History's Disquiet : Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the Question of Everyday Life

Our understanding of the culture and geopolitics of the world around us has been characterized by a partitioning between an "inside" and an "outside" that has succeeded in producing categories that act as boundaries.

Yet even as the postmodern academic community professes awareness of the capricious nature of such barriers, scholars regularly operate within the strictures implied.

Contemporary history has shown that as these barriers become ever less logical, the meaning of modernity is thrown sharply into question.In this book, historian Harry Harootunian calls attention to the boundaries that compartmentalize the world around us.

Exploring European and Japanese conceptions of modernity - as imagined in the writings of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, as well as ethnologist Yanagita Kunio and Marxist philosopher Tosaka Jun - Harootunian seeks to expose the problematic nature of scholarly categories.

In demystifying these rigid categories, he demonstrates how they can be escaped.