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ABSOLUTE EROTIC, ABSOLUTE GROTESQUE: The Living, Dead and Undead in Japan's Imperialism, 1895-1945. By Mark Driscoll. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. xix, 361 pp. (B&W photos., illus.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-4761-3.
Absolute erotic, absolute grotesque is a thought-provoking narrative of Japanese imperialism. Mark Driscoll directs our attention to Japan's "darker side (ankokumen)" (xi), while research on modernization theories of Japanese history has mostly ignored this aspect. By conceptualizing three phases of Japanese capitalism, biopolitics (1895-1914), neuropolitics (1920-36) and necropolitics (1932-45), Driscoll relocates the critical role of subjectivities in the colonial periphery and the profits generated by such groups as the central engines that drove Japan's imperial expansion during the outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War and the end of World War II.
It is fascinating to understand how events in the outer circle of the Japanese empire and the inner circle metropoles mutually influenced each other; as part 1, "Biopolitics," discusses, Chinese coolies, Japanese pimps, trafficked sex workers and Korean tenant farmers in the colonial margins were exploited to produce cheap labour and surplus work, and this enabled imperial capital accumulation. By introducing us to the vibrant space of the inner circle, part 2, "Neuropolitics," demonstrates the process through which living labour came to be treated as dead labour, as all human sensations were commodified. Erotic-grotesque modernism-the dominant form of mass culture in Japan's metropoles after the economic takeoff following the First World War-stood as the central mode for consolidating imperialist discourse on sexology. Capitalism generated a technologized machinery that was politically grotesque and masculine,...