characterized by “a troubled but usually successful search for aesthetic unity” (14) was the source of Donne’s fall from grace with critics in the aftermath of high theory, which stressed disruption and discontinuity rather than unity. Grady’s argument is that Benjamin’s account of modernist fragmentation not only describes Donne’s aesthetics better than the New Critics’ unity but that this is cause to see Donne’s poetry as speaking to the postmodern moment that is currently unfolding. Like the poets associated with both modernism and postmodernism, Donne was writing at a time when potent historical and cultural changes threatened previously coherent accounts of reality and human progress. Donne’s response was, in Grady’s view, a form of baroque allegory described by Benjamin in the book on German tragedy. Unlike traditional allegory, in Benjamin’s account, the baroque allegorical mode is defined by a difficult juxtaposition of seemingly incompatible fragments that are counterbalanced by a utopian alternative. In the second chapter, Grady turns to the Anniversaries as the paradigmatic examples of Donne’s deployment of baroque allegory in the Benjaminian sense. The argument stresses the fragmentation of the First Anniversary as its strength (a feature of the poem sometimes singled out for [End Page 166] criticism, especially in the era of the New Criticism). The world Donne anatomizes there is a fallen, incoherent world in which correspondence has failed. Only a glimpse of a hopeful alternative is available in the poem...

Modernism: Evolution of an Idea by Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers, Modernism’s Print Cultures by Faye Hamill and Mark Hussey, Modernism, Science, and Technology by Mark S. Morrison

Modernism: Evolution of an Idea by Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers, Modernism’s Print Cultures by Faye Hamill and Mark Hussey, Modernism, Science, and Technology by Mark S. Morrison

Erratum: Responses of Korean Buddhism to the Ethos of Contemporary Korea: Three Discourses in the Wake of Modernization. Religions 10 (2019): 6

The authors would like to make the following corrections to the paper (Yun and Park 2019): [...]

Responses of Korean Buddhism to the Ethos of Contemporary Korea: Three Discourses in the Wake of Modernization

The revival of Buddhism in Korea began in the 20th century as the nation suffered a downfall from the colonization of the Japanese Imperialists. In this chaotic time of social turmoil, transformation into a modern nation resulted not from a natural flow of events but rather from an articulation through a series of discourses on Korean identity. The modernization process in Korea was precipitated by the Japanese colonialism, thereby adding to the complexity during the time of social transformation. In this paper, we have reviewed the three major discourses of Korean Buddhism in the wake of modernization. The following discourses were attempts to deal with the problems faced by the Buddhist community during modernization: the discourse on secularity and social participation, the discourse on modernity centering on the issue of modifying precepts, and the discourse on identity contemplating the originality of Korean Buddhism. The fact that the old controversies concerning precepts continue even to this day in Korea might be regarded as a proof of the vibrant dynamics of contemporary Korean Buddhism. Accordingly, the next unavoidable discourse regarding Korean Buddhism would be on whether and how it can adapt itself to contemporary society, along with what part it will play in the forthcoming society.

Family in the Arabian Peninsula

AbstractThough in many ways the demographics and other characteristics of the Arab states of the Persian Gulf follow the proscribed pathways to modernity, the Arab societies in the region have not completely abandoned their traditional characteristics in the wake of modernization and globalization forces. These societies have found a way to consolidate the external and internal pressures and exist somewhere on a four-way spectrum between “modern traditionalism” and “traditional modernism” on one axis, and between “global traditionalism” and “traditionalized globalization” on the other. The Arab societies of the Persian Gulf fit neither into the “cultural maintenance” nor “modernization” category, but exist and thrive in some space in between, making it an interesting area of study in need of more research.

Tschechische katholische Kirche in der Peripetie der modernen Geschichte in den Böhmischen Ländern ab 1918

This contribution aims to give an overview of the most important stages of development in the Catholic environment of the Bohemian countries from 1918 to the present. Today, the Czech Republic is one of the most secularized states in Europe. In hardly any other country of the continent do religion and Church play a lesser role in public life than here. Reasons for this can be found in the historical circumstances connected with the great societal transformations in the wake of Modernity and atheist tendencies in the period of Communist rule. This is flanked by the most recent developments in post-Communist discourses. The predominantly negative relationship of Czech society to the Catholic Church undoubtedly is one of the points separating the Czech Republic from the post-Communist countries of Central Europe, particularly Poland and Hungary, but also Slovakia.

