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Category: 20th century

Gamal Abdel Nasser

Published April 1, 2022 by jeforte

Gamal Abdel NASSER (1918-1970) was an Egyptian politician who played a prominent role in shaping the region’s politics in the twentieth century. Starting his career in the Egyptian military, Nasser rose in rank and formed a close circle of allies (many of them fellow officers in the army). After participating in and surviving the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, in July of 1952 Nasser and 89 of his compatriots (the “Free Officers”) ousted King Farouk I in a coup, seizing control of the government. After some internal power struggles, Nasser emerged as Prime Minister in 1954, and quickly got to work instituting his policy platform, which would come to be known as Arab Socialism. Nasser’s policies aimed at modernizing Egypt, improving the material living conditions of its people, addressing inequality in land distribution, and instituted basic healthcare and welfare measures, as well as a minimum wage and provisions designed to help women. In 1956, the United States and Britain pulled out of an agreement to provide $270 million to fund the first stage of Nasser’s most ambitious public works project, the Aswan High Dam. In response, Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal, income from which Egypt could use to fund completion of the dam.

Britain and France did not take this well, resulting in the armed conflict known as the “Suez Crisis.” Although the Egyptian air force was decimated in this conflict, Nasser and Egypt emerged from the conflict with great prestige and appeared to be a model for how Arab countries could stand up to and resist domination by imperial powers. Nasser’s dream of an Arab socialist republic did not last, however, and following Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 war against Israel, many in the Arab world came to see Nasserism and socialism as failed solutions, especially given the economic struggles the Soviet Union was facing around this time, and accordingly looked to other alternatives, paving the way for the real rise of Islamic radicalism.

FURTHER READING

Gettleman, Marvin E., and Stuart Schaar. The Middle East and Islamic World Reader. New York, NY: Grove Press, 2012.

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The Meiji Restoration

Published April 1, 2022 by Franchesca Johnson
The First May Day Event, 1920

Throughout most of Japanese history, monarchies and feudal military dictatorships ruled the country. However, after a coup d’etat in January 1868 that stripped Tokugawa Yoshinobu of authority, Japan entered a tumultuous and revolutionary period known as the Meiji Restoration (1868-1912). Following hundreds of years under the rule of the Tokugawa Shogunate, the country was forced to construct a new government that appealed to the people. Moreover, as this period marked the continuation of Japan’s new relations with foreign countries for the first time in centuries, there was tremendous pressure to pursue distinct ideologies from foreign governments.

Therefore, the Meiji Era enabled vastly different perspectives to propose courses of action for economic, social, and cultural development. From socialism rooted in Christianity to Japanese Marxism, various systems were posited as options for the new centralized government. Thus, this section explores the numerous perspectives of Japanese resistance against the former government and the dominant ideologies that persisted throughout the era.

FURTHER READING

Beasley, William G. 1972. The Meiji Restoration. ACLS Humanities EBook. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.00345.

Theodore, William, Carol Gluck, and Arthur E Tiedemann. 2005. “The Meiji Restoration.” In Sources of Japanese Tradition. Vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Nakano Shigeharu

Published April 1, 2022 by Franchesca Johnson

NAKANO Shigeharu  (1902-1979) was a Japanese author and activist that utilized his writings to advocate for Marxist philosophy. Following the teachings of Fukumoto Kazuo and other Japanese Communist Party leaders, he crafted poetic critiques that employed the traditional tanka format to spread radical ideas throughout the 1920s.

Specifically, much of Nakano’s work lies in Miriam Silverberg’s translated compilation, Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu. Within pieces like “Farewell Before Daybreak” and “Imperial Hotel,” Nakano utilizes poetry to comment on the daily suffering of Japanese workers and illustrate an aversion to the effects of Westernization that accompanied foreign influence on Japan. Therefore, while many activists worked to expose the hypocrisy of the Japanese government with Marxist beliefs, Nakano Shigeharu championed radical change through his literature. While his advocacy for the Marxist ideology already exhibits opposition against Western democracies in Japan, his poetry also displays how culture was a vital tool of resistance against the hostile regime during the Meiji Restoration.

FURTHER READING

Silverberg, Miriam Rom. (1999) 2019. Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu. Princeton Legacy Library.

Theodore, William, Carol Gluck, and Arthur E Tiedemann. 2005. “Socialism and the Left.” In Sources of Japanese Tradition. Vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Edward Said

Published April 1, 2022 by jeforte

Edward SAID (1935-2003) was an outspoken critic of the field of orientalism and was hugely influential in redefining how scholars approach the field. Born to Palestinian parents in Jerusalem, Said attended the Egyptian branch of Victoria College in Cairo and then North Field Mount Herman in Massachusetts. As an Arabic-speaking Palestinian in these heavily English-dominated schools, Said frequently felt like an outsider, caught between identities in a space that denied his very existence. These boyhood experiences proved highly formative for Said, and by the time he graduated from Princeton in 1957 Said had become an insightful literary critic.

His most famous work is Orientalism (1978), a deconstruction of the field of “oriental” scholarship, which had long been dominated and shaped by western interpreters. Said’s primary argument is that the very notion of the “Orient” presupposes certain assumptions about the superiority of the west and deprives people who actually live there (“Orientals”) from telling their own stories, by means of a process of othering, in which non-western peoples come to be understood as “other” and fundamentally different or lacking in some way (compared to Westerners), often culminating in the elevation of trivial (superficial and/or cosmetic) differences to the level of constituting different natures. In this manner, people who have been “othered” can cease to be considered human and lose any associated human rights and dignities. Because this Orientalists perform this othering subconsciously, Said takes it upon himself to demonstrate the various ways in which these presupposed power-relations have shaped the west’s creation of the “Orient,” in large part through contrast to the West (or “Occident”). Said’s goal in writing Orientalism was to change discourse within the field of orientalism and more broadly, so as to allow “Oriental” voices to be heard and enable those voices to take the lead in shaping how their history is taught and understood, through new, authentic perspectives. After all, shouldn’t a people be allowed to shape its own legacy?

FURTHER READING

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. London, UK: Penguin Books, 2019.

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Kaneko Fumiko and Anarchism in the Meiji Restoration

Published April 1, 2022 by Franchesca Johnson

KANEKO Fumiko (1903-1926) was a political activist who advocated for an anarchist approach to Japanese society in response to the Meiji Restoration. Born out of wedlock to an impoverished mother and unrecognized by her father, Kaneko encountered the hardships of society very early in life, which eventually led her towards nihilism. However, even though these disadvantages could solely rationalize her anarchist perspective, her emigration to Korea and experience witnessing the mistreatment of Korean servants altered her stance on government and Japanese society.

Within interrogation records translated in Reflections on the Way to the Gallows: Rebel Women in Prewar Japan, Kaneko describes her initial endorsement of socialist policies and eventual criticism of the system. With frequent criticism of the upper-class and the emperor system, Kaneko became known as a thinker who embraced the futility of life and denounced all people’s greed and hypocrisy. Therefore, even though Kaneko was eventually imprisoned for her controversial opinions and ultimately committed suicide at age 23, her political perspectives remain markers of the disillusionment with the parliamentary government of the Meiji Era. 

FURTHER READING

Hane, Mikiso. 1998. Reflections on the Way to the Gallows: Rebel Women in Prewar Japan. University of California Press.

Theodore, William, Carol Gluck, and Arthur E Tiedemann. 2005. “Socialism and the Left.” In Sources of Japanese Tradition. Vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press.

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