Trespasses: Selected Writings by Masao Miyoshi (review)

It is uncommon enough for scholars to change their fields of study in mid-career. Masao Miyoshi did it two times: a tenured professor in the English department at UC Berkeley specializing in Victorian literature, Miyoshi moved in 1986 to the Literature department at UC San Diego, where he became one of the leading figures in the study of modern Japanese literary and intellectual history. Then, in the 1990s, he turned from Japan studies to become a pioneering theorist of globalization, focusing his attention in particular on the problems of the contemporary university. Trespasses reflects a significant portion of this intellectual trajectory: while his scholarship on English literature is not directly represented, the book includes a rich array of Miyoshi’s writings on a variety of topics, including essays on architecture, art, globalization, and environmental studies. The book traces the development of a powerful, critical voice across diverse subject areas, one that comes into its most compelling expression in Miyoshi’s critique of the university.

Trespasses constitutes something of a personal and intellectual biography of Miyoshi, who died shortly before its completion. Thus, fragments of his remarkable personal story come through at different moments, including in the strong introduction by Eric Cazdyn, the interview conducted by Kuan-Hsing Chen, and various sections of Miyoshi’s own essays. Growing up within the stifling, authoritarian atmosphere of World War II Tokyo, Miyoshi registered his sense of unease at the historical events unfolding around him through his study of English. The end of the war, however, was not an unequivocal experience of liberation—he notes that his skepticism of the Japanese state was re-directed toward the American-led occupation. The attempt to escape from that closed environment set in motion a life-long professional and intellectual journey in which Miyoshi never really settled into any comfortable point of fixity. His writings display a consistent concern with unresolvable antinomies, with outsiders, and with identifying points of opposition and tension in discursive formations and institutions.

The book begins, in a sense, with the end: the first chapter, “Literary Elaborations,” was one of Miyoshi’s last essays, which he wrote specifically for this volume. It represents a culmination of the subject that consumed Miyoshi’s attention in the last decades of his life—the role of the university within the accelerated global spread of capital and its effect on the production and dissemination of knowledge. The centerpiece of the article is a powerful and provocative call for reformulating the humanities (as well as all other academic disciplines) into the study of environmental justice. The chapters that follow this dramatic opening salvo are arranged chronologically, from earliest to most recent, and can be seen as filling in the back story, the complex path that led Miyoshi to the articulation of this position.

The shift from the first chapter’s apocalyptic tone to the textual analysis that underlies the second, an excerpt from his 1979 book As We Saw Them, is somewhat jarring. The chapter involves a close reading of writings by members of the 1860 Japanese government mission to the United States, focusing in particular on the noticeable absence of the first-person narrative voice. Yet the chapter also expresses a concern that would permeate Miyoshi’s writings, namely the focus on irreducible antimonies. As Cazdyn notes in the introduction, the “we” of this books title is “appropriately ambiguous” (p. xx), for Miyoshi examines not only the travel diaries of Japanese visitors to the United States, but also texts left by American visitors to Japan. In short, it is the interstice between incommensurable discursive positions that emerges as the true subject of his analysis.

Animating much of Miyoshi’s work on Japan is a resistance to the assimilation of cultural difference to universalism, part of an attempt to counter modernization theory, with its assumption of the universality of the Western developmental model. He thus argued, in his 1991 book Off Center and elsewhere, for the distinctiveness of the Japanese shōsetsu, enumerating all the...