Customer Reviews

History's Disquiet

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Harry Harootunian's book, "History's Disquiet," raises important issues about the way scholars approach the writing of history, especially of nation-states like Japan. He makes pointed suggestions that the major powers in the West have used a combination of political and economic (read: capitalistic) power to construct a version of events that contains a dissonance (disquiet) with the way the people affected by these events view them. He is particularly vehement about the way the notion of area studies has segregated scholarship in certain areas on an artificially geographic basis. This is high-octane theory that raises important issues.

Disregard the one-star 'rating' (below) of professor Harootunian's important intervention, 'History's Disquiet;' or, better yet, read it and understand that it is a manifestation of a larger project--that is, to discredit Harry's work in order to defend the integrity of 'Japanology' or 'Area Studies,' 'fields' of inquiry which have found themselves intellectually and morally bankrupt at this point in time (yet they linger on, haunting their own graves!). The 'review' below proceeds from some assumed transcendental position wherein the 'critic' pretends to have mastery of--what?--'Critical Theory,' perhaps (for lack of a better term), thereby dismissing Harry's work as 'quasi-theoretical,' etc., etc. Rubbish! This is simply another attempt to marginalize Harry and prevent potential readers from engaging his work. Let me spell this out for those who are hard-of-thinking (and their grad students): you ignore Harootunian's work at your peril.
The importance of professor Harootunian's work can be gauged by a consideration of what was being written BEFORE he came along and what has been written AFTER he began having an impact on this piteous 'field' of Japanology. To read his work and follow his own path of critical development, bearing in mind the impact this process had/has on Japanology at every turn, is genuinely exciting--if not for Harry, Miyoshi and Najita (and their students) the study of Japan in the US would be insufferably dull and as devoid of reflexivity and significance as its [illigitament] cousin, Anthropology, has traditionally been.
Read this book, particularly if you consider yourself invloved with 'Japan' or Asia, area studies, etc. To ignore Harootunian's work is pure negligence.

This book is characteristic of Harootunian's pseudo-theoretical approach which pretends to engage seriously with "Western" theory in order to reveal to non-existent practitioners long acknowledged criticisms of Area Studies. Conflating the modern moment with the postmodern, the book takes a 1920's notion of "everydayness" and argues for an approach of "everydayness" to transcend the problems of Area Studies in the here and now. While the critique of Area Studies is worthwhile, the solution here is preposterous, presenting the present as the remedy for the Academy in 2000. This has the potential of ending in the same double bind the present as universal portended for phenomenologists in the first half of the century. The trouble with Harry is that he only reads Hayden White (who he agrees with more than his critique shows) and Edward Said not the Freddy J's _Political Unconsious_. If he did he might be aware of a distinct difference of late capitalism and his own political stance in taking up the present as viable. His nonreading of Joyce is also symptomatic (he calls Stephen the protagonist.) His claims to scream something new about modernity and Area Studies whisper meek derivative phrases to the already overbloated body of scholarship of modernity as shock. In the end we can only be shocked at the lack of originality here. And this is truly uncanny.