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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Cultural studies
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Off Center - Power and Culture Relations Between Japan and the United States (Hardcover, New)
Loot Price: R1,319
Discovery Miles 13 190
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Off Center - Power and Culture Relations Between Japan and the United States (Hardcover, New)
Series: Convergences
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What is the connection between the United States' imbalance of
trade with Japan and the imbalance of translation in the other
direction? Between Western literary critics' estimates of Japanese
fiction and Japanese politicians' "American bashing"? Between the
portrayal of East-West relations in the film Merry Christmas, Mr.
Lawrence and the terms of the GATT trade agreements? In this
provocative study, Masao Miyoshi deliberately adopts an off-center
perspective--one that restores the historical asymmetry of
encounters between Japan and the United States, from Commodore
Perry to Douglas MacArthur--to investigate the blindness that has
characterized relations between the two cultures. Both nations are
blinkered by complementary forms of ethnocentricity. The United
States--or, more broadly, the Eurocentric West--believes its
culture to be universal, while Japan believes its culture to be
essentially unique. Thus American critics read and judge Japanese
literature by the standards of the Western novel; Japanese
politicians pay lip service to "free trade" while supporting
protectionist policies at home and abroad. Miyoshi takes off from
literature to range across culture, politics, and economics in his
analysis of the Japanese and their reflections in the West: the
fiction of Tanizaki, Mishima, Oe; trade negotiations; Japan bashing
and America bashing; Emperor worship; Japanese feminist writing;
the domination of transcribed conversation as a literary form in
contemporary Japan. In his confrontation with cultural critics,
Miyoshi does not spare "centrists" of either persuasion, nor those
who refuse to recognize that "the literary and the economical, the
cultural and the industrial, areinseparable". Yet contentious as
this book can be, it ultimately holds out, by its example, hope for
a criticism that can see beyond the boundaries of national
cultures--without substituting a historically false "universal"
culture--and that examines cultural convergences from a viewpoint
that remains provocatively and fruitfully off center.
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