Raja Adal

When modern primary schools were first founded in Japan and Egypt in the 1870s, they did not teach art. Yet by the middle of the twentieth century, art education was a permanent part of Japanese and Egyptian primary schooling. Both countries taught music and drawing, and wartime Japan also taught calligraphy. Why did art education become a core feature of schooling in societies as distant as Japan and Egypt, and how is aesthetics entangled with nationalism, colonialism, and empire?

Beauty in the Age of Empire is a global history of aesthetic education focused on how Western practices were adopted, transformed, and repurposed in Egypt and Japan. Raja Adal uncovers the emergence of aesthetic education in modern schools and its role in making a broad spectrum of ideologies from fascism to humanism attractive. With aesthetics, educators sought to enchant children with sounds and sights, using their ears and eyes to make ideologies into objects of desire. Spanning multiple languages and continents, and engaging with the histories of nationalism, art, education, and transnational exchanges, Beauty in the Age of Empire offers a strikingly original account of the rise of aesthetics in modern schools and the modern world. It shows that, while aesthetics is important to all societies, it was all the more important for those countries on the receiving end of Western expansion, which could not claim to be wealthier or more powerful than Western empires, only more beautiful.

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The main argument advanced by Masters is that the Arabs were not merely “subject people of the empire,” controlled by the sultan through force, but rather “collaborators in the imperial project” (p. 7). The empire survived in the Arab provinces because of “the legitimization that the Sunni Muslim elite was willing to extend to the Ottoman sultans,” (p. 47) both for self-interest and because of “the ideology of the Islamic sultanate that supported the Ottoman Empire” (p. 227) and avowed to protect Sunni Muslims. This collaboration also helps to explain why the early modern period was “relatively tranquil in most of the Arab provinces” (p. 46). Masters does not claim that this is a new argument. Indeed, in the 1970s and 1980s scholars began to systematically use previously untapped archival sources, such as the Islamic court records of Arab cities and other official Ottoman documents, and started to rewrite the history of the region and to attack the thendominant Arab nationalist narr...

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

Like most modern institutions in nineteenth-century non-Western states, modern school systems in 1870s Japan and Egypt were initially mimetic of the West. Modeled on the British South Kensington method and on its French equivalent, drawing education in Japanese and Egyptian schools was taught not as an art but as a functional technique that prepared children for modern professions like industrial design. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the South Kensington method of drawing education had lost its popularity in Europe, but more than a decade before its decline Japanese and Egyptian educators began teaching children genres of drawing that did not exist in European schools. In 1888 drawing education in Japan saw the replacement of the pencil with the brush, which was recast from the standard instrument of writing and painting of early modern East Asia to an instrument that came to represent Japanese art. In 1894 drawing education in Egypt saw the introduction of “Arabesque d...

This dissertation asks why art education was introduced in modern schools. Whether in the Western world, in Japan, or in Egypt, drawing education began as a functional skill. It aimed at preparing children for such tasks as map making, manufacturing design, or scientific imaging. This ...

Interwar Japan saw the rise of a generation of intellectuals, bureaucrats, and educators who were uneasy about modern life. One expression of this malaise was the introduction of calligraphy in the 1941 and 1943 school curricula. Calligraphy injected aesthetics into writing education. Yet it also compromised the speed and efficiency of writing, which lay at the core of Japan’s system of modern education. The solution was to teach writing twice, once as an art in the ‘art section ’ and once as a functional skill in the ‘language section’. As an art, writing was a means to cultivate the spirit, discipline the body, escape from the calculated logic of linear time and produce an aesthetic epiphany. As a functional tool, it was a skill for keeping pace with the demands of the modern world by communicating meaning quickly and efficiently. Bureaucrats and educators from 1941 were thus simultaneously engaged in the task of overcoming modernity on the one hand and of instilling proficiency i...

'ike Mine archive consists of seventy bound volumes of documents housed at the Mitsui Archives near Tokyo. This is probably the most complete business archive for the study of modern Japan available today. Its uniqueness lies in its size, some 30,000 pages, and its chronological span, half a century ranging from 1889 to 1940. Perhaps equally important for the researcher is the institutional home of the Mi'ike Mine archive. The Mitsui Archives has four full time researchers with doctoral degrees, publishes a journal about research that relates to its holdings, features a wealth of reference materials useful for the researcher, and since 2015 has permitted virtually unlimited photographic reproduction of its collections. This not only allows researchers to easily reproduce the documents in which they are interested, but also provides them with an opportunity to connect their work to that of others and to ask questions. For an overview of the kind of research that has made use of the documents in the Mitsui Archives, in 2017 the 50 th anniversary edition of its journal, Mitsui bunko rongi, features short pieces by more than one hundred researchers who have used its documents (my entry is also available at https://www.academia.edu/35788031/Adal_Taipuraita_ha_shintai_to_bunsho_wo_tsunageuruka). Goals of the indexing Project History and Current State of the Project The goal of this indexing project is to produce metadata of the entire Mitsui Mi'ike Mine Archive. The index consists of one line in an Excel spreadsheet for each document in the archives. Each line includes information which is not only useful for my research about the material history of writing, but could be useful to any number of researchers working on modern Japan. The information entered includes the date of each source, its type (letter, a telegram, a memo, a budget, a map, etc.), the number of pages, the color of the main text (which provides clues about the instrument of reproduction), the color of additional text (which provides clues about the instrument used for annotation and certification), the writing instrument used to produce the main text as well as any annotations and signatures, and the type of paper including any letterhead. In addition, letters include the location of the sender and receiver, the department of the sender and receiver in the company, and the position of the sender and receiver in the company. Many of the documents also include the names of the sender, receiver, or any other person who signed or stamped their name on it. The Mitsui Mi'ike Mine Archive metadata can be used in two ways. At the very least, it provides an extensive and detailed table of contents of this archive, one which is not available anywhere else and which, to my knowledge, is not publicly available for any other Japanese archive of this size. The metadata can also be analyzed. At the simplest level, this could mean, for example, sorting all letters according to the date, which would instantly result in a list of the more than ten-thousand letters in this archive. At a more complex level, this metadata opens the door to a digital analysis. The geographic data, the location of the sender and receiver of letters, makes GIS mapping possible.

In May 1851, the Great Exhibition opened in London. By the time it closed its doors five months later, British designers and educators were already taking stock of its accomplishments and failures. It had been a grandiose display of British industry and imperial possessions that was visited by nearly one-fifth of the British public and put on display Britain's global empire for an international audience to see. At the same time, it had confirmed what some British artists and designers already knew: the design of British manufactures did not appeal to a public that preferred French designs. The solution suggested by the exhibition's chief organizer, Henry Cole, was to reform the British system of drawing education. On the South Kensington corner of the exhibition grounds in Hyde Park, Cole founded a school of drawing. Its method of drawing education, known as the South Kensington method, taught linear drawings based on geometric designs as opposed to human figures or landscapes. The geometric drawings of the South Kensington School were such a success that they came to dominate drawing education curricula until the Acknowledgments: For comments on earlier versions of this article I would like to thank, the late Raouf Abbas, and the anonymous CSSH reviewers. This article is part of a book project that was researched in Egypt, Japan, France, and Great Britain. In Egypt I am grateful to the late Alain Roussillon for hosting me at the former Centre d'études et de documentation écon-omiques, juridiques et sociales (CEDEJ) and in Japan to Yoshimi Shunya for hosting me at the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies. These research trips were generously supported by a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, Foreign