The Mechanics of Modernity in Europe and East Asia


Book Description

This book provides a new answer to the old question of the 'rise of the west': why did some countries embark on a path of sustained economic growth while others stagnated? Taking a global view, Ringmar investigates the implications of his conclusions on issues facing the developing world today.




Decentering Musical Modernity


Book Description

This collection investigates the concept of modernity in music and its multiple interpretations in Europe and East Asia. Through contributions by both European and East Asian musicologists it discusses how a decentered understanding of musical modernity could be matched on multiple historiographical perspectives while being attentive to the specificities of local music and their narratives in East Asia and Europe. The essays connect local, global and transnational history with sociological theories of modernity and modernization, making the volume an important contribution to overcoming the Eurocentric dichotomy between western music and world music within the field of historical musicology.




Modalities of Change


Book Description

While in some cases modernity may dominate 'traditional' forms of expression, in others, the modern is embraced as a welcome source of new ideas that can modify 'tradition' while still keeping it within its own bounds. Maintaining a strong and distinct cultural identity with the help of modernity helps representatives of that identity cope with the modern world more generally. By contrast, assimilation to a dominant culture marked as modern is clearly associated with not only the loss of a distinct identity, but also its specific forms of cultural expression. This book explores the consequences of the interface between modernity and tradition in selected societies in Taiwan, mainland China and Vietnam. The contributors examine how traditions are themselves exploiting modernity in creative ways, in the interests of their own further cultural developments, and to what extent this approach is likely to help a tradition survive.




Christianity and Modernity in Eastern Europe


Book Description

Disgraceful collusion. Heroic resistance. Suppression of faith. Perseverance of convictions. The story of Christianity in twentieth-century Eastern Europe is often told in stark scenes of tragedy and triumph. Overlooked in the retelling of these dramas is how the region's clergy and lay believers lived their faith, acted within religious and political institutions, and adapted their traditions---while struggling to make sense of a changing world. The contributors to this volume, coming from the U.S. and Western and Eastern Europe, look beyond the narratives of resistance and collaboration. They offer surprising new evidence from archives and oral history interviews, and they provide fresh interpretations of Christianity as it was lived and expressed in modern Europe: from religiosity in the industrial cities of the late nineteenth century to current debates over immigration and European identity; from theological debates in East Germany to folk healing in post-socialist Bulgaria; and, counter-intuitively, from religious fervor among the Czechs to indifference among the Poles. Addressing Christianity in diverse forms---Orthodox, Protestant, Roman and Greek Catholic---as an integral part of the region's politics, society, and culture, this collection is a major addition to studies of both Eastern Europe and religion in the twentieth century. "A volume that specialists in the history of Christianity in other regions of the world will read with great interest, and a degree of envy. As an historian of religion in Western Europe, I can say that although there is a vast literature on the religious history of the nineteenth century and a growing literature on the twentieth century, there is nothing quite like this." From the Foreword by Hugh McLeod, author of The Religious Crisis of the 1960s. "This is a path-breaking book in two different ways. It contributes to the re-evaluation of the nature of modern European religion generally, and to the nature of religion in the modern world." Jeffrey Cox, University of Iowa, author of Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India.




Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity


Book Description

Seventeen scholars from varying fields here consider the implications of Confucian concerns--self-cultivation, regulation of the family, social civility, moral education, well-being of the people, governance of the state, and universal peace--in industrial East Asia.




Between Europe and Asia


Book Description

Between Europe and Asia analyzes the origins and development of Eurasianism, an intellectual movement that proclaimed the existence of Eurasia, a separate civilization coinciding with the former Russian Empire. The essays in the volume explore the historical roots, the heyday of the movement in the 1920s, and the afterlife of the movement in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The first study to offer a multifaceted account of Eurasianism in the twentieth century and to touch on the movement's intellectual entanglements with history, politics, literature, or geography, this book also explores Eurasianism's influences beyond Russia. The Eurasianists blended their search for a primordial essence of Russian culture with radicalism of Europe's interwar period. In reaction to the devastation and dislocation of the wars and revolutions, they celebrated the Orthodox Church and the Asian connections of Russian culture, while rejecting Western individualism and democracy. The movement sought to articulate a non-European, non-Western modernity, and to underscore Russia's role in the colonial world. As the authors demonstrate, Eurasianism was akin to many fascist movements in interwar Europe, and became one of the sources of the rhetoric of nationalist mobilization in Vladimir Putin's Russia. This book presents the rich history of the concept of Eurasianism, and how it developed over time to achieve its present form.




