Turn to the planet: Literature, diversity, and totality

Comparative Literature, Fall 2001 by Miyoshi, Masao

I. Literary Studies in 1983

In 1983, I was in Seoul to present a paper. The occasion was a conference on East Asian literature, a topic not too different from the one assigned to me for another event last year in the same city. This seventeen-year interval may not seem to be a long time in a normal phase of history. Between 1715 and 1732, for example, or even between 1918 and 1935, the change was certainly not trifling, but still the sense of continuity was quite strong. The difference between 1983 and 2000, however, is so immense that we can barely grasp the magnitude of the changes and transformations that occurred between these years, and in fact the phrase "a normal phase of history" is itself beginning to lose meaning. It looks as if we are heading toward a future where the pace of change will accelerate to such an extent that the trace of history may be erased as time hurries along through our everyday life. In this essay, I'd like to recall the ideas that were crucial, or that I considered crucial at that 1983 conference, and then set those ideas against what seems crucial now and reflect on the intervening events. Such a comparison might also reveal what has survived unchanged and suggest what may remain intact in the future. I will discuss the changes and continuities both inside and outside what has been known as "literature"

By the beginning of the 1980s, the impact of Edward Said's Orientalism, published in 1978, had spread far beyond its immediate range of the Middle East and colonial history. His Nietzschean and Foucauldian message on the genealogy of the concepts of power and learning had become generalized in the discourse of modern history. As everyone knows, Orientalism radically challenged the orthodoxy in disciplines like history, anthropology, geography, and sociology, as well as literary criticism. Many branches of the humanities and social sciences had been formed during the colonial period with unexamined assumptions about the centrality of European and North American civilization, and intellectuals emerging in the just liberated former colonized world found in Said's criticism something both revolutionary and fundamental for mapping the history and geography of the future. The term "Orientalism" was added to the vocabulary of many languages as a name for the hegemonic ideology of domination. This was to be the beginning of a new paradigm for equality and the open mind. In the context of the dominant practice of the Eurocentric formulation of knowledge, however, the anti-Orientalist criticism was looked on as a disturbing challenge. To the academic establishment, it was a movement of rebellion and resistance-at least at the initial stage.

The East Asian field (where I have been more than an occasional sojourner) has long been organized from the colonial perspective, and thus Said's criticism was not accepted at once, especially by established scholars. Critical categories transferred from European literature to East Asian literature-without scrutiny as to their applicability-were still very much in use at the beginning of the 1980s. Genre, form, structure, periodicity (such as "modernity" and "modernization"), intentionality, affect, authorship, originality, audience, textuality, media, plot, character, tonality, the idea of "literature" itself, and many other fundamental literary and cultural notions-as well as the terms used in describing and analyzing European literature(s) and culture(s)-were more or less randomly chosen as approximations. Even at the 1983 conference in Seoul, there were sharp divisions and disagreements among the panelists on the merit of the newly proposed transvaluation.

As I reread my contribution, "Against the Native Grain: Reading the Japanese Novel in America," I am reminded of several events both personal and critical that took place around that time. I came to know Edward Said well; while he was finishing the final manuscript of Orientalism at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, I was in Berkeley writing my book As We Saw Them, published in 1979. 1 am not comparing my book to Said's here: mine is a modest analysis of a cultural encounter, narrativized and ironic, whereas Orientalism is theoretical and oppositional, that is, both philosophical and political. I was stunned by the force of his opposition, which fundamentally challenged the liberal tenet, from which I had not quite been able to extricate myself despite my deepening disillusionment with academic intellectualism and liberalism. Said's position was different from Foucault's in refusing to universalize power and neutralize justice. It made a deeper impact on me, furthermore, as I joined him in various programs concerning the Palestinian struggle for survival against Israel, including visits to the West Bank and Tunis at his invitation in the 1980s. To the extent that I agreed with him on the matter of power and resistance, I was fully prepared to follow Said in viewing Japanese literature vis-a-vis Eurocentricity. Of course, I think I had attempted a similar project of transvaluation with As We Saw Them-as the title implied with its ironic coevality of "we" and "them" - except that mine was not fired with the resistance and opposition in which Said was unavoidably and passionately engaged. The contribution I made at the 1983 Seoul conference was in a way my first explicit statement as an act of resistance, a resistance which has lasted to this day under changing circumstances.