Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque , livre ebook

386

pages

English

Ebooks

2010

Écrit par
Driscoll Mark W. Driscoll

Publié par
Duke University Press

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386

pages

English

Ebooks

2010

Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

03 août 2010

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9780822392880

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

2 Mo

In this major reassessment of Japanese imperialism in Asia, Mark Driscoll foregrounds the role of human life and labor. Drawing on subaltern postcolonial studies and Marxism, he directs critical attention to the peripheries, where figures including Chinese coolies, Japanese pimps, trafficked Japanese women, and Korean tenant farmers supplied the vital energy that drove Japan's empire. He identifies three phases of Japan's capitalist expansion, each powered by distinct modes of capturing and expropriating life and labor: biopolitics (1895-1914), neuropolitics (1920-32), and necropolitics (1935-45). During the first phase, Japanese elites harnessed the labor of marginalized subjects as Japan colonized Taiwan, Korea, and south Manchuria, and sent hustlers and sex workers into China to expand its market hegemony. Linking the deformed bodies laboring in the peripheries with the "erotic-grotesque" media in the metropole, Driscoll centers the second phase on commercial sexology, pornography, and detective stories in Tokyo to argue that by 1930, capitalism had colonized all aspects of human life: not just labor practices but also consumers’ attention and leisure time. Focusing on Japan's Manchukuo colony in the third phase, he shows what happens to the central figures of biopolitics as they are subsumed under necropolitical capitalism: coolies become forced laborers, pimps turn into state officials and authorized narcotraffickers, and sex workers become "comfort women". Driscoll concludes by discussing Chinese fiction written inside Manchukuo, describing the everyday violence unleashed by necropolitics.

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Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

03 août 2010

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9780822392880

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

2 Mo

A b s o l u t eE r o t i c ,A b s o l u t eG r o t E s q u E

Mark Driscoll

A b s o l u t eE r o t i c ,A b s o l u t eG r o t E s q u E

the living, DeAD, AnD unDeAD in J ApAn’s imperiAlism, 1 895 –1945

DUkE uNIVERSITy pRESS DURHaM aNd lONdON 2010

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾

Typeset in Charis by Tseng ïnformation Systems, ïnc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

FromI àNE

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

ïntroduction

PA RT IBiopolitics

1. Cool(ie) Japan

2. Peripheral Pimps

3. Émpire in Hysterics

4. Stubborn Farmers and Grotesqued Korea

Intertext I. A Korean is being beaten; ï, a Japanese colonizer, am being beaten

PA RT I INeuropolitics

5. All That’s Solid Melts into Modern Girls and Boys

6. Revolutionary Pornography and the Declining Rate of Pleasure

Intertext II. europolitics Sprouts Fangs

PA RT I I INecropolitics

7. The Opiate of the (Chinese) People

8. Japanese Lessons

Conclusion: Bare Labor and the Émpire of the Living Dead

otes

Bibliography

ïndex

xvii

xxi

101

119

135

161

203

227

263

295

315

327

345

PREFACE

This book describes how Japan rose to be a world power in a few short decades. The dominant way of narrating that rise tends to focus on centers of power, whether the center is the supposed Éuro-American birthplace of modern technoscience and Énlightenment reason or is understood to be Japan’s westernized metropole, Tokyo. Against this hegemonic assumption that advanced conceptual and technical forms of Éuro-American and metropolitan origin are the sole causes of mod-ern development, subalternist postcolonial studies and Marxism—the two theoretical approaches privileged here—recommend that critical attention be redirected to human life and labor, especially that inhabit-ing the margins and peripheries far away from centers of power. Therein the ontological energy of life and the surpluses stolen from labor (by capital) can be clearly glimpsed as the engines driving imperial expan-sion. ïn this book marginal life and peripheral labor spawned in Japan’s peripheries in Korea and China will move out of the historiographical shadows to become starring dramatis personae. As the eshly container of life and labor is the body, working bodies, desiring bodies, addicted bodies, and dying bodies are offered up as evidence for what ï call the peripheral a priori: the spatiotemporal prioritizing of peripheral mar-ginalia as the primary agents of culturo-economic change, what D. K. Fieldhouse depicted as the “metropolitan dog wagged by the tail” of the colonial periphery (cited in Uchida J. 2005, 38). ïn this study of Japan’s imperialism, the peripheral tails wagging the dog of the imperial center are Chinese coolies, Japanese pimps working in China’s treaty ports, traîcked Japanese women, and poor Korean tenant farmers— the bodies supplying the vital energy and laboring surplus that mattered (to) Japan’s imperialism. The importance of the colonial periphery for empire was a given for

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