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NOT QUITE AN UROBOROS: THEORY, POWER, AND POPULAR CULTURE IN EARLY MODERN JAPAN
Author(s) -
Johnston William
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
history and theory
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.169
H-Index - 41
eISSN - 1468-2303
pISSN - 0018-2656
DOI - 10.1111/hith.10771
Subject(s) - polity , historiography , interpretation (philosophy) , popular culture , meiji period , power (physics) , ideology , dialogic , popularity , history , sociology , comics , epistemology , aesthetics , politics , culture theory , realism , literature , social science , philosophy , anthropology , political science , law , art , linguistics , media studies , physics , archaeology , quantum mechanics
Katsuya Hirano's The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan offers an Althusser‐inflected analysis of the relationship between power structures and the economy of cultural production, with a focus on late eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century Edo. Hirano spells out his cultural assumptions, and then examines the cultures of parody, comic realism, the grotesque, and the changing relationship between the Meiji state and the body. This theoretical tour de force, however, raises many questions regarding its assumptions about the structure of the early modern Japanese polity, elided evidence, and interpretation. As such, it will stimulate ongoing discussion regarding the place of theory, and in particular of neo‐Marxism, in contemporary historiography.