Autoexotic Literary Encounters between Meiji Japan and the West: Sōseki Natsume's “The Tower of London” (1905) and Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan (1904)

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (2) ◽  
pp. 447-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Charlotte Fukuzawa
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Edo Period ◽  
The West ◽  
Meiji Japan ◽  
Western Imperialism ◽  
Meiji Era ◽  
Travel Writings

As Roland Barthes's epoch-making essay Empire of Signs suggests, in a slightly orientalist tone itself, modern japanese culture is a fascinating kaleidoscope of Eastern and Western cultures, but at the same time a strong purism is inherent in its aestheticized nationalism. In this essay, I offer a comparative literary analysis of select travel writings that emerge out of Japanese-European encounters in the Meiji era (1868–1912) to show the cultural dynamism of the time, after the Edo period (1603–1852), when Japan first opened its borders to the West. My analysis of Japan of that time as an Eastern-Western contact zone is based on Homi Bhabha's notion of cultural hybridity and Mary Louise Pratt's understanding of a cultural encounter in an asymmetrical power constellation. Japan has never been a colony, escaping Western imperialism through the (sakoku; “closed country”) policy of the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, who banned all Christian missionaries and Western foreigners from the insular empire. In the Meiji modernization in 1868, the old samurai elites imported select reforms from Western Europe, notably from England, France, and Germany, to Japan. This is why Yōichi Komori claimed that Japan is a “self-colonized” () culture (Posutokoroniaru 8). Through the Meiji elite's adoption of certain modern ways from Germany, France, England, and the United States, an “imitative modernity” came into being.

scholarly journals Activity of Albanian emigration in the West towards the issue of Kosovo and Metohija (1945-1969)

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-255
Author(s):  
Igor Vukadinović
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
National Committee ◽  
The West ◽  
Health Institutions ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Second World

After the Second World War, a large number of members of the fascist regime of the Kingdom of Albania found refuge in Italy, Turkey and the countries of Western Europe, where they continued to politically act. The leading political options in exile - Balli Kombetar, Zogists and pro-Italian National Independent Bloc, decided to cooperate with each other, so they have formed the Albanian National Committee in 1946. The turning point for the Albanian extreme emigration in the West is Operation Valuable, by which the United States and Great Britain sought to overthrow the Communist regime of Enver Hoxha in Albania. Although the operation failed, strong ties were forged between US and British intelligence and Albanian nacionalist emigration, which were further intensified in the 1960s. Xhafer Deva, who was dedicated to act on the annexation of Kosovo and Metohija to Albania, immigrated to the United States in 1956 and established cooperation with the CIA. Albanian emigration in the West applied different methods in politics towards Kosovo and Metohija. Some organizations, such as Xhafer Deva's Third Prizren League, have focused on lobbying Western intelligence. The Bali Kombetar Independent, headquatered in Rome, paid particular attention to working with Albanian high school and student youth in Kosovo and Metohija. The Alliance of Kosovo, formed in 1949, was engaged in subtle methods of involving Albanian nationalists in Yugoslav state structures, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav People's Army, and educational and health institutions in Kosovo and Metohija. Albanian emigration was also involved in violent demonstrations in Kosovo and Metohija in 1968, and cooperated on this issue with the Communist regime of Enver Hoxha in Albania.

Shund and the Tabloids: Jewish Popular Reading in Inter-War Poland

2003 ◽  
pp. 188-212
Author(s):  
Nathan Cohen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
Tabloid Press

This chapter describes Jewish popular reading in inter-war Poland, looking at shund and the Polish tabloid press. In the first third of the twentieth century, as the Polish press was developing rapidly, sensationalist newspapers began to proliferate. While this type of press had been widespread in the United States and western Europe since the middle of the nineteenth century, it first emerged in Poland only in 1910, with Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny (Illustrated Daily Courier) in Kraków. In Warsaw, the first tabloid newspapers, Kurier Informacyjny i Telegraficzny (Information and Telegraphic Courier) and Ekspres Poranny (Morning Express), appeared in 1922. In 1926, Kurier Informacyjny i Telegraficzny changed its name, now printed in red, to Kurier Czerwony (Red Courier). In time, the colour red became emblematic of sensationalist newspapers in Poland, and they were nicknamed czerwoniaki (Reds), similar to the ‘yellow’ press in the West.

