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Translation and Subjectivity: On "Japan" and Cultural Nationalism. By NAOKI SAKAI. Foreword by Meaghan Morris. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. xxiii, 230 pp. $22.95 (paper).
For the past several years in the fields of linguistics, anthropology, literature, regional studies, and history, there has been a growing revolt against the constrictions imposed by what Naoki Sakai calls "cofigurations": the oppositions-Japan/West, individual/collectivity, traditional/modern-that have proven so dominant in empowering and limiting the ways people articulate ideas about Japan and Asia. However, this revolt has generally been limited to individual disciplines and Sakai's collection of previously published essays is, to my knowledge, the first major work to problematize from the perspective of intellectual history a variety of methodologies relying on these oppositions for "coexistence" through "codependence." Sakai's critique is aimed at breaking down the conceptual distinctions between "us" and "them."
The introduction argues that "[The emergence of Japanese language and Japanese ethnicity was irreparably associated with the problematic of translation" (p. 2). The national language, in turn, is a historical and intellectual construct by which internal language diversity is repressed in favor of homogeneity and unity: "[W]hat characterizes the emergence of the national language is that generic differences that can be represented cofiguratively in the regime of translation are all subsumed under the generality of the national language ... " (p. 16). Translation thus reinforces national language, national culture, and the state and "plays. . . an important role in the formation of the Japanese as a national subject" (p. 17).
Sakai's conceptions of translation and...