Naoki Sakai - Böcker

This book critically analyzes the global hegemony of the United States – a hegemony whose innovative aspect consists in articulating postcoloniality to imperial control – in relation to knowledge and knowledge production.Through targeted case studies on the historical relationship between regional areas and the United States, the authors explore possibilities and obstacles to epistemic decolonization. By highlighting the connection between the control of work and the control of communication that has been at the core of the colonial regimes of accumulation (‘classic colonialism’), they present an entirely new form of disciplinary practice, not based on the equation of evolution and knowledge. An extensive introduction outlines the historical genealogy of Pax Americana epistemic hegemony, while individual chapters examine the implications for different regions of the world and different domains of activity, including visual culture, economy, migration, the arts, and translation.This interdisciplinary collection will appeal to students and scholars in many fields, including Asian studies, American studies, postcolonialism, and political theory.

This book critically analyzes the global hegemony of the United States – a hegemony whose innovative aspect consists in articulating postcoloniality to imperial control – in relation to knowledge and knowledge production.Through targeted case studies on the historical relationship between regional areas and the United States, the authors explore possibilities and obstacles to epistemic decolonization. By highlighting the connection between the control of work and the control of communication that has been at the core of the colonial regimes of accumulation (‘classic colonialism’), they present an entirely new form of disciplinary practice, not based on the equation of evolution and knowledge. An extensive introduction outlines the historical genealogy of Pax Americana epistemic hegemony, while individual chapters examine the implications for different regions of the world and different domains of activity, including visual culture, economy, migration, the arts, and translation.This interdisciplinary collection will appeal to students and scholars in many fields, including Asian studies, American studies, postcolonialism, and political theory.

This collection examines postcolonial studies through the lens of translation studies, focusing on Asian and East Asian experiences. It redefines translation as a process of negotiating Otherness with language at its core.Following Talal Asad and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s critique, Isomae emphasises a shift from subjectivity to subjectivation, arguing that subjects exist in reciprocal relationships with Others. It positions translation not as identity formation but as communication that occurs through engagement with Others in public spaces. The editors acknowledge that asymmetrical postcolonial situations create misunderstandings, suggesting that recognizing the impossibility of fully understanding Others may actually create opportunities for meaningful connection—introducing the concept of "commensurability of the incommensurable."Offering a fresh theoretical framework that bridges disciplinary boundaries, this volume will interest scholars and students in postcolonial studies, translation studies, and Asian studies.

In The End of Pax Americana, Naoki Sakai focuses on U.S. hegemony's long history in East Asia and the effects of its decline on contemporary conceptions of internationality. Engaging with themes of nationality in conjunction with internationality, the civilizational construction of differences between East and West, and empire and decolonization, Sakai focuses on the formation of a nationalism of hikikomori, or “reclusive withdrawal”-Japan’s increasingly inward-looking tendency since the late 1990s, named for the phenomenon of the nation’s young people sequestering themselves from public life. Sakai argues that the exhaustion of Pax Americana and the post--World War II international order-under which Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and China experienced rapid modernization through consumer capitalism and a media revolution-signals neither the “decline of the West” nor the rise of the East, but, rather a dislocation and decentering of European and North American political, economic, diplomatic, and intellectual influence. This decentering is symbolized by the sense of the loss of old colonial empires such as those of Japan, Britain, and the United States.

In The End of Pax Americana, Naoki Sakai focuses on U.S. hegemony's long history in East Asia and the effects of its decline on contemporary conceptions of internationality. Engaging with themes of nationality in conjunction with internationality, the civilizational construction of differences between East and West, and empire and decolonization, Sakai focuses on the formation of a nationalism of hikikomori, or “reclusive withdrawal”-Japan’s increasingly inward-looking tendency since the late 1990s, named for the phenomenon of the nation’s young people sequestering themselves from public life. Sakai argues that the exhaustion of Pax Americana and the post--World War II international order-under which Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and China experienced rapid modernization through consumer capitalism and a media revolution-signals neither the “decline of the West” nor the rise of the East, but, rather a dislocation and decentering of European and North American political, economic, diplomatic, and intellectual influence. This decentering is symbolized by the sense of the loss of old colonial empires such as those of Japan, Britain, and the United States.

How can a post-national Japanese Studies be defined? How might the postwar myth of a monoethnic Japan be historicized? Can new forms of nationalism be effectively criticized by evoking a spirit of nationalist democracy? This book contains a series of groundbreaking essays by major Japanese and American scholars seeking to locate "Japan" beyond the geographical and ideological boundaries established post-1945 and under the Cold War. Included are essays on such iconic cultural figures as Maruyama Masao and Takamura Kōtarō; on the impact of colonialism on prewar theories of race, language, and multi-culturalism; on gender and nationalism; on the critique of culturalist notions of the "native speaker" and "mother tongue," and on Asian nationalisms in the era of globalization.