A Dangerous Subject: The Fashion Model and the Beauty/Narcissism Double Bind

In the wake of modernity, women's sexuality was positioned in a way that created a beauty/narcissism double bind that is still with us today. My concern in this article is that the subject position of “fashion model” serves as a constant reminder of this split, which is directed at all women and weakens the generalized woman's political agency. Fashion models themselves experience harassment and humiliation as well as pleasure and desire in their work as fashion models. However, the small portion of feminist work that has engaged explicitly with the fashion‐model business sees it mainly as an enterprise that is alienating and hostile to women. Although I do not entirely disagree with this analysis, it neglects the meaning of beauty and what beauty does to us with regard to creativity and pleasure. I wish to explore how some of the work experience of fashion models intersects with and challenges the beauty/narcissism double bind. I suggest that rather than grounding our understanding of the subject position “fashion model” and the fashion business solely in their reinforcement of the beauty/narcissism double bind, we should pay attention to the importance of what beauty and aspects of narcissism may mean.

‘Noble in his grandiose confusions’: Yeats and Coriolanus in the poetry of Geoffrey Hill

In the later poetry and critical writing of Geoffrey Hill, W. B. Yeats has come to cast an ever more ‘majestic Shade’ and in Liber Illustrium Virorum is styled as Hill’s ‘seamark’, a beacon that is as much a warning as it is a touchstone. Yeats’s political (and indeed apolitical) dubieties of the 1930s in contrast to what Hill sees as some of his finest work in Last Poems and Two Plays of 1939 serve as an enabling dilemma, energizing and tempering Hill’s most recent poetry. ‘Seamark’ is an allusion to Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, and Hill repeatedly associates the antimonies of that play’s ‘mode’ or polyphonic style in contrast to the reductive politics of its individual characters as analogous to the ‘grandiose confusions’ in Yeats between a masterful, politically sophisticated style and lapses into fascist screed or apolitical posturing. This article examines Hill’s reception of Coriolanus as a play crucial for understanding twentieth century poetics, particularly in the wake of modernism and its ‘twin betrayals’: political aesthetics and apolitical aesthetics. The article excavates the imaginative grounds of Hill’s link of Coriolanus to the work of W. B. Yeats, detailing the latter’s sustained, underexplored fascination with the play.

On Multispecies Mythology: A Critique of Animal Anthropology

This article argues that the turn to the animal is a return to mythology. By reading multispecies scholarship as narrativization of contemporary mythology, I claim that the field voices anxieties about human futures through figures of animal others. Multispecies ethnography implicitly grapples with an apocalyptic mythos prevailing in the wake of modernity’s seemingly abandoned dreams (e.g. geopolitical peace, postcolonial development, environmental consciousness, economic prosperity, public understanding of science). I reconsider the cultural function of multispecies research through two moves. First, I read Thom van Dooren’s Theory, Culture & Society article on ‘Authentic Crows’ as such a quasi-allegorical account. Second, I develop how animal anthropology captures the contemporary mythos in an ‘affirmationist’ register that counters the pessimistic affect of late industrialism. Ultimately, the critical politics of such research may be redeemed through efforts to work closely with scientists and to render explicit the accounts’ situatedness within late-industrial mythology.

