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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Duara, Prasenjit. Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asia Modern. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
Main Argument: Duara's interest, and main argument, is that "because it was such a transparently constructed entity in a contested region, Manchukuo provides a window into the modern processes of nation making, state building, and identity formation. … The blueprints, materials, technologies, techniques, and problems encountered in the construction of Manchukuo reveal the ways nation-makers sought to found the sovereignty of the nation-state in a discourse of cultural authenticity" (2).
Historiographical Engagement: Duara reads Chinese (he is in fact a historian of China by trade), so he has read a lot of the Chinese work on Manchukuo, as well as all the major works in English on empire in China and Japan in the period; my impression is that his Japanese is weaker, with the result that he seems to mostly stick to that language for primary sources.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Duara is concerned with three levels of discourse: the global, the local, and the national, and he argues that "the East Asia modern is a regional mediation of the global circulation of the practices and discourses of the modern," and that "the process of dissemination hardly develops on a level or open field, but through historically specific expressions of power, namely imperialism and a system of unequal states" (2-3). He sees Manchukuo as a hybrid of Japanese and Chinese modernity, in some ways: "the distinctive ways of demarcating and representing the spheres of modernity and tradition, state and society, nation and self in Manchukuo not only reflected processes in the two societies, but drew form cultural resources circulating between them. … Manchukuo reveals the lineaments of a regional understanding of how older formations are culturally constructed as sovereign nations in East Asia" (2, emphasis original).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter examines imperialism and nationalism in the 20thC, with the goal "to show that nationalism was not able to easily overcome the long practical history of the nation-state's association with imperialism in the competition for dominance of the capitalist world. Moreover, the evolving relationship between the two in the inter-war years meant that imperialism too came to be penetrated by nationalist rhetoric, forms, and practices" (9). Duara continues that "the systemic attributes underlying this relationship and transnational conditions--the circulatory conceptions, practices, and techniques--of nationality and sovereignty were misrecognized as immanent phenomena," which "could only be sustained by a symbolic regime of authenticity that in turn created the possibility of a morally absolute, unilateralist, and imperialist nationalism" (33). Thus imperialism was both a logic and a scourge of the global state system, and thus the radical nationalism of the 1920s in Japan "centered on powerful symbols of authenticity and on continuing expansion in deliberate defiance of an inter-state balance of power perceived as unjust to a sovereign Japan. It was facilitated by the ideology of pan-Asianism…" (34).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter offers a historical overview of Manchukuo, which prior to 1931 was of course Manchuria, the ancestral home of the ruling Qing Manchus which was colonized by Han Chinese beginning in the 19thC. After going through the history of the region up through the end of the war, Duara concludes that "the novelty of Manchukuo emerges from the institutional consequences of imperial nationalism in an emergent postcolonial time of mobilization and identity politics" (77). "Thus the regime functions of fascist corporatism appealed to ideas of Asian essentialism, whereas the imperative of govern mentality in this particular time and space called for a rhetoric of modernizing legitimation. While, as we have seen, this was a characteristic tension of the temporality of the modern nation-state, and was doubly intense for non-Western nations, in Manchukuo it was triply intense because Asianism was so central to its claim to sovereignty" (76).
