UC San Diego

This essay operates from a challenge that is evident in Miyoshi’s life and career, a humility of our knowledge system and the quest to exceed it. I suggest that Asia is trapped within a historical framing (as the Orient) that prevents people and places within Asia from extracting themselves from that condition of being. The problem lies within the conflation of Asia as a relational condition and the places of Asia, which adds materiality to the idea. History and the nation have been the media and form through which this problem has emerged and how many have tried to extract themselves. This circularity, I argue, reiterates what Alfred North Whitehead calls a “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”