Of Globetrotters and Globalization

Of Globetrotters and Globalization Andrew R. Graybill (bio) Lynn Hunt. Writing History in the Global Era. New York: Norton, 2014. x + 196 pp. Notes and index. $25.95. David M. Wrobel. Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013. xv + 312 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $39.95. In the 1870 account of his journey through the United States, the British traveler John White made a stop in Nebraska, which he found underwhelming. But he did come away with a story sure to delight his readers back home: the case of the “scalped man of Omaha.” As White learned, the man—a fellow Briton, as it turned out—had been crossing the Plains when Indians derailed the goods train on which he was traveling. He dashed for safety while the Natives dispatched the other passengers, and yet the Indians soon tracked him down, clubbed him with an axe, and— figuring that he was dead—claimed his scalp as a prize. The intrepid Englishman had in fact survived, and once the Natives scattered, he followed the railroad tracks, soon discovering his own scalp, which had been lost in the Indians’ hasty retreat. As White explained, the man “kept his scalp in a little box [and] showed it to visitors with pride” (Wrobel, p. 2). David Wrobel opens his book on travel writing about the West (and beyond) with this vignette, which nicely illustrates what we think we know about such accounts: namely, that they confirmed—often with more than a hint of condescension—that the trans-Mississippi was exotic and unpredictable, home to legendary figures such as Buffalo Bill Cody, and therefore unlike anywhere else on earth. But as Wrobel argues, John White was only one type of visitor to the West; during the period between 1850 and 1940, many other such sojourners (both Europeans and Americans) drew astute comparisons between the region and the wider world. It was only later, in the early decades of the twentieth century, that travelers venturing beyond the 100th meridian focused more intently on U.S. frontier exceptionalism, largely because of their anxieties about the creeping uniformity that followed in the wake of modernization. [End Page 132] Wrobel’s argument thus speaks meaningfully to a very different book: Lynn Hunt’s assessment of the “global turn” in the professional writing of history. On the one hand, Wrobel’s travelers—especially those nineteenth-century wanderers who placed their Western experiences in a broader context—confirm Hunt’s contention that the history of globalization reaches back much farther than the early 1990s, when it became a buzzword. On the other, just as the accounts of later visitors to the West are colored by their authors’ determination to find traces of authenticity there, Hunt reminds us that scholars bring their own concerns and orthodoxies to investigations of the past. This essay explores both books on their own terms before considering Global West, American Frontier through the lens of Writing History in the Global Era. Wrobel’s new book builds quite naturally on themes that he has explored in his two previous monographs: angst about the supposed closing of the U.S. frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, and the role of two forms of maligned and overlooked writing (booster literature and pioneer reminiscences) in shaping past as well as present understandings of the West. In the introduction to his latest book, Wrobel explains that he wants to use another set of dismissed or understudied texts—travel narratives—to chart the surprising trajectory of exceptionalist thinking about the region during the age of American empire (roughly the period between the U.S.–Mexican War and the Great Depression). In chapter one, he introduces us to the sorts of travelers who have caught his attention: Americans and Europeans, men and women, the famous and especially the forgotten. Indeed, while the artist George Catlin makes an extended appearance in this first section, Wrobel’s coverage, as he explains, “emphasizes works that warrant resurrection, or at least a closer look” (p. 8). Take, for example, Friedrich Gerstäcker (1816–72), a German writer who traveled...

Impossible Inheritance: Filiation and Patrimony in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled

The world of Ishiguro's The Unconsoled is caught in a strange stasis where history is both too present and absent altogether, and where the narrator-protagonist is both father and son, and also neither at the same time. This essay examines Ishiguro's use of tropes of filiation and patrimony, and argues that these frustrated genealogies allude to the long history of the novel genre and allegorize the impossibility of taking up this legacy in the wake of modernism and associated traumatic European histories.

Coming to Terms with Barth's "Third Thing": Hans Frei, Paul Ricoeur, and the Possibility of Postliberal Homiletics

In the wake of modernity and all across the theological spectrum, preaching has proven adept at evading or enlisting the Bible, but resistant to taking it seriously on its own terms. Karl Barth’s theology is an important resource for moving beyond this impasse, but does not offer a compelling account of how biblical language and sermonic language properly conformed to it participate in God’s free act of self-communication. The narrative hermeneutics of Hans Frei and Paul Ricoeur point the way toward such a critically informed postliberal homiletic. In particular, Ricoeur’s notion of threefold mimesis is appropriated to propose criteria for evaluating sermons in terms of their ability to pay against three debts: a debt to the actual (mimesis 1), a debt to the real (mimesis 2), and a debt to the possible (mimesis 3).

