This paper traces in the literature of the Renaissance, the period in which contract began to emerge as a major element in English law, the cultural grounds which make up part of the complex reason by which mutuality became so essential in the history of England, both inside and outside of literature. The premise of this study is that, contrary to certain fashionable theories of law as an instrument of power, law is in fact enabling; it derives is justification (a “reasonable fiction”) not by force but through mutual benefit. English law differs from continental laws in the sixteenth and seventieth centuries in that the English law acknowledged its justification in the people. As a result of the influence of English Protestantism and the work of English lawyers, the king of England was seen no less than the people as subject to the law, and his relationship with the people was contractual; it was based on the mutual-benefit philosophy of contract rather than on statute. The English brand of Protestantism can likewise be seen as based on a contract with God in which God offers salvation for obedience and the human, in response, offers obedience for salvation.

Prominent among the voices that have in recent years attacked the socalled “academic” or “cultural” left in the U.S. for its international or Third Worldist sympathies has been that of Richard Rorty. This paper shows that the practice of liberals like Rorty publicly attacking liberals in the name of liberal politics is not merely counterproductive in the light of current conservative trends in American politics, it is, in this case in particular, philosophically misguided. The invocation of a respect for “culture” (in the absence of any absolutist ground for human values), which makes the international sphere immune to critique and dialogue—which renders the international sphere a curiously private one—turns “culture” into an all-or-nothing, take-it-or-leave-it proposition. This attitude supports entrenched power structures and offers a too- easy defense by governmental bodies of virtually any action. On the contrary, as seen in the rise in influence and effectiveness of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in changing local politics via appeals to international arenas, it is only by remaining at least potentially open to criticism, by not hiding behind the absolute protection of incorrigibility, that culture can help engage the international intricacies of power.

Traditional Libertarian and Authoritarian perspectives on the function of speech in society offer inadequate solutions to the question of censorship. A third position, abstemious liberalism, is an improvement over these two traditions, but it does not have a realistic understanding of cultural relativity and leads to a shutting down of speech that is potentially offensive to some, but which nevertheless is needed in democratic societies. A fourth approach is outlined, which seeks to address the shortcomings of the other three.

Postwar Japanese responses to and discussions of Japan’s responsibility for aggression during the Asia-Pacific War have been influenced by a variety of factors, including the Tokyo war crimes trials and American policy toward the emperor. Japanese writers and critics have also been affected by such factors. Howerver, in the year or two immediately following Japan’s surrender, Japanese writers began even before the war crimes trials to assess their own and others’ war responsibility. The newly-formed Shin-Nihon Bungakukai (New Japan — Literary Society) declared that certain writers were particularly guilty, and published their names along with a short essay by critic, Odagiri Hideo. Odagiri’s essay, and other statements and essays by leftwing writers in 1946 and 1947, illustrate two tendencies which impeded full acceptance and politicization of the issue of writers’ war responsibility: a strong sense on the part of Japanese writers that they themselves were victims of the war (victim complex), and a tendency to attribute war guilt to the lack among writers and other Japanese of a modern personality. Their victim complex prevented them from recognizing their responsibility as victimizers of other Asians during the war; their focus on the need for a modern personality, or ego, turned them inward, toward introspection and solipsism, rather than outward, toward an openly political, socially-constructive process.

This paper addresses the theoretical and philosophical questions concerning how an individual identified him/herself as a member of an ethnic, racial, or national community in the context of Japanese Imperialist discourse during the 1930s. The central focus is Tanabe Hajime. Together with his mentor Nishida Kitaro, perhaps the most renowned philosopher of modern Japan. Tanabe established the so-called Kyoto School of philosophy which attracted the most intellectually astute students of the time. With his background in philosophy of sciences and modern European metaphysics, Tanabe attempted to create a philosophical argument for the multi-ethnic nation-state, and proposed the universalistic concept of Japanese national identity which positively evaluates and integrates the particular ethnic identities of Japan’s subjects. He tried to construct the Logic of Species (Shu no Ronri) acccrding to which a member of the Japanese Empire could identify with Japanese nationality precisely because she or he is of a particular ethnicity and can participate in the Japanese State which represents the whole, inclusive of all the ethnic groups. Relying upon the Hegelian concept of negativity, he explained the two different levels of belonging: particularistic belonging to the specific identity (shu zhong) such as ethnicity, and universalistic belonging to the generic identity (rui-lei). And he further demonstrated that ethnic identity is far from fixed, and is brought into the subject's self-awareness only insofar as the subject negates it and is free from it. In other words, the subject becomes aware of her or his ethnic origin only when she or he negates it, thereby participating in a higher order of social formation, the State, under which ethnic multiplicity is subsumed. Thus the species of ethnicity is constituted only insofar as it is negatively mediated by the genus, that is, the State. Tanabe saw the essential form of human freedom in this negative relation of the subject to her ethnicity, and understood a subject’s belonging to a nation not as an individual's positive and fixed essence but as a dialectic and negative process of mediation between the species and the genus. While postwar Japan was built upon the premises of ethnic nationalism, Japanese imperial nationalism of the pre-war period was afraid of ethnic nationalisms which could challenge the Empire’s rhetoric of multi-ethnicity and pluralism. It goes without saying that Tanabe’s Logic of Species was a response to such needs of Japanese Imperialism and that it represented a philosophical attempt to undermine ethnic nationalism. Not surprisingly, it served as a metaphysical foundation for the idea of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.

