A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at
www.luminosoa.org.
Language, Nation, Race explores the various language reforms at the
onset of Japanese modernity, a time when a "national language"
(kokugo) was produced to standardize Japanese. Faced with the threat
of Western colonialism, Meiji intellectuals proposed various reforms to
standardize the Japanese language in order to quickly educate the
illiterate masses. This book liberates these language reforms from the
predetermined category of the "nation," for such a notion had yet to
exist as a clear telos to which the reforms aspired. Atsuko Ueda draws
on, while critically intervening in, the vast scholarship of language
reform that engaged with numerous works of postcolonial and cultural
studies. She examines the first two decades of the Meiji period, with
specific focus on the issue of race, contending that no analysis of
imperialism or nationalism is possible without it.