Week 8 Reading Response

In “Tracking the Dinosaur” Harootunian discusses the vanished object of Asia and the role that Asian area studies has played in that disappearance. He castigates scholars in Asian Studies for their refusal to include interdisciplinary theories and methodologies that implicate culture and systems of power, in their allegiance to nation-states and reliance on statistical data as the substantive requirement of field study in Asian countries. He says that Asian Studies professional journals and associations are complicit with Asian area studies departments in a perpetual state of fundraising while not making intellectual changes in the field in order to allow it to be able to put issues in Japan studies in conversation with other area studies, cultural studies, and post-colonial studies.

I agree with him that “any critique must now be positioned not inside or outside the ‘West,’ since the ‘West’ can no longer be thought of as a dominant geographical concept structuring the non-West” (41). I also agree with him that it is important to instead view conflicts between nation-states from within the framework of a “dialectical encounter.” However, I still think there are important power relationships that are denied if the role that the “West” and specifically European states and the United States have played in colonization of mass amounts of people of color around the world. In his effort to not do what post-colonial studies does in relation to the binary of the colonizer and the colonized and leveling out differences in order to present a united monolithic experience of abjection and oppression, he does not leave a place for broad structures of racism and processes of racialization through colonialism that share commonalities in their differences around the world. It makes it difficult to account for the hundreds of years of white European and U.S. specific brutality and ideological trauma and categories that largely organize local and global social and political life today. How do we manage to not get stuck in monolithic particulars and instead have an ethical reading of histories and present oppressive frameworks? Connected to this is Tugg's concern, which I also share, with the gap between the everyday local knowledge and broad theoretical conversations-- I hope we might be able to talk about this too.

At the same time, I understand and think that he is making an important move in trying to bring critique to bare on Japan Studies as well as critiquing the Japanese nation-state as a colonialist state (which is sometimes left out of post-colonial narratives of white colonialists). This critique also surfaces in the Fujitani piece for today too, in his tracing of the ethnocentrism and racism of Edwin O. Reischauer through his memo to military officials in 1942. He also reads the racism at the heart of Japanese studies in its penchant for utility and functional characterizations of Japan and Japanese culture. He argues that Japanese studies provided the data that constituted Japan as a model capitalist nation even as Japanese Americans were constituted as the model-minority in an effort to counter movements in the 1960s and 70s for racial justice. Fujitani attributes the failure of Japanese studies to acknowledge the diasporic experiences of Asian immigrants in the U.S. because it would implicate the Japanese nation-state’s role in wars in the Asian Pacific region as well as the U.S.’s military presence and dominance in Japan and in other Asian countries. In an effort to filter how Japan is viewed as a nation-state, the prominent voices in Japanese studies do not critically account for social and political issues that implicate the Japanese nation-state as a global superpower as well as the U.S. government.