Books

Pub Date2019
ISBN9780231549288
Pages296
Link to Publisher

Beauty in the Age of Empire: Japan, Egypt, and the Global History of Aesthetic Education

Raja Adal
Columbia University Press

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?