Date: Thu, 5 Mar 1998 12:24:53 -0800 (PST)
From: Dennis R Redmond <dredmond-AT-gladstone.uoregon.edu>
Subject: M-TH: Re: A bird went looking for a cage ...


On Thu, 5 Mar 1998, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

> I would also like to start a thread on left modernism and orientalism, but
> I don't know when I can get around to doing so.

Aw, come on, go ahead and make the time. This ought to be a really
interesting topic -- not to indulge in the Asiaphoria/Asiagloom of our
ruling class, but this sort of thing is a crucial corrective to the usual
Eurocentrism (or maybe a better term would be Western Europeanism) of most
debates over modernism. From what little I know of the Pacific Rim (which
ain't all that much), Japan, China etc. created some amazing modernist
works of art, had powerful philosophical critiques and, as an added bonus,
generated some of the world's most profound and earth-shaking
revolutionary/anti-colonial movements. It's scandalous that most
debates over modernism completely ignore this fact, while our current 
hegemonic postmodernism doesn't even ask these questions, preferring
to babble self-referentially about the joys of Wintel and
CD-Rom. Educate the rest of us!

-- Dennis



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