In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire by Eiichiro Azuma (review)

Abstract

Published by the Harvard-Yenching Institute HJAS 81 (2021): 335–341 The Steppe and the Sea and Sudden Appearances exemplify resurgent interest in the material culture and artistic production of the Mongols. Although these topics have gained ground in the past twenty years, much work remains to be done on them. Allsen’s work sets the methodological and philological bar for future inquiry; Prazniak’s may foster new research topics, as it did for Allsen. One can only hope that the current generation of graduate students in universities around the world, who at minimum read Arabic, Persian, and Chinese (and other languages of the Mongol empire), will sustain the philological expectations set by Allsen in exploring the type of ambitious questions pioneered by Prazniak so as to achieve the clearest and deepest understanding of the material culture and artistic production of the Mongol empire. The time may be right for those authors unable to do research in primary sources to step back and leave the work to those emerging scholars who can read multiple languages of the Mongol empire, thus aligning the standard of scholarship for the Mongol empire with those of cognate fields such as Chinese and Islamic studies.