Imagining the Imaginary: A Reply to Ramon Saldívar

In his article, Ramon Saldívar correctly notes that one of the three principal concerns in my critique of his fine book had to do with the parallel relationship he, seemingly after Paredes, draws between the fate of Mexicans in the US borderlands and the fate of the Japanese under occupation. He says: "If I had made what would amount to a banal claim" by drawing such a parallel, "Limón would be justified in his critique," but he says, "I did not." In response I must quote Saldívar again. He writes that Paredes's felt "the kinship of affiliation with other races and ethnic groups that already existed in Paredes' experience of the transnational borderlands of Greater Mexico," a consciousness that "accelerates to fruition in Japan under the consciousness created by a sense of shared oppression and injustice, as mutual recipients of race prejudice, and of having experienced the catastrophe of imperial conquest" (Saldívar 341).

My larger intention was to offer a critical corrective to what I saw as a perspective that largely elided the manner in which Japan at that moment was itself an imperialist and racist aggressor nation, especially against China, and thus much more akin to many of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Anglos who came to dominate the US-Mexico borderlands. By this counter-view, it is the Chinese, largely ignored by Paredes/Saldívar, who were far more like Mexicans. Paredes/Saldívar then enhance their asymmetrical perspective by engaging in a kind of sympathetic, left-wing Orientalism toward Japan in mostly utter admiration of its culture under the duress of occupation which then leads me to my second criticism.

In a manner consistent with popular Hollywood films of the 1950s based on James Michener novels-Sayonara (1957) and The Bridges at Toko Ri (1954)-Paredes's/Saldívar's largely positive focus on Japan is centrally articulated through their women but, again, with the relative omission of Chinese women, whose fate was truly horrific at the hands of the Japanese military. Saldívar does not respond to this second woman-centered criticism except to acknowledge abstractly the "rapacious" conduct of the Japanese. I leave it to our readers to judge the banality of these issues.

Presumably less banal, however, is my third concern or what I called the "problem of Asia" as Saldívar devotes much more time to this question. Saldívar adduces the cultural theorist Sun Ge as well as various other unnamed Asian intellectuals to argue that Asia as a totality is very much on the minds of many such intellectuals and constitutes a "community of knowledge" that Paredes presumably also joined through his occupation-era writings. In her exhaustive reviews Sun Ge does indeed show us that there has been much discussion as to the meaning of Asia and that this concern is in large part in reaction to the West. (By the way, she does not explicitly name the US although one assumes it is subsumed under the "West.") However, what she also shows is that much of this discussion is idealistically abstract; indeed the dialogue draws from a community of academic perspectives and ideational knowledge, many literary, with the interesting exception of Umesawa Tadao, an historian and cultural ecologist in close proximity to anthropology. For him, this articulation of abstracted ideas about Asia, "the symbolization of Asia," is conducted in a manner that "ignores the multifarious facets of Asia, which is not acceptable to his academic training. . . . [T]he pluralistic nature of civilization does not need to be articulated through setting up the binary opposition of Asia versus Europe. Just dissolving the presupposition of a unifying Asia will do the job" (Sun 37).

Thus Umesawa Tadao would seem to be one Asian scholar who would dissent from Sun's perhaps overstated proposition quoted with approval by Saldívar that "For Asians, the Asia question is primarily a question of the sense of solidarity, a sense that arises in the midst of aggression and expansion perpetrated by the West" (27). However, Saldívar also refers to a collection...