The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan [Hardcover]

Frank Dikotter (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1997

This work reflects on the core issues related to the national and racial mythologies that have been central to nation building in China and Japan over the last century. The contributors demonstrate how the process of modern myth-making and racial identity politics has been at work in the region.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 234 pages
• Publisher: University of Hawaii Press (August 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0824819195
• ISBN-13: 978-0824819194
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,445,584 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Frank Dikotter is Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong and Professor of the Modern History of China on leave from the University of London. He has published a trilogy on racism, sexism and eugenics in modern China, as well as books on crime and punishment, on the history of drug use and on material culture. He just completed a book on the famine that claimed at least 45 million lives under Mao from 1958 to 1962, using hitherto closed party archives. See www.frankdikotter.com for a biography and many downloadable items!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent treatment of a complex subject, June 28, 2001

By 

Michael Hurt (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan (Hardcover)

Frank Dikötter has put together an excellent collection of articles about the development of racial and national identities in China and Japan. Starting from where Western scholars fear to tread but need to go, he asserts in the introduction that dismissing the development of racial (or racist) attitudes in Asia as the mere extension of Western ethnocentrism is not only short-sighted, but dangerous.

Especially as we enter the 21st century as globalization brings nations and ideologies closer together, it is important to understand the historically specific formations of national and racial identity that determines individual identity formation. Splitting the book into two halves, with articles about China leading off the book, the varied articles and analyses are quite insighful and theoretically rigorous.

This is a good first introduction to the subject, and many of the authors in the book can be found elsewhere, some of them having written their own books based on their lines of research. Kosaku Yoshino, Frank Dikötter, Louise Young, and David Goodman have all written works worthy of buying outright.

Of particular interest are the Japan chapters, which outline the development of ideas of racial particularism as the nation reconstructed itself in its program of modernization, the place of the Ainu "other" in this process, the distancing and stigmatizing of Chinese kanbun throughout this process, as well as the turn Japanese ideology took after the forced annexation of Manchukuo. For a detailed exploration of the Chinese formation of national identity, this is a good book, but it goes without saying (although I clearly am) that one should own a copy of Dikötter's The Discourse of Race in Modern China.

Perfect accompanying works to be read alongside this one are the aforementioned book on China, the edited volume Making Majorities, by Dru Gladney, as well as Cultural Nationalism in East Asia, by Harumi Befu. The big man on campus, as it were, is Kosaku Yoshino, who wrote Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan. If you are a scholar of nationalism in Asia, you cannot be without these books. Also of interest would be Michael Robinson's Cultural Nationalism in Korea, any and all works by John Dower, beginning with War Without Mercy, and the book Colonialism and Nationalism in Asian Cinema.

As a graduate student specializing in this area, and having just passed my qualifying exams in the area of Nationalism in East Asia, I can say that I have scoured bibliographies and booklists far and wide. This book, along with the others mentioned above, will provide a solid start for the interested scholar.