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at Asianism and the "new discourse of civilization," with particular attention paid to Chinese "redemptive societies," which were found in Manchukuo as well as in the rest of China. Duara argues that civilization in the 20thC "had come to represent the highest ideals of humanity, but, curiously, as embodied in distinctive national cultures. In other words, while each national project claimed its ultimate worth in its universal relevance or scope, their ideologues found it necessary to stress the origins, and hence the distinct authority, of their civilization" (120). Because Manchukuo, being a puppet state--and beyond that an even more blatantly created state than most--was so civilizationally "thin," and because the regime's leaders "laced legitimacy" as conationals or co-ethnics, "Japanese power-holders in Manchukuo had few options but to ally with elements of these popular cultural traditions in order to stabilize their regime and achieve their goals. The rhetoric of Asian civilizational distinctiveness not only furnished a framework for this alliance and claim to sovereignty, it provided the opportunity to transform them for purposes of the state" (121). Duara provides a very welcome clarification and conjunction of Garon and Gluck when he notes that "in Japan, the cultural framework of kyôka furnished the mechanism to control the management of society within the larger ideology of the emperor system. Such top-down statist formulations frequently led to the exclusion from legitimate 'tradition' of large groups of people who may have lived these traditions or who sought to embody their ideals" (ibid).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at women and the figure of tradition within modernity, "analyzing a patriarchal conception in the East Asia modern of woman as the figure of 'tradition within modernity'" (handily symbolized by the fact that in Japan in the 1920s, only Modern Girls wore Western dress, but successful men wore suits), looking at the experiences of women who were members of the Morality Society (Wanguo Daodehui) in Manchukuo (131). Crucially, the figure of the modern-woman-as-the-vessel-of-tradition gives states, especially Japan and Manchukuo, a lever or an avenue through which to cement state control over the family and it also "addresses most fundamentally the aporia of time, the anxiety faced by individuals and regimes in societies driven by a conception of historical time as the constancy of flux" (i.e. those in the grip of nationalism) (160). Duara also looks at the women lecturers who worked for the redemptive societies in Manchukuo, particularly the Morality Society and the Red Swastika Society, through which they played a role in building loyalty and enforcing governmental discipline among ordinary people--a paradoxically empowering position that nonetheless subordinated these women and their audiences more fully to the state. Duara also looks at Manchukuo literature (particularly short stories) by male and female writers as well as movies movies, particularly the films of Li Xianglan | Ri Koran, who was "of Japanese parentage but born and raised as Chinese in Manchuria and Beijing" and who "acted as a Chinese in Japanese-produced films promoting themes of pan-Asian womanhood, family values, and amity" (161).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at imperial nationalism and the frontier, under the contention that "the system of modern--and perhaps early modern--states is built on the imperative that all global resources be controlled by territorially sovereign polities, whether nations or empires. … Modern states have tended to incorporate contiguous, alien territories and peoples whenever possible, thereby blurring the practical distinction between imperialism and nationalism in these areas" (179). Much of Duara's analysis of the ways that these autonomous areas were dominated and peripheralized takes the form of looking at the work of Japanese and Chinese anthropologists in the region, writing discourses of the vanishing, as it were. Thus Duara "reveal[s] the territorial imperative underlying the modern state form common to both" imperialism and nationalism. "Because territorial incorporation was a response to or simultaneous with they emergence as contested borderlands, these regions were transformed from dark frontiers into hot spots. They became political spaces where the effort to invest sovereignty and defend it was most densely concentrated" (200). As for those "primitive peoples" themselves, such as the Oroqen, "our historical knowledge of them is inevitably conditioned by the larger forces of state building and incorporation," and in the end "the voice of the primitive is heard as the cry of our redemption, but only at the moment of her disappearance" (201). Hint: the reason Republican China didn't romanticize the Oroqen, unlike the Japanese, is because Republican China was wedded to the concept of the mono-ethnic China, the "zhonghua minzu."
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at "native place literature" in the Northeast, arguing that "while the area had seen several different regimes and the nature of regional representation had doubtless also changed, what had endured was the production of the local as sentiment and object of identity" (209). Duara argues that "the local may best be viewed in a field of multiple forces…contending to appropriate its meaning and resources. This view releases the local from a naturalistic fixity within the nation, so that it can be treated as a process" (210). Duara reads in particular Yanagita Kunio, Lu Xun, and Zhou Zuoren, and in particular the Japanese intellectual currents of "geographical determinism," which was part of the global emergence of the same in the interwar era, drawing in China upon the ideas of figures like Karl Wittfogel and Watsuji Tetsurô. Duara is ambivalent between collaborationist and resistant readings of these figures, especially Zhou and Yanagita, but he also reads Lu Xun, Fei Xiaotong, and Liang Shangding's novel Green Valley in depth. Duara concludes that "the contradictory imperatives for indentitarian states to modernize and simultaneously produce an authentic, timeless essence drove them and cultural producers to treat the locality as objects both of development and of identity. … In the identity-based polities of the modern era, control of territory is critically dependent on the subjective production of space as an object of identification" (235).
