DEBATES OVER COLONIAL MODERNITY IN EAST ASIA AND ANOTHER ALTERNATIVE

The introduction of the term 'colonial modernity' in historiography of the early 1990s provided an alternative to 'modernization theory' and an international focus to writing about Japanese and other imperialisms on the China mainland. This neologistic phrase also raised many other questions: the historicity of the national focus versus 'regionalism' in Asian Studies; the role imperialist social science in US Asian studies; the project of globalizing historiography and what units of comparison - value, nation, subalterneity, etc. - were viable in global studies; and the importance of ephemera and immanent critique in colonial modernist studies. Here the essay takes earlier debates about colonial modernity and modernization theory as a given foundation. The further step is to take seriously questions of selling, buying, investing, marketing and advertising under colonial modern conditions during the mobilization of international capital into aggressive corporate form. This historical focus is a means of opening to scrutiny ephemera and its likely role among people who were reinventing their given historical conditions, creating a material and intellectually viable colonial modernity. Thus, the essay begins with a discussion of the 'other scene of use value.' A particularly artful mise en abyme of a modern girl advertising shows the efficacy of this 'other scene' as a speculative, psychoanalytically coherent, fantasy form of intellection that may have prefigured and predisposed future, compulsory, class-striated modes of consumption and regimes of modern pleasure. The avenue that 'other scenes of use value' open to historiography may enhance the way the term colonial modernity is used and defined. The essay's general argument thus seeks to illustrate some of the stalemates facing the colonial modernity debate and to propose another possible line for historiographic work.