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University of California Press’s open access publishing
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learn more.
Imperial Genus begins with the turn to world culture and
ideas of the generally human in Japan’s cultural policy in
Korea in 1919. How were concepts of the human’s genus-being
operative in the discourses of the Japanese empire? How did they
inform the imagination and representation of modernity in colonial
Korea? Travis Workman delves into these questions through
texts in philosophy, literature, and social science.
Imperial Genus focuses on how notions of human generality
mediated uncertainty between the transcendental and the empirical,
the universal and the particular, and empire and colony
. It
shows how cosmopolitan cultural principles, the proletarian arts,
and Pan-Asian imperial nationalism converged with practices of
colonial governmentality. It is a genealogy of the various
articulations of the human’s genus-being within modern
humanist thinking in East Asia, as well as an exploration of the
limits of the human as both concept and historical figure.