Cognitive Resonance

Bibliographic Data: Faison, Elyssa. Managing Women: Disciplining Labor in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Bibliographic Data - Review: Review by: Bill Mihalopoulos, The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 69, No. 1 (Feb. 2010), pp. 253-55 .

Main Argument: Family + industrialization = patriarchal authority of the father grated onto the state ==> "corporate paternalism" mode of production centered around integrating women into hierarchical relations by disciplining female workers bodily, fixing of cultural standards of womanhood (i.e. women workers treated more as women than as workers). Capital shapes social knowledge as well as the individual; "capital shapes the capacity to communicate and to feel the content of what we think" (254). Method: Marx + Foucault = feminist revolution?

Bibliographic Data: Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. The Technological Transformation of Japan: From the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

( Technology and development )

Bibliographic Data: Harootunian, Harry D. Overcome By Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

( Overcoming modernity )

Bibliographic Data: Fogel, Joshua A. Politics and Sinology: The Case of Naito Konan (1866-1934). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

( Epistemological imperialism )

Bibliographic Data: Ruoff, Kenneth J. Imperial Japan at its Zenith: The Wartime Celebration of the Empire’s 2600th Anniversary. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010.

( Imperial pagaentry )

Bibliographic Data: Ruoff, Kenneth J. The People’s Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy, 1945-1995. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003.

( Popular monarchy )

Bibliographic Data: Kingsberg, Miriam. Moral Nation: Modern Japan and Narcotics in Global History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.

( Narco-politics and civilization )

At bottom, all historical practice is an act of criticism. At the same time that theory enables us to imagine the framing operation involved in the formulation of any analytic program, it must teach us that our own perspectives possess no privilege over others, since its power lies precisely in the capacity to make visible the frames from which our categories of representation derive. In this way, historical criticism can never be far from political purpose.

--Harry D. Harootunian, Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokugawa Nativism (2)

I really can't understate how much I agree with this. Historiography is an act of narrative, and as such its schemes of representation are no more immune from the operations of critical theory than literature, or life.