Entangled Paths Towards Modernity


Book Description

This is an important and innovative comparative study of socialist movements and regimes of modernization in the Balkans, encompassing Serbian populism, Bulgarian social democracy and Greek communism. It makes an original contribution both to the history of political ideas and to the political sociology of radical and socialist movements. It provides a fascinating account of the transplantation of ideologies that were adopted from Western Europe and from Russia into the very different environment of the Balkans, and traces their adaptation and their reception in this new environment. Book jacket.




Gender, Continuity, and the Shaping of Modernity in the Arts of East Asia, 16th–20th Centuries


Book Description

Gender, Continuity, and the Shaping of Modernity in the Arts of East Asia, 16th–20th Centuries explores women’s and men’s contributions to the arts and gendered visual representations in China, Korea, and Japan from the premodern through modern eras. A critical introduction and nine essays consider how threads of continuity and exchanges between the cultures of East Asia, Europe, and the United States helped to shape modernity in this region, in the process revealing East Asia as a vital component of the trans-Pacific world. The essays are organized into three themes: representations of femininity, women as makers, and constructions of gender, and they consider examples of architecture, painting, woodblock prints and illustrated books, photography, and textiles. Contributors are: Lara C. W. Blanchard, Kristen L. Chiem, Charlotte Horlyck, Ikumi Kaminishi, Nayeon Kim, Sunglim Kim, Radu Leca, Elizabeth Lillehoj, Ying-chen Peng, and Christina M. Spiker. Gender, Continuity, and the Shaping of Modernity in the Arts of East Asia, 16th–20th Centuries is now available in paperback for individual customers.




The Future of East Asia


Book Description

This book collects some of the most influential scholars in international relations who focus on Asia globally in exploring the challenges of diplomacy faced in Asia as US policy drastically changes. The president-elect has suggested policies which, if implemented, would radically transform the way that the region functions; what will this mean in practice? China's government is also retrenching nationalist positions; what is the future of China, and what does that mean for the region? A wide range of distinguished scholars, concerned about the future, have contributed their thoughts in an attempt to spark a global dialogue.




Carbon Technocracy


Book Description

A forceful reckoning with the relationship between energy and power through the history of what was once East Asia’s largest coal mine. The coal-mining town of Fushun in China’s Northeast is home to a monstrous open pit. First excavated in the early twentieth century, this pit grew like a widening maw over the ensuing decades, as various Chinese and Japanese states endeavored to unearth Fushun’s purportedly “inexhaustible” carbon resources. Today, the depleted mine that remains is a wondrous and terrifying monument to fantasies of a fossil-fueled future and the technologies mobilized in attempts to turn those developmentalist dreams into reality. In Carbon Technocracy, Victor Seow uses the remarkable story of the Fushun colliery to chart how the fossil fuel economy emerged in tandem with the rise of the modern technocratic state. Taking coal as an essential feedstock of national wealth and power, Chinese and Japanese bureaucrats, engineers, and industrialists deployed new technologies like open-pit mining and hydraulic stowage in pursuit of intensive energy extraction. But as much as these mine operators idealized the might of fossil fuel–driven machines, their extractive efforts nevertheless relied heavily on the human labor that those devices were expected to displace. Under the carbon energy regime, countless workers here and elsewhere would be subjected to invasive techniques of labor control, ever-escalating output targets, and the dangers of an increasingly exploited earth. Although Fushun is no longer the coal capital it once was, the pattern of aggressive fossil-fueled development that led to its ascent endures. As we confront a planetary crisis precipitated by our extravagant consumption of carbon, it holds urgent lessons. This is a groundbreaking exploration of how the mutual production of energy and power came to define industrial modernity and the wider world that carbon made.