Week 10 Reading Response

Hypervisibility and hypererasure have historically functioned as regulative mechanisms of identification and oppression in different countries around the world. In Chapter 3 of Translation and Subjectivity: On "Japan" and Cultural Nationalism, Naoki Sakai illustrates how the visibility and simultaneous invisibility of the body of the emperor contributed to “the formation of postwar Japanese cultural nationalism.” The everywhere and nowhere of the emperor's body and the overwhelming abundance of descriptions of his body constructed particular and universalist frame for identification. Is it then possible to read Sakai’s discussion of the premodern and the modern (154) is situated in relation to the universal and the particular (157), where the modern operates as a kind of hegemonic yardstick of what universal notions of teleological progress would look?