The Unity of the West and Free Trade: A Report From Washington

Worldview ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 14-16
Author(s):  
Lionel Gelber
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Common Market ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Common ◽  
De Gaulle

When the United States fostered the recovery and underwrote the security of Western Europe she had more than sentiment to impel her. That salient zone is a pivotal sector of the world balance, and while she may station fewer of her own troops upon its soil, she can entertain no total disengagement from it. But there is another West European item, the future of the Common Market, which calls for a fresh American scrutiny. The West will be better off if Western Europe acquires more of an ability to stand on its own feet. Gaullism, however, revealed a less modest goal, one that was not confined to France and did not vanish with the departure of General de Gaulle. On the contrary, it may have gained new leverage from his downfall.

YURIY SHEVELOV ABOUT HIS UKRAINIAN CHOICE OF AND ABOUT THE ATTITUDE TO “STRANGERS” IN THE MEMOIRS “I, ME, AND MYSELF (AND AROUND)”.

2019 ◽  
pp. 176-185
Author(s):  
Nadiia Koloshuk
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnic Identification ◽  
Western World ◽  
The West ◽  
Scientific World ◽  
The Face ◽  
Roman Jakobson ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Reflections of the outstanding scholar-Slavicist Yuriy Shevelov about his paradoxical experience of ethnic- identification, on the background of this problem as a general human and fundamental one, have a lot of weight. The escape of a young Ukrainian scientist from occupied Kharkiv to the West was driven by conscious aspirations to self-fulfillment and freedom. The path from Ukraine to Europe, and later to America, saved him from war and physical destruction, which threatened not only him but also a significant part of his people. Thinking of this path as salvation, he soberly and quite tolerably showed the environment of the Ukrainian and foreign intellectuals. He was a close acquaintance with them in pre- war and occupied Kharkiv and Lviv, in the German DP camps for Ukrainian refugees, in the research centers of Western Europe, and later in the United States. Openness and sincerity, as well as the scale of experience and depiction, the depth and self-criticism of comprehension of his own experience, make the book of Yu. Shevelov particularly valuable in the Ukrainian culture of the twentieth century. Yu. Shevelov rightly considered the reason for a special hatred on the part of representatives of the “Russian world” (in particular, in the face of the Russian emigrant Roman Jakobson and Ukrainian traitor Ivan Bilodid) their desire to destroy in his person a representative of an independent Ukrainian culture, a qualified researcher of its history and language, capable of advancing and advocating scientific ideas, those contradicted their Russification desires, which formed in the minds of the representatives of the scientific community of the western world non-penetrating barriers to the penetration of the voice of the stateless Ukrainian ethnic group. He called a complete defeat the result of his confrontation with the “Russian world” in the western scientific world. However, based on the fact that his labor is now in demand, and those who want to affirm the “Russian world” in the West and in Ukraine were already diminished, we can assert: his efforts have not gone in vain. Identification is that complex of ideas, which is made up in human heads, and here the truth goes up over the lie.

Future History

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Bross
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
West Indies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Archival Theory ◽  
The West ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Enslaved Women ◽  
Global Power ◽  
Historical Contextualization

Future History analyzes English and American writings that imagine England on a global stage well before England became an empire or the United States became a global power. Through close readings, historical contextualization, application of archival theory, and careful speculation, the book traces the ways that English and American writers imagined the East Indies and the West Indies as interconnected. The book argues that the earliest expressions of an American or English worldview were born colonial, conceived at the margins of a rising empire, not in its metropolis, and that a wider variety of agents than we have previously understood—Algonquian converts, “reformed” Catholics, enslaved women in the spice trade, Protestant dissidents, West Indian maroons—helped shape that worldview. In order to recover these voices and experiences, so often overwritten or ignored, the book combines more traditional methodologies of literary analysis and historicization with an interrogation of the structures of the archives in which early writings have been preserved. The chapters taken together describe a particular global (East Indies–West Indies) literary history, while the codas, taken as a separate sequence, demonstrate how a “slant” view on literary history that is asynchronous and at times anachronistic affords a new and more inclusive view of the worlding of the English imagination in the seventeenth century.

