Asia Pacific Modern Series
By Andre Schmid, Takashi Fujitani, Theodore Jun Yoo and
4/5
()
About this series
Titles in the series (13)
- Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame
5
Tropics of Savagery is an incisive and provocative study of the figures and tropes of "savagery" in Japanese colonial culture. Through a rigorous analysis of literary works, ethnographic studies, and a variety of other discourses, Robert Thomas Tierney demonstrates how imperial Japan constructed its own identity in relation both to the West and to the people it colonized. By examining the representations of Taiwanese aborigines and indigenous Micronesians in the works of prominent writers, he shows that the trope of the savage underwent several metamorphoses over the course of Japan's colonial period--violent headhunter to be subjugated, ethnographic other to be studied, happy primitive to be exoticized, and hybrid colonial subject to be assimilated.
- The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea: Education, Labor, and Health, 1910–1945
3
This study examines how the concept of "Korean woman" underwent a radical transformation in Korea's public discourse during the years of Japanese colonialism. Theodore Jun Yoo shows that as women moved out of traditional spheres to occupy new positions outside the home, they encountered the pervasive control of the colonial state, which sought to impose modernity on them. While some Korean women conformed to the dictates of colonial hegemony, others took deliberate pains to distinguish between what was "modern" (e.g., Western outfits) and thus legitimate, and what was "Japanese," and thus illegitimate. Yoo argues that what made the experience of these women unique was the dual confrontation with modernity itself and with Japan as a colonial power.
- Colonial Project, National Game: A History of Baseball in Taiwan
6
In this engrossing cultural history of baseball in Taiwan, Andrew D. Morris traces the game’s social, ethnic, political, and cultural significance since its introduction on the island more than one hundred years ago. Introduced by the Japanese colonial government at the turn of the century, baseball was expected to "civilize" and modernize Taiwan’s Han Chinese and Austronesian Aborigine populations. After World War II, the game was tolerated as a remnant of Japanese culture and then strategically employed by the ruling Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Even as it was also enthroned by Taiwanese politicians, cultural producers, and citizens as their national game. In considering baseball’s cultural and historical implications, Morris deftly addresses a number of societal themes crucial to understanding modern Taiwan, the question of Chinese "reunification," and East Asia as a whole.
- Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times
1
This history of Japanese mass culture during the decades preceding Pearl Harbor argues that the new gestures, relationship, and humor of ero-guro-nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense) expressed a self-consciously modern ethos that challenged state ideology and expansionism. Miriam Silverberg uses sources such as movie magazines, ethnographies of the homeless, and the most famous photographs from this era to capture the spirit, textures, and language of a time when the media reached all classes, connecting the rural social order to urban mores. Employing the concept of montage as a metaphor that informed the organization of Japanese mass culture during the 1920s and 1930s, Silverberg challenges the erasure of Japanese colonialism and its legacies. She evokes vivid images from daily life during the 1920s and 1930s, including details about food, housing, fashion, modes of popular entertainment, and attitudes toward sexuality. Her innovative study demonstrates how new public spaces, new relationships within the family, and an ironic sensibility expressed the attitude of Japanese consumers who identified with the modern as providing a cosmopolitan break from tradition at the same time that they mobilized for war.
- Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II
7
Race for Empire offers a profound and challenging reinterpretation of nationalism, racism, and wartime mobilization during the Asia-Pacific war. In parallel case studies—of Japanese Americans mobilized to serve in the United States Army and of Koreans recruited or drafted into the Japanese military—T. Fujitani examines the U.S. and Japanese empires as they struggled to manage racialized populations while waging total war. Fujitani probes governmental policies and analyzes representations of these soldiers—on film, in literature, and in archival documents—to reveal how characteristics of racism, nationalism, capitalism, gender politics, and the family changed on both sides. He demonstrates that the United States and Japan became increasingly alike over the course of the war, perhaps most tellingly in their common attempts to disavow racism even as they reproduced it in new ways and forms.
- A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900–1949
9
In this path-breaking book, Tong Lam examines the emergence of the "culture of fact" in modern China, showing how elites and intellectuals sought to transform the dynastic empire into a nation-state, thereby ensuring its survival. Lam argues that an epistemological break away from traditional modes of understanding the observable world began around the turn of the twentieth century. Tracing the Neo-Confucian school of evidentiary research and the modern departure from it, Lam shows how, through the rise of the social survey, "the fact" became a basic conceptual medium and source of truth. In focusing on China’s social survey movement, A Passion for Facts analyzes how information generated by a range of research practices—census, sociological investigation, and ethnography—was mobilized by competing political factions to imagine, manage, and remake the nation.
