Playing War (eBook)

Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan

Sabine Frühstück (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017
288 Seiten
University of California Press (Verlag)
978-0-520-96823-3 (ISBN)

Infos

In Playing War, Sabine Fruhstuck makes a bold proposition: that for over a century throughout Japan and beyond, children and concepts of childhood have been appropriated as tools for decidedly unchildlike purposes: to validate, moralize, humanize, and naturalize war, and to sentimentalize peace. She argues that modern conceptions of war insist on and exploit a specific and static notion of the child: that the child, though the embodiment of vulnerability and innocence, nonetheless possesses an inherent will to war, and that this seemingly contradictory creature demonstrates what it means to be human. In examining the intersection of children/childhood with war/military, Fruhstuck identifies the insidious factors perpetuating this alliance, thus rethinking the very foundations of modern militarism. She interrogates how essentialist notions of both childhood and war have been productively intertwined; how assumptions about childhood and war have converged; and how children and childhood have worked as symbolic constructions and powerful rhetorical tools, particularly in the decades between the nation- and empire-building efforts of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries up to the uneven manifestations of globalization at the beginning of the twenty-first.

Inhalt

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Vulnerability Hypothesis

PART I. PLAYING WAR
Chapter 1 • Field Games
Chapter 2 • Paper Battles

PART II. PICTURING WAR
Chapter 3 • The Moral Authority of Innocence
Chapter 4 • Queering War
Epilogue: The Rule of Babies in Pink

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 18.7.2017
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Natur / Technik ► Fahrzeuge / Flugzeuge / Schiffe ► Militärfahrzeuge / -flugzeuge / -schiffe
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• Schlagworte: Childhood • Child labor • child military • children • exploiting children • Globalization • history of children • history of children and war • Innocence • Japan • Late 19th century • modern conceptions of war • modern militarism • naturalizing war • Peace • rhetorical tools • symbolic constructions • vulnerability • what it means to be human
• ISBN-10: 0-520-96823-9 / 0520968239
• ISBN-13: 978-0-520-96823-3 / 9780520968233