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Book Review
| Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern. By PRASENJIT DUARA. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. 306+ xiii pp. $49.95 (hardcover).
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Years ago, I offered a group of first-year graduate students a seminar titled "Topics on East Asia." My intention was to ask the students of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean studies to free themselves from insular area study, which has dominated the scholarship of East Asia since 1945, and seek out common agendas among them. Despite my intention, it was a miserable disaster. The reasons, as I look back, are several. One, I organized the reading materials by nation-states (of Japan, Korea, and China). Two, students were eager to read only the materials of their own geographical interests. Third, as a scholar of modern Japan, I was hesitant to bring in the seminar the notion of Pan-Asian-ism, as it necessarily implies the ghost of Japan's imperialism, "the Greater East Asia Sphere." This was at a time when area studies and the concept of national history were already under attack. Still, I felt that the task of deconstructing area studies for East Asia had a long way to go. |
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In his third major book, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern, Prasenjit Duara has beautifully accomplished this task. The book offers us a wholly original, path-breaking, and interdisciplinary approach to the geopolitical area of East Asia. Duara not only overthrows the old conception of Manchukuo as a Japanese puppet state (without, however, belittling Japan's imperial violence on China and its people), but also emphasizes the need to see Manchukuo as "a space of conversion and transformation of global discourses of national or civilizational authenticity" (p. 3). Hence, to speak of Manchukuo, we must integrate at least the three spatial levels: Manchukuo, East Asia, and the global system of nation-states. This also means that such concepts as history, culture, and modern, for which the nation is often considered to be a collective subject, do not have universal meanings. Instead, their meanings change both in time and over space, and if so, we need to approach them in terms of translation, circulation, and exchange of their meanings. |
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