Deconstructing Nationality (Cornell East Asia)

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 Kôtarô; 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.

The product of an international collaborative research project launched at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and Cornell University in the early 1990s, this book is a companion volume to Total War and 'Modernization,' edited by Yasushi Yamanouchi, J. Victor Koschmann and Ryûichi Narita (Cornell East Asia Series No. 100).