Realignment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan Osborne
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
The Great Depression

The later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed arguments from social reformers and artists and economists that the new, spontaneously evolving society was deficient. It worsened poverty, and it impoverished the soul. The tool of political regulation, exercised in the growing political power of the emerging organization known as the nation, was called in to polish the rough edges of the self-regulating society. As time went on, political regulation gradually came to be seen as the default, and self-regulation needed to be justified. The chapter particularly emphasizes the growth in such thinking among socialists and progressives in the United States and Western Europe. The catastrophe of the Great Depression, combined with admiration for a Soviet Union, Italy, and Germany, where political regulators said they were rationally designing a better society, meant that by the onset of World War II, this presumption was firmly in place throughout the West.

Imperial Subjects in the Soviet Union: M.N. Roy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Re-Thinking Freedom and Authoritarianism

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 913-934 ◽  
Author(s):  
Choi Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Political Freedom ◽  
The West ◽  
Rabindranath Tagore ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Western Imperialism ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
Political Framing ◽  
East West

The compelling trope of ‘Russia and the West,’ or to be more precise, ‘Russia Under Western Eyes,’ has produced a vast and significant body of literature. This has helped in the political framing of the twentieth century as a world divided between the democratic and market-based nations of the West, and the dictatorial and state controlled countries in the Soviet East. Simultaneously, it has served to bury, blunt, and otherwise obscure perspectives from the colonized world on the East–West dichotomy. An analysis of the travel writings of two important Indian visitors to the Soviet Union, M.N. Roy and Rabindranath Tagore, shows that Europe’s imperial subjects filtered their impressions of Soviet authoritarianism through their own experiences of repressive Western imperialism, thus charting a new global map of political freedom. Roy and Tagore’s writings, powered by both their colonial and Soviet experiences, make a significant contribution to the twentieth-century intellectual debates on moral freedom, individualism, and authoritarianism.

Integration in the West: The Conflict of Perspectives

1963 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 753-770 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnold Wolfers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Marshall Plan ◽  
The West ◽  
American Policy ◽  
Atlantic Community

From the time of the Marshall Plan to the present, American policy toward Europe has been guided simultaneously by two aspirations. One has been to see western Europe unified, the other—stemming from the conviction that the fate of the United States is inextricably tied to that of Europe—has been to create strong bonds among the Atlantic nations. Until quite recently it was believed that these two aspirations stood in a kind of predetermined harmony to each other: the more tightly the European nations would band together, gaining strength and prosperity from their union, the better it would be for all members of the Atlantic Community; and the more intimately Europe was linked with the United States, the more Europe, as a unit, would stand to gain.

Cultural Transformations of Biomedicine in Japan—Hospitalization in Contemporary Japan

1986 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Western Science ◽  
The West ◽  
Extensive Discussion ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
Cultural Transformations ◽  
Technological Impact ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
Scientific Technology

A widely held assumption today is that biomedicine is “scientific” and therefore “objective,” thus, “culture-free.” It epitomizes the objectivism falsely attributed to technology in general. Contemporary Japan is seen to epitomize non-Western modernity with its high development of industrialization and scientific technology. It follows then that biomedicine in Japan today should remain as such without cultural transformations. Yet, in post-industrial Japan today biomedicine takes an almost entirely different form and meaning from biomedicine practiced elsewhere, especially in Western societies such as the United States. The purpose of this paper is to describe the experience of hospitalization in contemporary Japan in order to demonstrate how Japanese culture and society have powerfully transformed the underlying concepts and practices of biomedicine, which was originally introduced from the West and has been highly acclaimed by the Japanese as the epitome of superior Western science and technology. Due to space limitations, however, it will not be possible to engage in an extensive discussion of theories about technological impact, or issues involved in the broader theoretical concern variously referred to as “modernization,” “industrialization,” “rationalization,” “secularization,” etc.

scholarly journals Changing Directions in Russian-American Economic Relations, 1912-1917

Slavic Review ◽  
1972 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeanette E. Tuve
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
Mutual Exchange ◽  
European Economic ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
West European

In the nineteenth century Russia and the United States emerged as nations on the periphery of the West European economic and political vortex. Their relations with each other had been, for the most part, prompted by or integrated with some larger issue involving the powers of Western Europe. Economic relations were no exception. Both nations were traditionally exporters of raw materials to industrialized, urbanized nations, which in turn were prepared and eager to exchange manufactured goods for raw materials. Russian and American products were therefore competitive rather than reciprocal, and profitable mutual exchange of goods had not developed. Both nations were debtor nations and had relied on the surplus capital of the small and large investors of Western Europe to provide the beginnings of internal transportation and industrialization.

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