Book Review

Methods/Theory

The cataract of nationalism studies that began around ten or fifteen years ago shows no signs of abating, and this volume is the latest evidence of it. Very soon we are likely to have studies of the studies of nationalism: charting stages, identifying traditions, and historicizing the scholarship itself. With an eye to that question, I tried to specify what was distinctive about the volume under review. Apart from nationalism and Asia—both rather large categories—there are few thematic unities. I toyed with its intellectual provenance—largely a product of Asian studies in Canada—but quickly dropped it. In many ways, the volume itself is a "postnational" product, an important concept in the book that editors Timothy Brook and Andre Schmid describe as having more to do with "what" happens rather than "where" it happens. Perhaps the threads that weave the book together are principally methodological. The volume explores issues within and at the edges of the dominant postcolonial and globalization paradigms to ask "who spoke for the nation?" Who were the contestants and how did they deploy the resources of the imperialist enemy? How do dominant nationalisms construct citizens, and how do people seek to recover their subjectivity? And, perhaps most interesting, "how do global capitalism and nationalism articulate?"	1
Methodologically, several of these essays succeed in integrating what often used to be a largely discursive or intellectual historical understanding of nationalism with an analysis of social practices. The essay by Susan Burns on public health and the body in Japan discusses the contest waged over the body and mind of the Meiji citizen-to-be by the national state, popular groups and popular culture, as well as the modern press. Her case studies of the medical supervision of prostitutes and stories of responses to modern mental confinement are fascinating. By pointing out that many ordinary Japanese people saw the modernizing national agenda of the state to be a cause of as much as a solution to their problems, she reminds us that the Japanese modernization and nation-building process was hardly a smooth one. Schmid's chapter on decentering China in the modern Korean elite-nationalist consciousness at the turn of the nineteenth century examines the way in which this elite not only reified and essentialized notions of Chineseness and Koreanness but projected the differences back into a historiography that has continued to influence even relatively recent Western analyses. Schmid explores this phenomenon through both texts and practices such as language standardization or flag creation, often reading one against the other in ways that yield complexities and ironies in the Korean elite's construction of the nation.	2
V. Ravindiran's chapter on Dravidian nationalism directed against Brahmins among South India Tamils is an example of discourse analysis that points beyond discourse even if it does not take us there. Ravindiran shows with considerable skill and authority how different generations of low-caste Tamils from the late nineteenth century acquired a new sense of identity as Dravidians as a result of the scholarship of missionaries, who hoped to alienate them from Brahmins and bring them into the fold. He argues that this alliance between a missionary Orientalism and the aspirations of subordinate groups served as a powerful critique not only of the old Hindu order but also of modern Indian nationalism, which was itself an alliance of the dominant Orientalism and Indian high castes. Ravindiran's thesis points us to a non-discursive argument: shifts in meaning have to be understood in terms of how they appeal to different emergent groups. Yet it would have been nice to see how exactly the social articulated with the discourse.	. . .