History's Disquiet Book

Despite an insistence on extremely dense theory, which anyone familiar with Harootunian's work should be used to by now, the author weaves a very intricate web that covers issues with so-called 'Area Studies,' historiography, and the practice of everyday life in modernity.

Harootunian's first chapter, "Tracking the Dinosaur," was easily the most understandable for me. In it, he covers territory that should be familiar with anyone who's studied post-Saïd scholarship, in that scholarship has artificially created an Other. The author expands on this, explaining that the entire field of 'Area Studies' developed through Cold War politics, government funding that is obvious when we consider the booming role that Chinese Studies are playing today. Scholars are expected to become "experts" in an imagined region, most often a nation-state, attempting to inherit the linguistic and cultural intransitive hermeneutics that anyone from said region would already possess. Do you see the issue here? "Western" scholars are expected to become experts in a region simply by understanding it as well as its inhabitants, promoting existing power structures based on the pre-existing East-West false dichotomy. This is exacerbated by the fact that 'Area Studies' tends to emphasize a multidisciplinary, rather than interdisciplinary, salad of knowledge. Scholars take courses in film, literature, history, etc. and are supposed experts based on this random smattering of knowledge. This type of attitude discourages intellectual growth and philosophical inquiry. Yet, we continue to "feed the Dinosaur."

His second chapter is where things become a little too dense for me. To put it simply, Harootunian observes a variety of theories on the "Everyday." Perhaps it is because, ironically, despite obtaining my Bachelor's in an interdisciplinary program, I too have been tricked by the dominant field of 'Area Studies' and have not been given significant opportunities to study and understand theory, relying too much on a broad but shallow field of knowledge. By observing scholars as diverse as Laclau, Lefebvre, Heidegger, Tosaka, and Marx, Harootunian analyzes the role of production and commodity in the everyday life of the Modern. I will have to revisit this chapter later to attempt to fully understand it, but from my (very basic) understanding, it seems as if modern capitalism has created a "doubling," highlighting the repetition of the everyday (the spectacle of modernity), while simultaneously destroying how time had been perceived before.

The third chapter, "Dialectical Optics," returns to Japan. This should be familiar to anyone who's attempted to read his monolithic "Overcome by Modernity," as he analyzes Japanese "modernists" such as Tosaka Jun and Kon Wajirō. In Interwar Japan, we see many parallels with "Western" observations of modernity. In this sense he is able to effectively connect the first two chapters. The "East" and the "West" are not a binary; rather, through Modernity, they have very similar experiences of trying to make sense of the "Everyday." Thus, the intellectually bankrupt practices of "Area Studies" and its subsequent Otherization are revealed. In this chapter, Harootunian proposes a new type of historiography that focuses on the emotions and lived experiences of the "Everyday." Rather than targeting some abstract, unknown past, historians should try to look for the present within the past, in order to make sense of lived experiences.

While this book posed many intellectual challenges, wherein three seemingly unrelated chapters appear, towards the final pages things suddenly began to click and make sense. The grand web that Harootunian has woven begins to reveal itself. It is never too explicit and requires a lot of effort to make sense of this web, meaning it will require multiple readings to fully reveal the larger structure. However, from only a first reading, the glimpses that I have observed have been extremely revelatory. This is the kind of theory that can challenge existing academic institutions and reconceptualize our modes of understanding culture and modernity.