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples In the first part of his conclusion, Duara argues (and I am not sure that I agree with this) that "Manchukuo was undermined by the contradiction between an alliance based on independence--hence the quest for sovereignty--and the imperialist power structure, whereas in Korea and Taiwan the tension developed chiefly between assimilation and exclusion" (246). More significantly, Duara reads Manchukuo as the exemplar of the East Asian model of development via Bruce Cumings, seeing it as a "particular cultural deployment, during this period, of the East Asian modern--enabling exaltation of the state, commitment of the bureaucracy, appeals to discipline and self-sacrifice, and 'moral suasion,' among other developments" that enabled the creation of the model in the postwar period (250). Similarly, Manchukuo served as a laboratory for policies that could not be carried out in Japan, from architecture to germ warfare to state capitalism. Looking at the respective fates of Manchukuo and the Soviet Union, both of which espoused a multinationalism that "did not often clarify the relationship between (ethnic) and nationality and the larger nation-state," leads Duara ultimately to conclude that "the legitimacy of the 20thC state, no matter how strong and modern, appears to have been built around narratives of identity" (253). Not coincidentally, when it failed, Manchukuo "ended as a strong--military fascist--state that represented only itself" (ibid).
Critical assessment: When I left undergrad this was probably my favorite work of scholarship, and I was somewhat thrown when I got to Berkeley to find that a lot of people cast a lot of shade on it. I can see those criticisms, particularly the one that the book is not really so much about Manchukuo as Manchukuo is a frame to hang some rather interesting and still, I think, fundamentally correct historical and political theory onto--but on the other hand, rereading this book, there are a lot of historical facts here that didn't stick in my brain the first time around. Certainly there are more facts about daily life in Manchukuo then Louise Young managed to provide.
I read this book in my final class with my wonderful undergraduate advisor Katherine Tegtmeyer Pak, who is a political scientist, and undoubtedly some of my love for the book comes from that experience--it was an excellent and innovative class. But I still think that what Duara does here is interesting and valuable; I suspect that some of the shade cast on it results from the fact that many historians, at least those here at Berkeley, seem to fear and loathe theory, and Duara here is making theory. (Don't get me started on the terrible diagrams, because they really are terrible.) But I still think that if one is willing to take the book on its own terms, it is excellent overall.
Further reading: Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire; Mark Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque; Miriam Kingsberg, Moral Nation; Yoshihisa Matsusaka, The Making of Japanese Manchuria; Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases
Meta notes: I underlined way too many things in books when I was an undergrad.
Main Argument: Duara's interest, and main argument, is that "because it was such a transparently constructed entity in a contested region, Manchukuo provides a window into the modern processes of nation making, state building, and identity formation. … The blueprints, materials, technologies, techniques, and problems encountered in the construction of Manchukuo reveal the ways nation-makers sought to found the sovereignty of the nation-state in a discourse of cultural authenticity" (2).
Historiographical Engagement: Duara reads Chinese (he is in fact a historian of China by trade), so he has read a lot of the Chinese work on Manchukuo, as well as all the major works in English on empire in China and Japan in the period; my impression is that his Japanese is weaker, with the result that he seems to mostly stick to that language for primary sources.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Duara is concerned with three levels of discourse: the global, the local, and the national, and he argues that "the East Asia modern is a regional mediation of the global circulation of the practices and discourses of the modern," and that "the process of dissemination hardly develops on a level or open field, but through historically specific expressions of power, namely imperialism and a system of unequal states" (2-3). He sees Manchukuo as a hybrid of Japanese and Chinese modernity, in some ways: "the distinctive ways of demarcating and representing the spheres of modernity and tradition, state and society, nation and self in Manchukuo not only reflected processes in the two societies, but drew form cultural resources circulating between them. … Manchukuo reveals the lineaments of a regional understanding of how older formations are culturally constructed as sovereign nations in East Asia" (2, emphasis original).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter examines imperialism and nationalism in the 20thC, with the goal "to show that nationalism was not able to easily overcome the long practical history of the nation-state's association with imperialism in the competition for dominance of the capitalist world. Moreover, the evolving relationship between the two in the inter-war years meant that imperialism too came to be penetrated by nationalist rhetoric, forms, and practices" (9). Duara continues that "the systemic attributes underlying this relationship and transnational conditions--the circulatory conceptions, practices, and techniques--of nationality and sovereignty were misrecognized as immanent phenomena," which "could only be sustained by a symbolic regime of authenticity that in turn created the possibility of a morally absolute, unilateralist, and imperialist nationalism" (33). Thus imperialism was both a logic and a scourge of the global state system, and thus the radical nationalism of the 1920s in Japan "centered on powerful symbols of authenticity and on continuing expansion in deliberate defiance of an inter-state balance of power perceived as unjust to a sovereign Japan. It was facilitated by the ideology of pan-Asianism…" (34).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter offers a historical overview of Manchukuo, which prior to 1931 was of course Manchuria, the ancestral home of the ruling Qing Manchus which was colonized by Han Chinese beginning in the 19thC. After going through the history of the region up through the end of the war, Duara concludes that "the novelty of Manchukuo emerges from the institutional consequences of imperial nationalism in an emergent postcolonial time of mobilization and identity politics" (77). "Thus the regime functions of fascist corporatism appealed to ideas of Asian essentialism, whereas the imperative of govern mentality in this particular time and space called for a rhetoric of modernizing legitimation. While, as we have seen, this was a characteristic tension of the temporality of the modern nation-state, and was doubly intense for non-Western nations, in Manchukuo it was triply intense because Asianism was so central to its claim to sovereignty" (76).
