Gavin Walker

Naoki Sakai

As technological innovation and cultural exchange challenge conventional borders, national identities, and notions of the nation-state, scholars have increasingly argued that the traditional concepts of "area" are ideological and political constructs tied to a schema of the world that no longer exists. This special issue of positions: asia critique posits that this "end of area" does not necessarily mean the end of area studies as a discipline. Rather, contributors suggest that "area" has detached itself from the realm of geopolitics and entered into the realm of biopolitics and biopower, which provides an opportunity to reevaluate and remap the goals of area studies. To address that change, this issue centers translation and the biopolitical as new theoretical mechanisms for area studies to order, combine, separate, and classify life. Topics include the concept of "area" itself; the philosophy of translation; reflections on Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Edward Said; governmentality and biopower in the time of global capital; and biopolitical management of geocultural areas. Contributors: Étienne Balibar, Ken C. Kawashima, Sandro Mezzadra, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Naoki Sakai, Shu-Mei Shih, Jon Solomon, Tazaki Hideaki, Gavin Walker

Biopolitics, Geopolitics, History

The End of Area

The analysis of May 68 in Paris, Berkeley, and the Western world has been widely reconsidered. But 1968 is not only a year that conjures up images of Paris, Frankfurt, or Milan. It is also the pivotal year for a new anti-colonial and anti-capitalist politics to erupt across the Third World - Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Japan’s position — neither in “the West” nor in the “Third World” —provoked a complex and intense round of mass mobilizations through the 1960s and early 70s. The Japanese situation remains remarkably under-examined globally. Beginning in the late 1950s, a New Left, independent of the prewar Japanese communist moment (itself of major historical importance in the 1920s and 30s), came to produce one of the most vibrant decades of political organization, political thought, and political aesthetics in the global twentieth century. In the present volume, major thinkers of the Left in Japan alongside scholars of the 1968 movements reexamine the theoretical sources, historical background, cultural productions, and major organizational problems of the 1968 revolutions in Japan.

Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ’68

The Red Years

In The Sublime Perversion of Capital Gavin Walker examines the Japanese debate about capitalism between the 1920s and 1950s, using it as a "prehistory" to consider current discussions of uneven development and contemporary topics in Marxist theory and historiography. Walker locates the debate's culmination in the work of Uno Kōzō, whose investigations into the development of capitalism and the commodification of labor power are essential for rethinking the national question in Marxist theory. Walker's analysis of Uno and the Japanese debate strips Marxist historiography of its Eurocentric focus, showing how Marxist thought was globalized from the start. In analyzing the little-heralded tradition of Japanese Marxist theory alongside Marx himself, Walker not only offers new insights into the transition to capitalism, the rise of globalization, and the relation between capital and the formation of the nation-state; he provides new ways to break Marxist theory's impasse with postcolonial studies and critical theory.

Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan

The Sublime Perversion of Capital

Japan: The "other," lesser-known 1968 The analysis of May 68 in Paris, Berkeley, and the Western world has been widely reconsidered. But 1968 is not only a year that conjures up images of Paris, Frankfurt, or Milan: it is also the pivotal year for a new anti-colonial and anti-capitalist politicsto erupt across the Third World, a crucial and central moment in the history, thought, and politics of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Japan's position -- neither in "the West" nor in the "Third World" --provoked a complex and intense round of mass mobilizations through the 1960s and early 70s. Although the "'68 revolutions" of the Global North -- Western Europe and North America -- are widely known, the Japanese situation remains remarkably under-examined globally. Beginning in the late 1950s, a New Left, independent of the prewar Japanese communist moment (itself of major historical importance in the 1920s and 30s), came to produce one of the most vibrant decades of political organization, political thought, and political aesthetics in the global twentieth century. In the present volume, major thinkers of the Left in Japan alongside scholars of the 1968 movements reexamine the theoretical sources, historical background, cultural productions, and major organizational problems of the 1968 revolutions in Japan.

Gavin Walker

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