When the Future Remoulds the Past: Chronopolitics of the Japanese Empire and the Theoretical Limits of the Modern Time Regime

Abstract

Reinhart Koselleck’s account of modern temporality - a ‘space of experience’ and a ‘horizon of expectation’ distinguished from one another in an ever-shifting present - has become a dominant grammar for thinking about how modernity conceives past, present, and future. 

This lecture tests this grammar against the Japanese Empire’s political future imaginary. Tracing how the political centre invoked, qualified, and mobilised ‘future’ reveals multiple, shifting temporalities that escape Koselleck’s framework. This, however, is not an anomaly, not a deviation from a universal modern time regime. The chronopolitics of the Japanese Empire exposes limits internal to theory and, in turn, urges us to reconceive area studies from a site to apply theory to as a mode of partaking in theorisation.

Biography

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Dr Aya Hino is a postdoctoral researcher at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, and a member of two research projects: ‘East Asian Futures’ funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), and ‘Contesting Japan’s Future’ funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). She completed a cotutelle doctorate program at Heidelberg University, Germany, and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. 

Her research interests lie in the history of knowledge with a particular emphasis on its intersections with power and coloniality. Her current project, ‘The Empire’s Wilful Malaise: Ideology, Utopia, and Knowledge Production in Japan’, explores how the entanglement of chronopolitics and epistemology shaped the Japanese Empire’s ideological and utopian visions of its own future.