Before the Nation : Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan /

Burns (Univ. of Chicago) offers a revisionist history that calls into question the received understandings of Kokugaku (national studies), particularly its relations with modern Japanese nationalism. She suggests a way to rearticulate "complex and multiple relations between premodern representations of community and the modern nation." Previous scholarship of Kokugaku tended to analyze premodern (Tokugawa) discourse on Japanese identity as the precursor of modern Japanese nationalism. Burns challenges the linearity of this mode of historical analysis by showing a variety of often-competing Tokugawa discourses on Japanese identity between the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Her choice of relatively "unknown" scholars of Kokugaku is a strategic move to demonstrate the lack of linearity and to introduce the multivocal quality of Kokugaku discourse. For example, Burns contends that Ueda Akinari (1734-1809), a Kokugaku scholar and writer, proposed a conception of Japan radically different from that created by the most celebrated Kokugaku scholar, Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801). Burns argues that the new modern (Meiji) regime appropriated Kokugaku scholars' vocabulary and set of epistemological strategies to forge nationalism. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. K. Hirano Indiana University South Bend