Nationalism Reading Group

成蹊大学文学部の客員研究員のカミラさんと日本のナショナリズムをテーマにした英語によるディスカッション・グループを立ち上げました。4月から開始予定です。スケジュールが決まり次第お知らせします。どうぞご参加ください。海外にいると英語で発表をし議論をするのに、日本では日本語という当たり前の日常にちょっとでも抵抗しようというような気持ちです。

第１回会合について：

The first meeting will take place on the 17th of April Thursday, 18:30~20:30.

Venue: Office 512 Building #10 Seikei University
Text: Raymond Williams Culture and Society: Intro. and Ch. 1, 2

Please contact me (endoATfh.seikei.ac.jp) if you wish to join it (AT=@). The PDF file of the above texts can be distributed to those who need it.

New Interdisciplinary Reading Group

Topic: Japanese Nationalism in Contexts: Culture, Politics and Literature.

Seikei University
The Department of English

Undeniably, nationalism and culture are inseparable. Historically viewed, nationalism is a cultural form which developed in response to the conditions of the modern industrial society. More specifically, political nationalism borrows from the repertoire of cultural heritage in order to reinvent and construct national histories, myths and symbols. Nationalism as a cultural phenomenon, inspired by philosophical and literary texts, will be the focus of this new seminar series. Initially, we will address several general questions about the relationship between nationalism, society and culture. In what sense was European nationalism a ‘modern(ist)’ project? Can we trace its (literary and philosophical) genealogies? How do the ‘high’ and popular cultures shape political attitudes? How did writers employ the binary of autonomous subjectivity versus political state in their pro-nationalist discourses? We will also study the nationalist rhetoric of selected British modernists. This will lead us to the examination of the nationalist tendencies in the literary and non-literary texts produced by Japanese modernists. In particular, we will focus on their use of (European) ideas and concepts in order to construct the narratives of ‘imagined community’: Japan. We will analyse how these ideas are transformed and adapted to serve political ambitions. We will also indentify and discuss the cases where such ideas are used by the representatives of the so-called Japanese ‘new nationalism’.

The seminars will be conducted in English. Academic staff, doctoral students and ambitious undergraduate students are invited to attend and freely participate in the discussions. Everybody is welcome to propose additional/different texts related to the topic. In cases where extracts are indicated as the reading material, the organisers will distribute them to the participants as PDF files via e-mail, approximately two weeks in advance of the next meeting.

Tentative reading list
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (1958)
David Aram Kaiser, Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism (extract; 1999)
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkeimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (extracts; 1947)
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (extract; 1989)
Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (short extracts; 1951)
Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (1946)
Anthony Smith, Nationalism (extract; 2001)
T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948)
F. Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (extract; 1979)
P. Rabinov, The Foucault Reader (ext. ‘What is Enlightenment’ & ‘Truth and Power’; 1982)
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (extract; 2004)
Kojin Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (1993)
Naoki Sakai, Meaghan Morris, Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism (2007)
Naoki Sakai, Brett de Bary, Iyotani Toshio (Eds), Deconstructing Nationality (extracts; 2005)

The first meeting will take place from 6:30pm on the 17th April Thursday. The venue will soon be decided.