Anri Yasuda (EALLC) and Robert Stolz (History) will join the Institute of the Humanities & Global Cultures and the East Asia Center for a special event, discussing their recent books, Beauty Matters: Modern Japanese Literature and the Question of Aesthetics, 1890-1930 and The Japanese Ideology: A Marxist Critique of Liberalism and Fascism (Tosaka Jun, Translated by Robert Stolz) both published in 2024 by Columbia University Press.

A Pop-Up Book Launch with Anri Yasuda and Robert Stolz: Modern Japanese Literature and a Marxist Critque of Liberalism and Fascism

In Beauty Matters, Yasuda demonstrates that by exploring the often conflicting yet powerful pull of aesthetic sentiments, major authors of the late Meiji (1868–1912) and Taishō (1912–1926) periods illuminated themes and perspectives that resonated broadly in modern Japanese society. This approach presents an alternative to conventional accounts in which Japanese literature before the modernist turn of the 1920s has tended to be defined by an insular focus on subjective representation and autobiographical realism.  By tracing the wide-reaching significance of aesthetic affect in literary thought, Beauty Matters destabilizes received conceptions of literature’s parameters and affirms literature’s continued potential to intervene in cultural discourses in Japan and beyond.

With Stolz's translation of The Japanese Ideology, Anglophone readers gain new access to a classic of twentieth-century Marxist thought by an unsung peer of Gramsci and Benjamin with striking relevance today. The Japanese Ideology provides a materialist analysis of the reactionary ideology then overtaking Japan, with profound significance for anywhere fascism has taken root. Modeled after Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology, it critiques idealism as the common ground for liberalism and fascism, against which only historical materialism can suffice. The author, Jun Tosaka, demonstrates how liberal and fascist ideas at once justified and concealed Japan’s colonization of East Asia, and he investigates the many traces of fascism in Japanese thought and society. The Japanese Ideology makes an important intervention in Marxist theory by criticizing reliance on the East/West binary and the notion of the “Asiatic mode of production.” 

During this event, Professors Yasuda and Stolz will introduce one another's books and engage in a discussion about both texts before inviting questions from the audience.  Please register for the event by April 14th.  Registrants may stop by the IHGC for FREE COPIES of the books, while supplies last. 

The event will be held Friday, April 18, from 11:00 am - 1:00 pm in Wilson 142, with lunch provided.