Joshua Blakeney interviewed Professor Cemil Aydin

Joshua Blakeney interviewed Professor Cemil Aydin, member of the History department at the University of North Carolina and author of the thought-provoking text The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia. They covered a wide range of topics during the show, including: The differences and similarities between the Ottoman Empire's Pan-Islamism and Imperial Japan's Pan-Asianism Orientalism, reverse-Orientalism and overcoming essentialized geographies The contradiction between the West's promotion of a universal modernity and the ethnic exceptionalism inherent to European imperialism Japanese modernization as a threat to Western hegemony and Communist expansionism in Asia Paul Richard and Occidental defences of Japanese civilizational discourses The orientalization of seemingly inorganic ideologies in Asia Perceived biases in the historiography of WWII Shūmei Ōkawa and the evolution of Pan-Asianist ideology Justice Radhabinod Pal's dissentient verdict at the Tokyo Trials and its implications for the victors' history of WWII The pros and cons of developing counterfactual historical narratives The benefits of the multipolar world for peripheral nations