IIAS Newsletter 46 Winter 2008
Viren Murthy
Takeuchi Yoshimi and the dilemmas of resistance to global capitalist modernity
In 1948, after returning from China and publishing an influential book on the Chinese leftist writer Lu Xun, the famous Japanese literary critic Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910-1977) developed a provocative account of modern Japanese culture in his influential essay ‘What is Modernity? He contrasted Japan, whose modernity merely aped the West, with China, whose modernity grew out of fundamental resistance to European invasion. Takeuchi’s theory anticipates the ideas of contemporary critics of Eurocentricism, which makes his work particularly relevant today.
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