Expansionism

About: Expansionism is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 979 publications have been published within this topic receiving 11169 citations.

Crossing Empire's Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia (review)

Abstract: and the late Miyata Noboru, who trace the origin of their discipline to Inoue Enryô, Ema Tsutomu, and Yanagita Kunio and his followers. Use of the term yôkai is thus a matter of choice, and the choice is not a universal one: in the fields of Japanese theater studies and early modern literature, for instance, the term yôkai has never played an important role, even in works dealing with bakemono (monsters), yûrei (ghosts), or konpaku (spirits)—all considered yôkai by scholars in the field of “yôkai studies.” All of which is to say that Pandemonium and Parade bears the marks of the scholarly genealogy upon which Foster draws. And this is, I think, another fascinating aspect of Foster’s project: his book, written in English, engages in a dialogue with the work of a particular group of Japanese scholars, currently the most active and productive in the discussion of the mysterious, while also tracing the history of its own discipline. Pandemonium and Parade is an important contribution to Japanese studies, then, not only in its nuanced treatment of yôkai—in the way it makes yôkai speak to us about specific cultural and historical moments—but also in its careful delineation, in the liminal, in-between field of English-language Japanese studies, of the very contexts from which yôkai studies emerged. Foster notes that unlike Godzilla, Mizuki’s yôkai “remained domestic actors” (p. 203); yet the remarkable success of Yokai Attack: The Japanese Monster Survival Guide suggests that, true to form, yôkai refuse to be constrained even by national borders. Pandemonium and Parade shows that yôkai studies, too, can travel. The wealth of research and secondary scholarship that Pandemonium and Parade brings together for the first time makes this book essential reading for researchers in the field; the contemporary relevance of yôkai and Foster’s wonderful prose make it ideal for use in undergraduate classes and easily accessible for anyone interested in the topic.

Veiled Intentions: The Cultural Mythology Of Veils, Harems, And Belly Dancers In The Service Of Empire, Security, And Globalization

Abstract: In the contemporary context, mythologized figures of Arab womanhood, such as the seemingly ubiquitous image of the veiled woman and the persistent icon of the belly dancer, continue to operate as the visual vocabulary through which collective anxieties about new forms of power and progress manifest. If images of belly dancers and harem girls in twentieth-century tobacco advertisements reflect the disorientations of consumerism and expansionism in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, contemporary images of Arab womanhood continue to be engaged with consumerism and expansionism in the context of contemporary U.S. neoliberalism and imperialism. In this chapter, I am interested in applying the trajectory of my argument thus far to representations of Arab and Muslim womanhood in what might be called the era of globalization, from the 1970s to the present. Like my analysis of the metanarrative of modernity, I will be investigating mainstream discourses of globalization in terms of their disavowal of the neocolonial and imperialist projects in which they are embedded.