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at Asianism and the "new discourse of civilization," with particular attention paid to Chinese "redemptive societies," which were found in Manchukuo as well as in the rest of China. Duara argues that civilization in the 20thC "had come to represent the highest ideals of humanity, but, curiously, as embodied in distinctive national cultures. In other words, while each national project claimed its ultimate worth in its universal relevance or scope, their ideologues found it necessary to stress the origins, and hence the distinct authority, of their civilization" (120). Because Manchukuo, being a puppet state--and beyond that an even more blatantly created state than most--was so civilizationally "thin," and because the regime's leaders "laced legitimacy" as conationals or co-ethnics, "Japanese power-holders in Manchukuo had few options but to ally with elements of these popular cultural traditions in order to stabilize their regime and achieve their goals. The rhetoric of Asian civilizational distinctiveness not only furnished a framework for this alliance and claim to sovereignty, it provided the opportunity to transform them for purposes of the state" (121). Duara provides a very welcome clarification and conjunction of Garon and Gluck when he notes that "in Japan, the cultural framework of kyôka furnished the mechanism to control the management of society within the larger ideology of the emperor system. Such top-down statist formulations frequently led to the exclusion from legitimate 'tradition' of large groups of people who may have lived these traditions or who sought to embody their ideals" (ibid).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at women and the figure of tradition within modernity, "analyzing a patriarchal conception in the East Asia modern of woman as the figure of 'tradition within modernity'" (handily symbolized by the fact that in Japan in the 1920s, only Modern Girls wore Western dress, but successful men wore suits), looking at the experiences of women who were members of the Morality Society (Wanguo Daodehui) in Manchukuo (131). Crucially, the figure of the modern-woman-as-the-vessel-of-tradition gives states, especially Japan and Manchukuo, a lever or an avenue through which to cement state control over the family and it also "addresses most fundamentally the aporia of time, the anxiety faced by individuals and regimes in societies driven by a conception of historical time as the constancy of flux" (i.e. those in the grip of nationalism) (160). Duara also looks at the women lecturers who worked for the redemptive societies in Manchukuo, particularly the Morality Society and the Red Swastika Society, through which they played a role in building loyalty and enforcing governmental discipline among ordinary people--a paradoxically empowering position that nonetheless subordinated these women and their audiences more fully to the state. Duara also looks at Manchukuo literature (particularly short stories) by male and female writers as well as movies movies, particularly the films of Li Xianglan | Ri Koran, who was "of Japanese parentage but born and raised as Chinese in Manchuria and Beijing" and who "acted as a Chinese in Japanese-produced films promoting themes of pan-Asian womanhood, family values, and amity" (161).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at imperial nationalism and the frontier, under the contention that "the system of modern--and perhaps early modern--states is built on the imperative that all global resources be controlled by territorially sovereign polities, whether nations or empires. … Modern states have tended to incorporate contiguous, alien territories and peoples whenever possible, thereby blurring the practical distinction between imperialism and nationalism in these areas" (179). Much of Duara's analysis of the ways that these autonomous areas were dominated and peripheralized takes the form of looking at the work of Japanese and Chinese anthropologists in the region, writing discourses of the vanishing, as it were. Thus Duara "reveal[s] the territorial imperative underlying the modern state form common to both" imperialism and nationalism. "Because territorial incorporation was a response to or simultaneous with they emergence as contested borderlands, these regions were transformed from dark frontiers into hot spots. They became political spaces where the effort to invest sovereignty and defend it was most densely concentrated" (200). As for those "primitive peoples" themselves, such as the Oroqen, "our historical knowledge of them is inevitably conditioned by the larger forces of state building and incorporation," and in the end "the voice of the primitive is heard as the cry of our redemption, but only at the moment of her disappearance" (201). Hint: the reason Republican China didn't romanticize the Oroqen, unlike the Japanese, is because Republican China was wedded to the concept of the mono-ethnic China, the "zhonghua minzu."
