The twenty-four accessible and thought-provoking essays in this volume present innovative new scholarship on Japan’s modern history, including its imperial past and transregional entanglements. Drawing on the latest Japanese and English-language scholarship, it highlights Japan’s distinctiveness as an extraordinarily fast-changing place. Indeed, Japan provides a ringside seat to all the big trends of modern history. Japan was the first non-Western society to become a modern nation and empire, to industrialize, to wage modern war on a vast scale, and to deliver a high standard of living to virtually all its citizens. Because the Japanese so determinedly acted to reshape global hierarchies, their modern history was incredibly destabilizing for the world. This intense dynamism has powered a variety of debates and conflicts, both at home and with people and places beyond Japan’s shores. Put simply, Japan has packed a lot of history into less than two centuries.

The prevailing paradigm of modern art in Brazil still revolves around the Modern Art Week of 1922, in São Paulo, and the self-professed avant-gardes that derived from that event. What came immediately before it is usually relegated to a limbo status, as neither modern nor non-modern. The introduction casts doubt upon the widely accepted category pre-modernism, questioning its validity as a historical construct. Evidence demonstrates that alternate modernisms existed in the Brazilian context prior to 1922. Chief among these is a variant of modernism linked to the rising urban culture of music, dance, theatre, humour, graphics and cinema in Rio de Janeiro. The relative lack of scholarly interest in mass culture has led to a tendency to overstate the impact of erudite expressions in literature, fine art and architecture. Other arenas of cultural production have been systematically overlooked, including ones to which Afro-Brazilian artists made important contributions. This skewed perspective subtly elides how elite practitioners often appropriated subaltern identities to reinforce their own claims to modernity, vis-à-vis their European counterparts. The book proposes to examine the conflicts between primitivism and nationalism, modernism and archaism. Rethinking these tensions in the Brazilian context helps make sense of divergent models of modernism elsewhere.

Magical realism, primitivism and ethnography are historically and theoretically interrelated discourses. Mavellous folk and fairy tales, legends and myths are remote origins that received renewed attention with the rise of the avant-grade and American archaeology in the early twentieth century. In the Hispanic tradition, antecedents date back to medieval lore, which inspired chivalric and pastoral romances as well as the picaresque novel, finding a seminal synthesis in Don Quixote. In the New World, the Chronicles of the Indies, with their outlandish tales of discovery, drew not only from medieval and early Renaissance worldviews, but also from marvellous sources as varied as John Mandeville, Marco Polo, Ptolemy, Pliny and the Bible. Latin American authors have consistently cited these sources of magical realism, yet they looked at them through the prism of the avant-garde. Alejo Carpentier conceived of his seminal concept of lo real maravilloso americano as an answer to the Surrealists’ artificial merveilleux. Carpentier and Miguel Ángel Asturias, with his Surrealist view of the ancient Maya, coincided in late 1920s Paris with avant-garde primitivism and another magic realist, Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri, a close associate of Massimo Bontempelli, whose version of magical realism became their true spark, whereas Franz Roh’s influence in Latin America was negligible. Later authors like Juan Rulfo and Gabriel García Márquez significantly developed magical realist narratology, consolidating the Latin American trend and making it indispensable for understanding its international expansion based on the allegorical reinterpretation, and subversion, of dominant history – a crucial postcolonial endeavour for cultures around the world.