Return to the Past in García Márquez’s El amor en los tiempos del cólera

El amor en los tiempos del colera assembles many of the themes and techniques that characterize Garcia Marquez's earlier work. Paramount among the techniques are hyperbole, retrospection, humor, and sarcasm. Thematically, memory, age, illegitimacy, the passage of time, poverty, politics, and civil wars provide its spiritus vivicans. In El amor, the reevaluation of memory in light of the rapid changes ushered in by modernity takes center stage. The reassessment of the value of memory in the novel parallels efforts from early modernity to subvert the importance of remembering. This essay argues that while Garcia Marquez joins the chorus celebrating the weakening of memory as a basic lifeorientation, he avoids the excesses of those like Jean Baudrillard that promote a near total break with the past. His position in El amor approximates that of Soren Kierkegaard who calls for a self-perfecting in the twin arts of remembering and forgetting in order to play at battledore and shuttlecock with the whole of existence (Either/Or 1: 234). To that end, the essay provides a historical review of the importance of remembering and forgetting before examining the novel under three rubrics, to wit, remembering, forgetting, and the twin arts of remembering and forgetting. HISTORICAL REVIEW In Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture, David Gross establishes that pre-modern view of remembering was generally positive. The Greeks, Romans and the medieval world all considered memory as sine qua non for piety, creativity, ethics, character, spirituality, happiness, and wholeness. However, this positive outlook began to be questioned especially in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when the foundations of traditional society began to shake in the wake of modernity. The rapid changes occasioned by industrialization, including mobility and urbanization, came with a new set of values. New institutions sprang up to replace traditional ones. The individual could no longer be relied upon to preserve values, customs and traditions handed down from forebears since she was not glued to one place. In light of this new reality, intellectuals began to question the value of memory, which began to lose its appeal and became a liability. In time, it was viewed as an outside determination, coercive and restrictive of one's thoughts and actions. Forgetting became the new paradigm and was praised by psychologists, psychiatrists, and philosophers alike. In the view of many thinkers, including Pierre Janet, Herman Ebbinghaus, Frederick Nietzsche, Henry Maudsley, William James, Herbert Spencer, Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, and Louis Lavelle, the advantages of ridding ourselves of the old lumber of the were enormous. For one thing, we are able to loosen up, improvise, or even start afresh. These qualities of freedom, improvisation, and innovation would enable us to cope successfully with the demands of modernity (Gross 31). In addition to being unreliable and escapist, many thinkers perceived memory as an impediment and even a monstrosity (33). Forgetting, on the other hand, was liberating, regenerative and purifying. According to Anthony Giddens, forgetting opened the door to potentially new ways of being and acting (78). SETTING THE STAGE In El amor, the process of mnemonic reevaluation begins by setting the story in post-independent Colombia over a period of about fifty years, beginning from 1880 to about 1930. Nation building was the order of the day as European culture and technology found its way into Colombia. Modernity was on a slow but certain march and the foundations of traditional society had begun to wobble. It is against this backdrop that Garcia Marquez weaves a love triangle spanning over fifty years and whose development allows a reassessment of the value of memory in light of emerging realities. Garcia Marquez's journey to the past is not guided by the allure of romanticism or the magic of tradition. …

Visual evaluation of urban streetscapes: How do public preferences reconcile with those held by experts?

Visual qualities of well-liked settings are known to include richness and variety, tempered by perceptible underlying structure and clear associational meanings. For a variety of reasons – among them, technological, economic and professional principles – the design coherence of the built environment appears to have diminished in the wake of Modernism. However, opinions about the quality of the built environment are usually voiced by experts. Does it follow that their opinions are also those of lay people? Indeed, looking beyond academic critique of the appearance of the built environment, what are the views and aesthetic preferences of those who use the city? The article reports on the results of recent research that has evaluated perceptions of and preferences for a range of different urban street scenes. The opinions of the lay public as well as design and planning professionals have been collected for comparison. The research seeks to understand whether there are built-form characteristics, seen across a collection of buildings that make up a street edge, that are preferred over others. Based on data from 200 survey responses and a focus group discussion, the findings identify characteristics that are deemed to foster well-liked urban settings as well as those that should be avoided.