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at "native place literature" in the Northeast, arguing that "while the area had seen several different regimes and the nature of regional representation had doubtless also changed, what had endured was the production of the local as sentiment and object of identity" (209). Duara argues that "the local may best be viewed in a field of multiple forces…contending to appropriate its meaning and resources. This view releases the local from a naturalistic fixity within the nation, so that it can be treated as a process" (210). Duara reads in particular Yanagita Kunio, Lu Xun, and Zhou Zuoren, and in particular the Japanese intellectual currents of "geographical determinism," which was part of the global emergence of the same in the interwar era, drawing in China upon the ideas of figures like Karl Wittfogel and Watsuji Tetsurô. Duara is ambivalent between collaborationist and resistant readings of these figures, especially Zhou and Yanagita, but he also reads Lu Xun, Fei Xiaotong, and Liang Shangding's novel Green Valley in depth. Duara concludes that "the contradictory imperatives for indentitarian states to modernize and simultaneously produce an authentic, timeless essence drove them and cultural producers to treat the locality as objects both of development and of identity. … In the identity-based polities of the modern era, control of territory is critically dependent on the subjective production of space as an object of identification" (235).
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples In the first part of his conclusion, Duara argues (and I am not sure that I agree with this) that "Manchukuo was undermined by the contradiction between an alliance based on independence--hence the quest for sovereignty--and the imperialist power structure, whereas in Korea and Taiwan the tension developed chiefly between assimilation and exclusion" (246). More significantly, Duara reads Manchukuo as the exemplar of the East Asian model of development via Bruce Cumings, seeing it as a "particular cultural deployment, during this period, of the East Asian modern--enabling exaltation of the state, commitment of the bureaucracy, appeals to discipline and self-sacrifice, and 'moral suasion,' among other developments" that enabled the creation of the model in the postwar period (250). Similarly, Manchukuo served as a laboratory for policies that could not be carried out in Japan, from architecture to germ warfare to state capitalism. Looking at the respective fates of Manchukuo and the Soviet Union, both of which espoused a multinationalism that "did not often clarify the relationship between (ethnic) and nationality and the larger nation-state," leads Duara ultimately to conclude that "the legitimacy of the 20thC state, no matter how strong and modern, appears to have been built around narratives of identity" (253). Not coincidentally, when it failed, Manchukuo "ended as a strong--military fascist--state that represented only itself" (ibid).
Critical assessment: When I left undergrad this was probably my favorite work of scholarship, and I was somewhat thrown when I got to Berkeley to find that a lot of people cast a lot of shade on it. I can see those criticisms, particularly the one that the book is not really so much about Manchukuo as Manchukuo is a frame to hang some rather interesting and still, I think, fundamentally correct historical and political theory onto--but on the other hand, rereading this book, there are a lot of historical facts here that didn't stick in my brain the first time around. Certainly there are more facts about daily life in Manchukuo then Louise Young managed to provide.
I read this book in my final class with my wonderful undergraduate advisor Katherine Tegtmeyer Pak, who is a political scientist, and undoubtedly some of my love for the book comes from that experience--it was an excellent and innovative class. But I still think that what Duara does here is interesting and valuable; I suspect that some of the shade cast on it results from the fact that many historians, at least those here at Berkeley, seem to fear and loathe theory, and Duara here is making theory. (Don't get me started on the terrible diagrams, because they really are terrible.) But I still think that if one is willing to take the book on its own terms, it is excellent overall.
Further reading: Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire; Mark Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque; Miriam Kingsberg, Moral Nation; Yoshihisa Matsusaka, The Making of Japanese Manchuria; Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases
Meta notes: I underlined way too many things in books when I was an undergrad.