The Politics of Culture. Around the Work of Naoki Sakai, Edited by Richard Calichman, John Namjun Kim

Richard Calichman & John Namjun Kim, The Politics of Culture. Around the Work of Naoki Sakai, Routledge, Leiden Series in Modern East Asian Politics and History, 2010.

ISBN : 9780415562164 / 91,50 € / 272 pages

Naoki Sakai is an important and prominent thinker in Asian and cultural studies and his work continues to make itself felt across a broad range of both national and disciplinary borders. Originally finding a home in the otherwise circumscribed field of Japan Studies, Sakai’s writings have succeeded in large part in destabilizing that home, exposing the fragility of its boundaries to an outside that threatens constantly to overwhelm it.

Bringing together an expert team of contributors from North America, Europe and Russia, this volume takes the groundbreaking work of Naoki Sakai as its starting point and broadens the scope of Cultural Studies to bridge across philosophy and critical theory. At the same time it explicitly problematizes the putative divide between "Asian" and "Western" research objects and methodologies, and the link between "culture and the nation".