Deconstructing Nationality

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 Kōtarō; 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.

Maxim Silverman analyzes the connection between racism and the development of the nation-state in modern France. He raises important questions about the nature of French society and contributes to the European debate on citizenship.

The notion of "heritage" has become one of the global tropes in recent years. At the heart of heritage politics are three questions: what heritage is, who decides what it is, and for whom is the decision made. However, existing work on heritage language has rarely tackled these questions, assuming that teaching children of migrants their "heritage language" empowers them. This book challenges this assumption, situating the notion of heritage language in the host society’s involvement in social justice, nation-building efforts, (superficial) celebration of diversity, and investment on global links the migrants offer as well as the migrants’ fear of discrimination and desire for belonging, social status, and economic gain. Based on ethnographic research in Bolivia, Peru, the United States, and Japan, the book illuminates the complexity and political nature of determining what constitutes heritage language for migrants with connections to Japan. This volume opens up a new field of investigation in heritage language studies: the complex linkage between heritage language and social justice for migrants. This book was published as a special issue of Critical Asian Studies.

Written by Ernst Hirsch Ballin, this original Advanced Introduction uncovers the foundations of legal research methods, an area of legal scholarship distinctly lacking in standardisation. The author shows how such methods differ along critical, empirical, and fundamental lines, and how our understanding of these is crucial to overcoming crises and restoring trust in the law. Key topics include a consideration of law as a normative language and an examination of the common objects of legal research.

In what ways can or should art engage with its social context? Authors, readers, and critics have been preoccupied with this question since the dawn of modern literature in Korea. Advocates of social engagement have typically focused on realist texts, seeing such works as best suited to represent injustices and inequalities by describing them as if they were before our very eyes. Christopher P. Hanscom questions this understanding of political art by examining four figures central to recent Korean fiction, film, and public discourse: the migrant laborer, the witness to or survivor of state violence, the refugee, and the socially excluded urban precariat. Instead of making these marginalized figures intelligible to common sense, this book reveals the capacity of art to address the “impossible speech” of those who are not asked, expected, or allowed to put forward their thoughts, yet who in so doing expand the limits of the possible. Impossible Speech proposes a new approach to literature and film that foregrounds ostensibly “nonpolitical” or nonsensical moments, challenging assumptions about the relationship between politics and art that locate the “politics” of the work in the representation of content understood in advance as being political. Recasting the political as a struggle over the possibility or impossibility of speech itself, this book finds the politics of a work of art in its power to confront the boundaries of what is sayable.

During the first half of the 20th century, Japan was the dominant military & political force in East Asia. This study explores the transculturations of Japanese literature amongst the Chinese, Koreans, Taiwanese & Manchurians whose lives had come within the sphere of the Japanese Empire.

From anxiety about Muslim immigrants in Western Europe to concerns about undocumented workers and cross-border security threats in the United States, disputes over immigration have proliferated and intensified in recent years. These debates are among the most contentious facing constitutional democracies, and they show little sign of fading away. Edited and with an introduction by political scientist Rogers M. Smith, Citizenship, Borders, and Human Needs brings together essays by leading international scholars from a wide range of disciplines to explore the economic, cultural, political, and normative aspects of comparative immigration policies. In the first section, contributors go beyond familiar explanations of immigration's economic effects to explore whose needs are truly helped and harmed by current migration patterns. The concerns of receiving countries include but are not limited to their economic interests, and several essays weigh different models of managing cultural identity and conflict in democracies with large immigrant populations. Other essays consider the implications of immigration for politics and citizenship. In many nations, large-scale immigration challenges existing political institutions, which must struggle to foster political inclusion and accommodate changing ways of belonging to the polity. The volume concludes with contrasting reflections on the normative standards that should guide immigration policies in modern constitutional democracies. Citizenship, Borders, and Human Needs develops connections between thoughtful scholarship and public policy, thereby advancing public debate on these complex and divisive issues. Though most attention in the collection is devoted to the dilemmas facing immigrant-receiving countries in the West, the volume also explores policies and outcomes in immigrant-sending countries, as well as the situation of developing nations—such as India—that are net receivers of migrants.

"Bringing political theory together with debates in international relations and in citizenship studies, the author argues that citizenship should no longer be understood as a status of privilege and belonging. Instead, it is an institutional role, through which persons might exercise their political agency - their capacities to shape the contexts of their lives and promote the freedom and well-being of themselves and others. In advancing this conception of citizenship, Dobson draws on and develops ideas found in the work of the philosopher Alan Gewirth." "Supranational Citizenship will be principally of interest to researchers in the fields of European integration, international normative theory, political and moral philosophy, and citizenship."--BOOK JACKET.