Over the past four decades, the work of Harry Harootunian has played a critical role in Japanese studies.
This volume collects essays that span his career and situate Japan’s modern intellectual history within a larger theoretical framework, bringing Japanese thinkers into analyses often dominated by a Eurocentric focus. Jun Tosaka is read alongside Karl Polanyi; Kunio Yanagita with Hegel and Walter Benjamin, giving the reader a fuller sense of the global scope of the displacements created by the transition to modernity. This is less about provincializing Europe than insisting upon a shared experience of the shock of the modern.
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