Brett de Bary

Naoki Sakai

Toshio Iyotani

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.

Deconstructing Nationality

The fate of the university has become an object of urgent concern for academics in many disciplines around the globe, as higher education has been commercialized by the global movement to “reform” toward new managerial structures common in business and industry. In English-language academic publishing, the future of the university has attracted the attention of critical theorists, but most works discussing the effects of profit-oriented corporatization on curriculum and pedagogy have focused on North America. Drawing on examples of university restructuring in China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Korea, Mexico, Singapore, Taiwan, Russia, and the United States, these trenchantpersonal essays take global transformation of the university in the age of informatic capital as an urgent question. Prominent scholars in humanities, cultural studies, translation, critical theory and postcolonial studies discuss theemergence of cognitive capitalism, neo-colonialism and the hegemony of academic English, academic freedom, and the rise of new, exploitative regimes of self-management that have implicated the university in a profound reorganization of labor dissolving distinctions between the “mental” and “manual.”

Brett de Bary

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