Black Theology or Black Religion? Discipleship as a Theological Method

Since its inception black theology has wrestled with questions of method as well as the struggle of African-American Christian existence in the wake of modernity. This article examines the relationship between black theology and black religious scholarship. Arguing against the centrality of Charles Long as one who recapitulates a colonial dominance through the refusal of African-American Christian particularity, I examine the work of Victor Anderson and Anthony Pinn. I conclude with a consideration of identity as performance and the language of discipleship as a means of expressing a black theology of liberation intelligible within the particularity of African-American Christian life.

On the Proper Essence of Christian Economic Ethics

In recent times, the question about the proper essence of a Christian economic ethics has rarely been asked explicitly. However, the concept of a society, as presented by Jurgen Habermas, offers renewed access. The necessary foundation for this approach involves the relationship between belief and reason as the basis for communication, the concept of 'being made in God's own likeness' as regulating factor and the association with the Christian way of life as a prerequisite for responsible economic activity. One possible consequence hereof is to see the social market economy as a third way, situated between socialism and capitalism, with its extra-economic prerequisites and its particular relationship between market and state. After all, the aim is also to consider the role of the Church as a global player and an intermediary of values for a civil society. Key words: Christian economic ethics, Catholic Social Teaching, society, political theology, social market economy Definition of the problem The question on the proper essence of Christian economic ethics has hardly been asked explicitly any more in recent times (Wilhelms 2007: 494). Why did it not happen? In the past, for Christian social ethics - which also includes economic ethics - such foundations were part of the standard (Brinkmann 1978: 461 ff.; Kerber 1978: 547 ff.). Did we lose sight of this question in the secular societies because religious positions were pushed aside into private life; and what does the social philosopher Jurgen Habermas mean when he speaks, in this context, of a post-secular mat should conserve the moral potentials of religions (Habermas 2001)? We should continue by dealing with these questions if laying the foundations for Christian economic ethics is to be successful in today's conditions. 1. Post-secular society If we ask for the meaning of the term society, first of all two distinctions can be made. On the one hand, the concept of society presupposes a secularization process, and on the other hand, the assumption that mis process has come to its end does not mean that, as a result, a closed, for example Christian, society would be the consequence. But rather, society can only mean that secular patterns of interpretation - just like all other ones - must justify themselves in the discourse and that, besides religious ones, they subsist, but cannot enjoy any automatic preference. However, with the religion sociologist Jose Casanova, we have to question the presuppositions of this position advocated by Habermas. For instance, in his Eurocentric view, Habermas assumes that religious groups continue to exist within an environment that is otherwise predominantly secular (Habermas 2008: 37 f.). But Casanova questions this process of secularization in several respects by pointing first at the fact that the decline of religious life, which is noticeable in Central Europe, can be considered an exception on the world stage. Second, he states, the idea that from an authoritarian, religious society, a democratic, secular one has arisen in the wake of modernization, is a myth. According to him, the denominational State was rather the consequence of the Thirty Years War, and in many cases, in particular, religious groups were involved in democratization processes. And also with respect to the potential of religions for violence, Casanova demonstrates that nearly all of the extraordinary acts of violence of the first half of the twentieth century were not religiously motivated (Casanova 2009: 8 ff.). Altogether, he refers, as a consequence, to three components of a secularization theory that are, in his view, to be distinguished from one another and between which there is no necessary interrelation: a) the theory of institutional differentiation between the secular sphere, such as the State, the economy, science on the one hand, and religious institutions on the other; b) the theory of a progressive decline of religious convictions and practices as a measure of modernization; and c) the theory of privatization of religion as a prerequisite for a modern, secular and democratic policy (Casanova 2009: 83). …

In the Company of Men: Representations of Male-Male Sexuality in Meiji Literature (review)

