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Book Review
Asia
| Prasenjit Duara. Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern. (State and Society in East Asia Series.) Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. 2003. Pp. xiii, 306. $49.95.
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| Prasenjit Duara, one of the most innovative historians of East Asia in the English-speaking world, has produced an immensely rich and imaginative study of Japanese-controlled Manchuria. It ranges over a multitude of theoretical issues and historical questions, from Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee to Naito Konan and Gu Jiegang, from nationalist patriarchy to East Asian modernity, from religious universalism to civilizational authenticity, and from the rise of academic ethnography in China to the changing nature of imperialism and nationalism in global history. |
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The main focus of the book is the state-building history of Manchuria under Japanese control. The Japanese Guandong Army seized Manchuria in 1931 and a year later created Manchukuo and installed as its emperor the last (Manchu) Chinese emperor, Henry Pu Yi. For its subservient relations with Tokyo and brutal oppression of its people, Manchukuo has been dismissed by scholars as a "puppet" regime serving Japanese militarism. This book, however, urges us to take the Japanese colonial state-building project in Manchukuo seriously. |
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