Beauty in the Age of Empire
Beauty in the Age of Empire
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帝国时代的美丽
DOI：
10.7312/adal19120
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发表时间：
2019
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Raja Adal
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Raja Adal
拉贾·阿达尔写道，就其本身而言，将画笔引入埃及的日本和阿拉伯设计的儿童艺术教育，体现了“一种关于本土的美学论述”；然而，在全球比较的背景下，它“指出(S)不仅仅是民族审美表现形式的崛起”(第140-41页)。从全球的角度来看，用美学术语表述并被塑造成独特的日本人或明显的埃及人的特定事物，显然是模仿的。这些跨国和全球性的动态激发了阿达尔令人印象深刻的研究、清晰的论证和优雅的写作，他研究了从19世纪70年代到第二次世界大战结束的日本和埃及的美育历史。跨越国界的知识形式的兴起是近年来日本研究中最重要的发展，是反对地缘政治驱动的“地区研究”方法的强大范式转变的一部分，在这种方法中，民族国家是唯一的验证范畴，现代化理论的目的论是唯一的框架。目前的历史、文学和视觉研究往往把日本放在东亚的背景下。阿达尔的作品超越了东亚的框架，专注于日本和埃及的审美教育，这两个完全不同的社会处于西方扩张的接收端。书中描述的同时代变革不是追溯到日本和埃及之间的直接接触，而是来自大都市(英国、法国和美国)的文本、对象和实践的流动。共同的条件也会产生共同的思想反应，通过美育而变得有吸引力。美不在帝国主义的达尔文主义世界秩序之外；正如阿达尔所说，“如果西方的技术强大，本土的自我就是美丽的”(第4页)。阿达尔的研究也是对迪佩什·查克拉巴蒂所呼吁的“主体性具体化实践的历史”的回应。1美学回到了伊曼纽尔·康德的前任亚历山大·戈特利布·鲍姆加滕所阐述的知觉的感觉体验的原始希腊含义。阿达尔的美学史是作为课程科目的音乐、写作和艺术史，提供了一种感官的文化训练，并使一大批令人着迷的意识形态。他的档案包括课程、教材和各种演员(教育工作者、官僚、艺术家)的演讲，资料来源有日语、阿拉伯语、英语和法语。这项研究的两个部分都由引人入胜的插曲构成：第一部分是钢琴(一种经过机械制造完善的皇家和现代乐器)，第二部分是国歌(实际上是深深模仿的民族独特性的签名)。第一部分涉及音乐和写作。日本和埃及的教育工作者都意识到了音乐的物质效果及其迷人的力量：他们一直在与儿童音景中的外国、商业和粗俗的旋律作斗争。另一方面，写作随着被采纳的西部而被工具化
On its own, the introduction of the brush into children’s art education in Japanese and Arabic designs in Egypt exemplifies “an aesthetic discourse of indigeneity,” writes Raja Adal; in a global comparative context, however, it “point[s] to more than the rise of national forms of aesthetic expression” (pp. 140–41). From a global perspective, the particular, articulated in aesthetic terms and cast as uniquely Japanese or distinctly Egyptian, emerges as decidedly mimetic. These transnational and global dynamics animate Adal’s impressively researched, lucidly argued, and elegantly written study of the histories of aesthetic education in Japan and Egypt from the 1870s to the end of World War II. The rise of border-crossing forms of knowledge is the most significant development in Japan studies in recent years, part of a powerful paradigm shift against the geopolitically driven approaches of “area studies,” for which the nation-state was the sole validating category and the teleologies of modernization theory the only framework. Current work in history, literature, and visual studies often places Japan within an East Asian context. Adal’s work exceeds this East Asian frame with its focus on aesthetic education in Japan and Egypt, two very different societies at the receiving end of Western expansion. The coeval transformations described in the book are traced not to direct contacts between Japan and Egypt but to the flow of texts, objects, and practices from the metropoles (Britain, France, and the United States). Common conditions also gave rise to common ideological reflexes, made attractive through aesthetic education. Beauty was outside the largely social Darwinist world order of imperialism; as Adal puts it, “If Western techniques were powerful, the indigenous self was beautiful” (p. 4). Adal’s investigation is also a response to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call for “histories of the embodied practices of subjectivity.”1 Aesthetics is returned to its original Greek meaning of the sensory experience of perception, as elaborated by Immanuel Kant’s predecessor Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. Adal’s history of aesthetic education is the history of music, writing, and art as curricular subjects that provided a cultural training of the senses and made enchanting a large spectrum of ideologies. His archive includes curricula, teaching materials, and the discourses of various actors (educators, bureaucrats, artists), with sources in Japanese, Arabic, English, and French. The two parts of the study are each framed by fascinating interludes: the first on the piano (an imperial and modern instrument par excellence, perfected by mechanical manufacturing), the second on national anthems (signatures of national uniqueness that are actually deeply mimetic). Part one deals with music and writing. Educators in both Japan and Egypt were aware of the corporeal effects of music and its powers of enchantment: they were in constant battle with the foreign, commercial, and vulgar melodies in the children’s soundscape. Writing, on the other hand, was instrumentalized along adopted Western