Women of Japan and Korea: Continuity and Change,by Joyce Gelb and Marian Lief Palley,eds.

Abstract

Japan and Korea as neighboring countries share some basic similarities in their cultural heritage. Their languages, which belong to the Altaic family, exhibit a striking resemblance in grammatical structure. Yet their writing systems, the kana syllabaries and the han'gul alphabets, are distinct. Both societies have been influenced by Confucianism and Buddhism, but the place of Buddhism in contemporary Japan and Korea is quite different, and the Confucian legacy is believed to be much stronger in Korea than in Japan. The traditional family systems of Japan and Korea were both patrilineally organized, but the details of the descent rules differ markedly. In short, Japan and Korea share the general traits of East Asian civilization, but diverge in the details of their cultural traditions.     

African Postmodernism: Its Moment,Nature and Content

The fulcrum of this article is its exposure of postcolonial African modernity as being both historically and philosophically, an anachronistic colonial modernity, or simply Afrocoloniality. I explicate this anachronism by pointing out that while the cultural and intellectual edifice of Afrocoloniality was built on a colonial European Modernism, whose epistemic infrastructure continues to be reconstructed by the Western postmodernist movement, the structure of this Afrocoloniality remains impervious to this reconstruction. A Status quaestionis arises from the fact that, historically, in its nascent form, this African modernity that we claim is an Afrocoloniality was facilitated by an anticolonial consciousness that embraced and generated a series of political categories and a political praxis, which, in turn, had to be trapped in the paradigms of European modernism, while this very European modernism was in a state of philosophic crisis. A recognition of this incongruity, I argue, constitutes a uniquely African postmodernist conceptual prism that can serve to appraise these politico-philosophical categories that have informed the conduct of the anti-colonial struggle and the resultant postcolonial milieu. This article therefore, makes a case for this Afro-postmodernism.     

Continuity and Change before and after the Uprisings in Tunisia,Egypt and Morocco: Regime Reconfiguration and Policymaking in North Africa

While the scholarship on the Arab uprisings is increasingly complex and intellectually refined, this special issue considers an aspect that so far has failed to attract sustained scholarly attention, namely continuity and change. This introduction provides the framework underpinning the special issue as a whole and discusses all the articles composing it, while elaborating on the scientific contribution that the examination of continuity and change before and after the uprisings can make to our understanding of politics in the region.