Book Reviews
Nation Work is a unique collection of eight essays which attempt to enrich the understanding of the origin and growth of nations by examining four Asian countries, namely China, India, Korea and Japan. The papers cast light on the various aspects of nation-building processes of these countries, which have been relatively unexplored in the Western literature. While admitting the significant influence of Western imperialism on the development of Asian nationalisms, the authors of the volume are more concerned with tensions within Asia rather than those between Asia and the West. Moreover, although they agree that Asian elites had to work on modern nation-building projects by adopting Western knowledge and technology, they maintain that the processes of national identity formation took place within particular Asian contexts and, therefore, were unique to Asian localities.
In the first essay, Susan L. Burns examines in what ways public-health measures transformed the notion of the individual, private body into that of the national body and strengthened identification of the public with the nation in nineteenth-century Japan. The second and third essays deal with the ideological processes in Dravidian nationalism in India and Korean nationalism. V. Ravindiran discusses how Tamils exploited missionary orientalism in order to establish a Dravidian identity on the basis of local vernacular cultures of South India in resistance to dominant Brahmanism founded on Sanskritic Hindu culture. Andre Schmid presents the ways in which Korean journalists strove to refashion a Korean identity by dissociating Korea from the influence of the old Chinese empire and discovering cultures and symbols unique to the Korean peninsula.
Furthermore, R. Bin Wong, Margherita Zanasi and Timothy Brook demonstrate how competing visions of China as a modern nation had profound consequences for the course of development of Chinese nationalism. Wong argues that a growing cultural gap between the Western-influenced culture of urban elites and the Confucian-based culture of rural masses undermined the conceptual development of Chinese national culture as the basis of Chinese national identity in the twentieth century. Zansai’s case study shows how a minister of industry, Chen Gongbo, sought to achieve national unity on the basis of economic unification. Brook explores how collaborationist ideology could have been construed as a form of nationalism in an occupied wartime China.
Finally, the last two essays discuss the conditions of post-nationalism in China and Japan. By introducing the concept of post-nationalism which ‘expresses the myriad contradictions in contemporary China that arise out of the intersecting trajectories of globalism and nationalism’ (p. 192), Xiaoping Li explains the schizophrenic conditions of modern China characterised by a tension between promoting globalisation and manufacturing national cohesion. Thomas Keirstead shows how various histories produced during the Meiji period uncritically used the nation in explaining the past and that they constituted the ground on which the concept of the modern Japanese nation was formed. As the concluding remarks, Keirstead suggests that other interpretations of the past might be plausible in the contemporary contexts of global capitalism and information flow, and that it is necessary to understand in what ways new approaches to the past work with the ideas of the nation-state and affect the collectivities through which people act in the political and cultural spheres.
Overall, I recommend Nation Work as an interesting introductory book for those who are not familiar with Asian nationalisms. Although the main argument is that the development of Asian nationalisms was not simply a reaction to Western imperialism and that internal tensions within Asia played a crucial role are not new among Asian specialists, the essays give some interesting insights into the various ways through which Asian elites strove to construct modern nations-states as the means of national survival. Nevertheless, there are some shortcomings in the volume.
First, because the authors tend to focus on a particular aspect of nationalism, there are not sufficient discussions of what impacts it had on the overall development of nationalism and how different aspects of nationalism interacted with each other in its evolution. Without these data, it is difficult to evaluate the significance of the subjects which the authors have chosen to discuss. Secondly, in general, the volume adopts an elite-centred Hobsbawmian modernist approach. However, as Carol Gluck argues, ‘there is always a multiplicity of ideological formation within a society’
(Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (1958): 7) and the elite could not manipulate the ideological processes without any interaction with others. Unfortunately, relatively less consideration is given to the elite’s ability to respond to definitions of the nation put forward by mass cultures and social practices. As a result the claim made by Brook and Schmid in their introduction that the processes of identity formation were unique to the Asian localities becomes less convincing. The authors need to reconsider and clarify what Asian localities consisted of.