How can a post-national Japanese Studies be defined? How might the postwar myth of a monoethnic Japan be historicized? Can new forms of nationalism be effectively criticized by evoking a spirit of nationalist democracy? This book contains a series of groundbreaking essays by major Japanese and American scholars seeking to locate "Japan" beyond the geographical and ideological boundaries established post-1945 and under the Cold War. Included are essays on such iconic cultural figures as Maruyama Masao and Takamura Kōtarō; on the impact of colonialism on prewar theories of race, language, and multi-culturalism; on gender and nationalism; on the critique of culturalist notions of the "native speaker" and "mother tongue," and on Asian nationalisms in the era of globalization.

Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference, the fourth book in the Traces series, focuses on the problems of translation and the political dynamics surrounding multiplicity - linguistic, regional, transnational, and civilizational - today. The international group of authors deal, both theoretically and empirically, with the historical obstacles and future opportunities offered by an emerging global order that is still struggling with the legacy of the previous four centuries of Eurocentric capitalist development. The authors amply illustrate that the concept of translation is far from being singularly determined, and how extremely difficult it is for philosophy to be distinct from translation. Here translation is regarded as a general concept, by which the Eurocentric framework implicit in the existent academic practices of comparison is problematized and according to which old questions are transformed into new ones and articulated to one another across disciplinary boundaries and regional or national borders.This book shows how the emerging global order might be viewed once we have been liberated from the Eurocentric perspective; it includes sociological inquiries into the system of international security networks and an analysis of the consequences of the transformation of the nation-state; it deals with the foundation of international law and its unalienable connection to modern colonial violence, and the foundational complicity between modern sovereignty and biopolitics. On an empirical note, the essays in this major volume deal with the various practices of translation in multiple locales, the belated constitution of anthropological language, philosophical discussion on translation, and the sexual aspects of translational politics. The relations between economics, ontology, and politics together form the crossroads at which the authors in this volume meet.As such, the volume will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience of readers in the Humanities concerned with the intersections among politics, economy, philosophy, postcoloniality, and translation studies, and would above all attract interest from the emerging readership in biopolitics (under the field of comparative literature).

Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference, the fourth book in the Traces series, focuses on the problems of translation and the political dynamics surrounding multiplicity - linguistic, regional, transnational, and civilizational - today. The international group of authors deal, both theoretically and empirically, with the historical obstacles and future opportunities offered by an emerging global order that is still struggling with the legacy of the previous four centuries of Eurocentric capitalist development. The authors amply illustrate that the concept of translation is far from being singularly determined, and how extremely difficult it is for philosophy to be distinct from translation. Here translation is regarded as a general concept, by which the Eurocentric framework implicit in the existent academic practices of comparison is problematized and according to which old questions are transformed into new ones and articulated to one another across disciplinary boundaries and regional or national borders.This book shows how the emerging global order might be viewed once we have been liberated from the Eurocentric perspective; it includes sociological inquiries into the system of international security networks and an analysis of the consequences of the transformation of the nation-state; it deals with the foundation of international law and its unalienable connection to modern colonial violence, and the foundational complicity between modern sovereignty and biopolitics. On an empirical note, the essays in this major volume deal with the various practices of translation in multiple locales, the belated constitution of anthropological language, philosophical discussion on translation, and the sexual aspects of translational politics. The relations between economics, ontology, and politics together form the crossroads at which the authors in this volume meet.As such, the volume will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience of readers in the Humanities concerned with the intersections among politics, economy, philosophy, postcoloniality, and translation studies, and would above all attract interest from the emerging readership in biopolitics (under the field of comparative literature).

This book aims to present the historical and political significance of literary and philosophical debates conducted in East Asia during the war years of the 1930s and 1940s. The volume includes seven essays, an introduction and a translation of the manifesto “Principles of Thought for a New Japan (1939),” based on which the vision of the East Asian Community was later put forth. Its perspective is decidedly transnational. In view of the current situation in East Asia, some essays in this volume will attempt a critical re-assessment of Area Studies, within the purview of which the majority of scholarship about the Japanese intellectual history of the interwar period, literary debates such as the symposium entitled Overcoming Modernity and the round-table discussion of “World History and the standpoint of Japan, as well as the Kyoto School of Philosophy have been conducted, both in English and Japanese, during the post World War II period. Furthermore, the book will situate the intellectual debates about the East Asian Community and the symposium ‘Overcoming Modernity’ in the global context of the 1930s.