Reviewed by: In the Company of Men: Representations of Male-Male Sexuality in Meiji Literature Paul Gordon Schalow In the Company of Men: Representations of Male-Male Sexuality in Meiji Literature. By Jim Reichert. Stanford University Press, 2006. 282 pages. Hardcover $60.00. The forty-five-year reign of the Meiji emperor from 1868 to 1912 was long enough to encompass both the initial exuberant attempts to transform a land and a people into something suitably modern, as well as the subsequent sober recognition of the cost of that transformation and a kind of nostalgia, especially in the capital city of Tokyo, for what had been Edo culture. "Civilization and Enlightenment" was the byword of the [End Page 237] new imperial reign, and reform affected every area of life. The idea of what constituted an appropriately modern army and navy, or transportation system, or political structure, and so forth, evolved over time, and eventually new institutions replaced those of the Edo era. Once in place, moreover, the new army and navy, transportation system, political structure, and other state structures marked for reform were endorsed in various visible and gratifying ways: by, for example, the victories against China in 1895 and Russia in 1905, by the obvious increased ease of commuting within cities and traveling across regions, and by the palpable sense that Japan had catapulted itself into the ranks of major world powers. The Meiji oligarchs also addressed the idea of what constituted a suitably modern sexuality for the Japanese people. Serving as a spokesperson for the government, the educator and reformer Fukuzawa Yukichi endorsed the model of one husband/one wife embodied in his own marriage. In the legal realm, prostitution was outlawed, as was anal intercourse between males. (The limited effect of these laws has been discussed in detail by Greg Pflugfelder in his study Cartographies of Desire, University of California Press, 1999.) The regulation of sexuality had always been a major concern of the Tokugawa bakufu, as shown by the various attempts beginning in the seventeenth century to isolate male prostitution in "theater districts" and female prostitution in "pleasure quarters" in the urban centers, but the Meiji control of sexual commerce became prescriptive in ways never seen before. The aim of these reforms was ostensibly the ennobling of relations between the sexes and the elevation of the status of women, but in fact the results were highly ambiguous. Sexual reform had major repercussions for Meiji literature, of course, since the life force (eros) had always been one of Edo literature's wellsprings. Jim Reichert's fascinating and timely book, In the Company of Men: Representations of Male-Male Sexuality in Meiji Literature, is the first study of Meiji literature to consider what happened when "compulsory heterosexuality" was imposed in the wake of modernization. Reichert approaches his ambitious project by providing a detailed discussion of several important authors and texts that clarify in specific ways how writing on male-male sexuality was reformulated and even erased in the Meiji era. It is an important and revisionist project, intended to change the master narrative of Meiji literary history that until now, he argues, has "largely overlook[ed] the impact of changing notions of sexuality and masculinity on the development of modern Japanese literature" (p. 9). Reichert divides his discussion into four stages that correspond to the standard division of Meiji literary history into early, reformist, neoclassical, and late periods, roughly corresponding to decade-long intervals from the 1870s to mid-1880s, the late 1880s to mid-1890s, the late 1890s, and finally the first decade of the twentieth century to 1912. To illustrate the earliest transition from Edo to Meiji, the study addresses Shizu no odamaki (a late Edo work) and Sawamura Tanosuke akebono zōshi (from 1880), two popular books that circulated in the early years of the Meiji period and depicted male-male sexuality in terms consistent with the Edo construct of nanshoku (male love). These books and others like them remained highly influential despite the Meiji government's reform efforts. Reichert makes the excellent point that readers did not approach these transitional depictions merely as nostalgic remnants of a bygone Edo mode of male-male intimacy...

Communities Becoming a Nation: Spain and Spanish America in the Wake of Modernity (and Thereafter)

Herzog challenges a traditional narrative of the emergence of the nation state in her study of Spain and the New World, arguing that citizenship in Spain and in Spanish America was rooted in the early modern period, and remained rooted thereafter, in local practices of participation and community rites, which allowed municipalities to decide who the ‘national’ citizens were. Her study reveals that it was in fact the practice of colonial expansion in the new world which first produced a legal definition of Spaniards. Herzog also focuses on the subtleties of inclusion and exclusion that remain critical to citizenship today.