Masao Miyoshi

The Cultures of Globalization

A pervasive force that evades easy analysis, globalization has come to represent the export and import of culture, the speed and intensity of which has increased to unprecedented levels in recent years. The Cultures of Globalization presents an international panel of intellectuals who consider the process of globalization as it concerns the transformation of the economic into the cultural and vice versa; the rise of consumer culture around the world; the production and cancellation of forms of subjectivity; and the challenges it presents to national identity, local culture, and traditional forms of everyday life.nnDiscussing overlapping themes of transnational consequence, the contributors to this volume describe how the global character of technology, communication networks, consumer culture, intellectual discourse, the arts, and mass entertainment have all been affected by recent worldwide trends. Appropriate to such diversity of material, the authors approach their topics from a variety of theoretical perspectives, including those of linguistics, sociology, economics, anthropology, and the law. Essays examine such topics as free trade, capitalism, the North and South, Eurocentrism, language migration, art and cinema, social fragmentation, sovereignty and nationhood, higher education, environmental justice, wealth and poverty, transnational corporations, and global culture. Bridging the spheres of economic, political, and cultural inquiry, The Cultures of Globalization offers crucial insights into many of the most significant changes occurring in today’s world.nnContributors . Noam Chomsky, Ioan Davies, Manthia Diawara, Enrique Dussel, David Harvey, Sherif Hetata, Fredric Jameson, Geeta Kapur, Liu Kang, Joan Martinez-Alier, Masao Miyoshi, Walter D. Mignolo, Alberto Moreiras, Paik Nak-chung, Leslie Sklair, Subramani, Barbara Trent

A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State

Discourse and practice are interdependent. Practice follows discourse, while discourse is generated by practice. As for the discourse on colonialism, there is a long lineage of engagements with the history of colonialism. One recalls papers by practitioners such as John Locke, Edmund Burke, James Mill, and Thomas Macaulay early on, and critiques of the practice by Hobson, Lenin, Luxemburg, and Schumpeter among many others since the height of imperialism. Numerous metropolitan fiction writers are obsessed by the presence of remote colonies from Melville and Flaubert to Conrad and Gide. Actually, hardly any Western writer from Jane Austen to Thomas Mann, from Balzac to D. H. Lawrence could manage to escape from the spell of modern expansionism. The modern West depends on its colonies for self-definition, as Edward Saids newest book, Culture and Imperialism, argues. In the area of literary theory and criticism, however, the discourse on colonialism has a surprisingly brief history. One needs to remember that writers of the Negritude Movement and other Third World writers such

Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies

Under globalization, the project of area studies and its relationship to the fields of cultural, ethnic, and gender studies has grown more complex and more in need of the rigorous reexamination that this volume and its distinguished contributors undertake. In the aftermath of World War II, area studies were created in large part to supply information on potential enemies of the United States. The essays in Learning Places argue, however, that the post–Cold War era has seen these programs largely degenerate into little more than public relations firms for the areas they research.nnA tremendous amount of money flows—particularly within the sphere of East Asian studies, the contributors claim—from foreign agencies and governments to U.S. universities to underwrite courses on their histories and societies. In the process, this volume argues, such funds have gone beyond support to the wholesale subsidization of students in graduate programs, threatening the very integrity of research agendas. Native authority has been elevated to a position of primacy; Asian-born academics are presumed to be definitive commentators in Asian studies, for example. Area studies, the contributors believe, has outlived the original reason for its construction. The essays in this volume examine particular topics such as the development of cultural studies and hyphenated studies (such as African-American, Asian-American, Mexican-American) in the context of the failure of area studies, the corporatization of the contemporary university, the prehistory of postcolonial discourse, and the problematic impact of unformulated political goals on international activism.nnLearning Places points to the necessity, the difficulty, and the possibility in higher education of breaking free from an entrenched Cold War narrative and making the study of a specific area part of the agenda of education generally. The book will appeal to all whose research has a local component, as well as to those interested in the future course of higher education generally.nnContributors. Paul A. Bove, Rey Chow, Bruce Cummings, James A. Fujii, Harry Harootunian, Masao Miyoshi, Tetsuo Najita, Richard H. Okada, Benita Parry, Moss Roberts, Bernard S. Silberman, Stefan Tanaka, Rob Wilson, Sylvia Yanagisako, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto

Postmodernism and Japan

CONTENTS: Introduction, Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian Note on Japanese Names On Culture and Technology in Postmodern Japan, Tetsuo Najita Critical Texts, Mass Artifacts: The Consumption of Knowledge in Postmodern Japan, Marilyn Ivy Of City, Nation, and Style, Isozaki Arata Visible Discourses/Invisible Ideologies, H. D. Harootunian Modernity and Its Critiques: The Problem of Universalism and Particularism, Naoki Sakai Maruyama Masao and the Incomplete Project of Modernity, J. Victor Koschmann Against the Native Grain: The Japanese Novel and the Postmodern West, Masao Miyoshi Somehow: The Postmodern as Atmosphere, Norma Field Japans Dual Identity: A Writers Dilemma, Oe Kenzabura Suicide and the Japanese Postmodern: A Postnarrative Paradigm?, Alan Wolfe Karatani Kojins Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, Brett de Bary One Spirit, Two Nineteenth Centuries, Karatani Kojin Infantile Capitalism and Japans Postmodernism: A Fairy Tale, Asada Akira Picturing Japan: Reflections on the Workshop, Stephen Melville

Sites of Resistance in the Global Economy

to Indonesia as wages rose. In Indonesia, they pay young girls

The Culture of Japanese Fascism

1.35 for sewing shoes all day. Overtime is often mandatory. There are no union protections. A pair of Nike shoes sells in the United States for between

Turn to the Planet: Literature, Diversity, and Totality

45 and

XL in Asia: A Dialogue between Rem Koolhaas and Masao Miyoshi

80 but costs only

The Possibility of Imagination in These Islands

5.60 to produce. Michael Jordans reported

Ivory Tower in Escrow

20 million fee for promoting the brand was more than Nikes entire payroll of these young workers in its six factories in 1992.1 Rumor is now spread-