Masao Miyoshi

Masao Miyoshi appears in Edward Said’s discussion of postcolonialism and postmodernism as a critic of the new global order and of academic responses that risk evading its power relations. The book cites Miyoshi’s analysis of transnational economic authority and his insistence on political and economic scrutiny, using those arguments to sharpen the distinction between postcolonialism’s historical urgency and postmodernism’s comparative detachment.

Critique of the Global Order

Said situates Miyoshi alongside Arif Dirlik in a discussion of globalization and the concentration of power in a small financial elite. The system described expands that elite’s influence across the globe, raises the prices of commodities and services, and shifts wealth from lower-income sectors—usually in the non-Western world—to higher-income ones. This account makes globalization more than a change in the scale of economic exchange: it describes a redistribution of resources and power with a marked geographic and class direction.

Miyoshi and Dirlik also identify a transnational order in which state borders lose force, while labor and income become subject to global managers. In Said’s account of their argument, colonialism returns in altered form as the subordination of the South to the North. The political structure has changed, but hierarchy persists: control operates through transnational management and economic dependence rather than only through the older, overt forms of colonial rule.

Academic Fields and Political Evasion

Miyoshi and Dirlik extend their critique to Western academic interest in multiculturalism and postcoloniality. They suggest that these subjects can become a cultural and intellectual retreat from the realities of global power. In this reading, the language of cultural inclusion does not by itself amount to an examination of who controls resources, labor, or institutions; academic attention can instead turn away from those material relations.

Miyoshi’s proposed remedy is stated as a demand for rigorous political and economic scrutiny, rather than what he calls a gesture of pedagogic expediency. Said presents this demand as a challenge to liberal self-deception in fields such as cultural studies and multiculturalism. Its force lies in shifting the test of critical work from the vocabulary it adopts to whether it investigates the economic and political arrangements shaping the world it describes.

Place in Said’s Distinction Between Postcolonialism and Postmodernism

Said introduces postcolonialism and postmodernism as related currents that emerged as subjects of engagement and investigation during the 1980s. Their shared prefix, he observes through Ella Shohat’s formulation, signals continuities as well as discontinuities: the newer formations do not simply leave colonial practices behind but may involve new modes of the old. Miyoshi’s analysis of transnational power gives this continuity a concrete economic and political dimension.

The discussion then differentiates the two currents. Said associates postmodernism with a stronger Eurocentric bias, emphasis on the local and contingent, and a relative lightness of historical weight; he contrasts this with early postcolonial work grounded in domination and control, considered from the perspective of political independence or unfinished liberation. Postmodernism’s accounts of the disappearance of grand narratives stand apart from postcolonial scholarship’s insistence that those narratives remain, even when their realization is deferred or obstructed. Miyoshi’s demand for material scrutiny reinforces the political urgency of the latter. Said allows that the approaches can overlap, including in the use of magical realism, but does not treat that overlap as erasing their different imperatives.