lt is commonly believed that law is objective, neutral, dispassionate, fair and constitutes an impersonal way of arriving at the truth. However, in this paper, the author argues that legal texts in fact are no less subjective, partial and indeterminate than literary or filmic texts. To prove his points, the author examines closely a modern Japanese fiim Death by Hanging, in which a Korean descendant is charged with murder and brought to trial in a Japanese courthouse and novels of Piyadasa Sirisena, a Sri Lankan novelist who writes his novels like legal texts, to contend that literary texts and filmic texts are not much different from iegal texts; they all share the common similarity as narratives of persuasion, in which incidents, episodes and tropes are selected and manuipulated to emphasize a particular point of view, displaying a high degree of affinity to a legal narrative where a lawyer is pleading his case. Likewise, similar to a literary text, a legal text, whether a narrative constructed by a prosecutor, a defence lawyer or a judge, is a form of writing, a form of rhetoric constructed to persuade potential audiences. Therefore, it is argued cogently that liteary texts, filmic texts and legal texts in general can all be grouped usefully as narratives of persuasion, “textualization that submit to a sense of coherence and closure, but never with any success.”

This paper studies the rapidly changing conceptions of literary property around the turn of the last century in China; in particular, it examines the practice of translation with the attending issues of authorship, authority and authenticity. For when a literary text crosses national, linguistic borders, it inevitably traverses the boundary of authorial territory. And no time is more so than the period under study here, the period of colonial expansion in China, the period of heightened nationalist sentiment among the Chinese intellectuals. The aim of this paper is to understand the historical, cultural specifics that govem the concepts of ownership in literary production.

This paper first traces the effects of changes in the law on the history of copyright and on the development of the Romantic notion of the author. It then brings that historical trajectory forward to suggest the effects of changes in current laws on the ways that authors and literature are perceived in society as well as on the types of cultural productions designated with such valorized terms. It argues that despite the resistance of some capitalistic concerns certain changes in copyright law are necessary in order to keep in step with technological and philosophical changes occurring in the late twentieth century. It also argues, however, that some notion of the author ought to be retained for theoretical and practical purposes in order to ensure that certain types of texts, texts which are essential for our contemporary historical moment, continue to be produced.

This paper provides a rhetorical analysis of two key documents of the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence which announces the formation of a sovereign people and the Constitution which declared “we, the people” to be the subject/agent of an openended, self-constituting political process; additionally, this paper touches upon many related or associated historical, philosophical, political and cultural issues. This idea of a nation embodying and representing a sovereign people was both startling and new, and was also imitated in the constitutions of other nations. The invention of “the people” was a long, historical process with its roots lying in the new forms of subjectivity developing in the public spheres of Europe and its colonies in the eighteenth century. The self-referential reflexivity of Descartes’ cogito and its dico variant form the core of a. radical new role for individual consciousness, that of the ground of morality and epistemology, not merely as a tool of discovering some ultimate authority such as God. This philosophical subjectivity couples with print, not as an extension of face-to-face communication, but as the foregrounding of writing’s potential for unlimited dissemination and, thereby creates a print-mediated difference between public discourse and private correspondence. This becomes the semiotic base for new forms of subjectivity which in turn contribute to the development of nationalism, civil society and the modern nation-state.

This paper moves towards establishing a more postmodern notion of justice in the contemporary Asia/Pacific region by challenging the seamless workings of the American literary nation-state with the uncanny return of a “shark god” poem from early nineteenth century Hawaiian literature. The aim is to promote a global sensibility towards the local and local identity in Hawaii as this can be rooted in heterogiossic spatiality, competing language-games, competing languages, and the clashing traditions and heritages of American, Asian and Pacific makeup that demand a postmodern hearing.