Description
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Language, Nation, Race explores the various language reforms at the onset of Japanese modernity, a time when a "national language" (kokugo) was produced to standardize Japanese. Faced with the threat of Western colonialism, Meiji intellectuals proposed various reforms to standardize the Japanese language in order to quickly educate the illiterate masses. This book liberates these language reforms from the predetermined category of the "nation," for such a notion had yet to exist as a clear telos to which the reforms aspired. Atsuko Ueda draws on, while critically intervening in, the vast scholarship of language reform that engaged with numerous works of postcolonial and cultural studies. She examines the first two decades of the Meiji period, with specific focus on the issue of race, contending that no analysis of imperialism or nationalism is possible without it.
About the Author
Atsuko Ueda is Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Literature at Princeton University. She is the author of Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment and a coeditor of Politics and Literature Debate: Postwar Japanese Literary Criticism 1945-1952.
Book Information
ISBN 9780520381711
Author Atsuko Ueda
Format Paperback
Page Count 172
Imprint University of California Press
Publisher University of California Press
Weight(grams) 272g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 13mm
Language, Nation, Race explores the various language reforms at the onset of Japanese modernity, a time when a "national language" (kokugo) was produced to standardize Japanese. Faced with the threat of Western colonialism, Meiji intellectuals proposed various reforms to standardize the Japanese language in order to quickly educate the illiterate masses. This book liberates these language reforms from the predetermined category of the "nation," for such a notion had yet to exist as a clear telos to which the reforms aspired. Atsuko Ueda draws on, while critically intervening in, the vast scholarship of language reform that engaged with numerous works of postcolonial and cultural studies. She examines the first two decades of the Meiji period, with specific focus on the issue of race, contending that no analysis of imperialism or nationalism is possible without it.
About the Author
Atsuko Ueda is Associate Professor of Modern Japanese Literature at Princeton University. She is the author of Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment and a coeditor of Politics and Literature Debate: Postwar Japanese Literary Criticism 1945-1952.
Book Information
ISBN 9780520381711
Author Atsuko Ueda
Format Paperback
Page Count 172
Imprint University of California Press
Publisher University of California Press
Weight(grams) 272g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 13mm
![Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment: The Production of "Literature" in Meiji Japan by Atsuko Ueda](https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-zkx5lhzlf8/images/stencil/444x444/products/738054/737766/9780804757782__96750.1687561182.jpg?c=1 "Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment: The Production of "Literature" in Meiji Japan by Atsuko Ueda")
