Trespasses: Selected Writings
For virtually all of his distinguished career, Masao Miyoshi has avoided the mainstream, and yet as an outsider he has been a powerful and central force in intellectual life, internationally as well as within the United States. Whether as one of the first thinkers to examine difference as a strategic political act, or as a critic of the political use and misuse of academic knowledge, or as a theorist of postmodernism, or as an early voice speaking to the problems of the global economy and the processes of globalization, he has brought his outsider consciousness to bear on the most pressing concerns confronting the civilized world today. TRESPASSES presents many of the most influential writings from across the wide range of Miyoshi’s interests, including important new, previously unpublished work on the fate of the university and academic life in the face of the gradual dissolution of the humanities and the decline of literature, at a time when the world faces a grave ecological crisis and the prospect of human extinction.
In the book editor Eric Cazdyn first presents a brief biographical overview of Miyoshi’s life. Born in 1928 in Tokyo, the youngest of three boys, in a family whose roots can be traced back to Samurai, from an early age he read novels in English, inciting political suspicions in the ultra-nationalist Japan of the mid 1930s and 40s. Spending his youth amid the turmoil of the Pacific War years, he early experienced a sense of himself as an outsider. As a young academic at Berkeley in the 1960s. he supported the Free Speech Movement and fought the university administration to lift a ban on on-campus political activities. Here he formed life-long friendships with Noam Chomsky, Fredric Jameson, and Hayden White, whose influence on his work would be enduring.
