New Book Announcement: “Japan’s Russia: Challenging the East-West Paradigm” by Olga V Solovieva and Sho Konishi

 Japan’s Russia: Challenging the East-West Paradigm, Olga V Solovieva, Sho Konishi (Cambria Press, February 2021)
Japan’s Russia: Challenging the East-West Paradigm, Olga V Solovieva, Sho Konishi (Cambria Press, February 2021)

The Russian cultural presence in Japan after the Meiji Revolution was immense. Indeed, Japanese cultural negotiations with Russian intellectuals and Russian literature, art, theology and political thought, formed an important basis for modern Japanese transnational intellectual, cultural, literary, and artistic production. And yet, despite the depth and range of “Japan’s Russia,” this historical phenomenon has been markedly neglected in our studies of modern Japanese intellectual life. This absence may be attributed to the fact that “Japan’s Russia” as idea and cultural expression developed outside the logic of Western modernity. There has been an interconnected logic behind this ignorance, a systematic lacuna in our historiography that tied method to historical actors, concept to theory.

This volume seeks to depart from this logic in order to identify thoughts and practices that helped produce a dynamic transnational cultural phenomenon that we identify as “Japan’s Russia.” It does so by orchestrating case studies from cutting-edge scholarship originating in multiple disciplines, each with its own methodological and theoretical implications.

 

Japan’s Russia: Challenging the East-West Paradigm
by Olga V Solovieva and Sho Konishi
Cambria Press, February 2021 (ISBN 9781621965534)