- Working Skin: Making Leather, Making a Multicultural Japan
13
Since the 1980s, arguments for a multicultural Japan have gained considerable currency against an entrenched myth of national homogeneity. Working Skin enters this conversation with an ethnography of Japan’s "Buraku" people. Touted as Japan’s largest minority, the Buraku are stigmatized because of associations with labor considered unclean, such as leather and meat production. That labor, however, is vanishing from Japan: Liberalized markets have sent these jobs overseas, and changes in family and residential record-keeping have made it harder to track connections to these industries. Multiculturalism, as a project of managing difference, comes into ascendancy and relief just as the labor it struggles to represent is disappearing. Working Skin develops this argument by exploring the interconnected work of tanners in Japan, Buraku rights activists and their South Asian allies, as well as cattle ranchers in West Texas, United Nations officials, and international NGO advocates. Moving deftly across these engagements, Joseph Hankins analyzes the global political and economic demands of the labor of multiculturalism. Written in accessible prose, this book speaks to larger theoretical debates in critical anthropology, Asian and cultural studies, and examinations of liberalism and empire, and it will appeal to audiences interested in social movements, stigmatization, and the overlapping circulation of language, politics, and capital.
- The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past
8
What can we learn about the Chinese revolution by placing a doubly marginalized group—rural women—at the center of the inquiry? In this book, Gail Hershatter explores changes in the lives of seventy-two elderly women in rural Shaanxi province during the revolutionary decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Interweaving these women’s life histories with insightful analysis, Hershatter shows how Party-state policy became local and personal, and how it affected women’s agricultural work, domestic routines, activism, marriage, childbirth, and parenting—even their notions of virtue and respectability. The women narrate their pasts from the vantage point of the present and highlight their enduring virtues, important achievements, and most deeply harbored grievances. In showing what memories can tell us about gender as an axis of power, difference, and collectivity in 1950s rural China and the present, Hershatter powerfully examines the nature of socialism and how gender figured in its creation.
- Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945
12
Assimilating Seoul, the first book-length study written in English about Seoul during the colonial period, challenges conventional nationalist paradigms by revealing the intersection of Korean and Japanese history in this important capital. Through microhistories of Shinto festivals, industrial expositions, and sanitation campaigns, Todd A. Henry offers a transnational account that treats the city’s public spaces as "contact zones," showing how residents negotiated pressures to become loyal, industrious, and hygienic subjects of the Japanese empire. Unlike previous, top-down analyses, this ethnographic history investigates modalities of Japanese rule as experienced from below. Although the colonial state set ambitious goals for the integration of Koreans, Japanese settler elites and lower-class expatriates shaped the speed and direction of assimilation by bending government initiatives to their own interests and identities. Meanwhile, Korean men and women of different classes and generations rearticulated the terms and degree of their incorporation into a multiethnic polity. Assimilating Seoul captures these fascinating responses to an empire that used the lure of empowerment to disguise the reality of alienation.
- Sanitized Sex: Regulating Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and Intimacy in Occupied Japan, 1945-1952
15
Sanitized Sex analyzes the development of new forms of regulation concerning prostitution, venereal disease, and intimacy during the American occupation of Japan after the Second World War, focusing on the period between 1945 and 1952. It contributes to the cultural and social history of the occupation of Japan by investigating the intersections of ordering principles like race, class, gender, and sexuality. It also reveals how sex and its regulation were not marginal but key issues in postwar empire-building, U.S.-Japanese relations, and American and Japanese self-imagery. The regulation of sexual encounters between occupiers and occupied was closely linked to the disintegration of the Japanese empire and the rise of U.S. hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region during the Cold War era. Shedding new light on the configuration of postwar Japan, the process of decolonization, the postcolonial formation of the Asia-Pacific region, and the particularities of postwar U.S. imperialism, Sanitized Sex offers a reading of the intimacies of empires—defeated and victorious.
- North Korea’s Mundane Revolution: Socialist Living and the Rise of Kim Il Sung, 1953–1965
19
When the crucial years after the Korean War are remembered today, histories about North Korea largely recount a grand epic of revolution centering on the ascent of Kim Il Sung to absolute power. Often overshadowed in this storyline, however, are the myriad ways the Korean population participated in party-state projects to rebuild their lives and country after the devastation of the war. North Korea's Mundane Revolution traces the origins of the country's long-term durability in the questions that Korean women and men raised about the modern individual, housing, family life, and consumption. Using a wide range of overlooked sources, Andre Schmid examines the formation of a gendered socialist lifestyle in North Korea by focusing on the localized processes of socioeconomic and cultural change. This style of "New Living" replaced radical definitions of gender and class revolution with the politics of individual self-reform and cultural elevation, leading to a depoliticization of the country's political culture in the very years that Kim Il Sung rose to power.
- In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan's Borderless Empire
17
In Search of Our Frontier explores the complex transnational history of Japanese immigrant settler colonialism, which linked Japanese America with Japan’s colonial empire through the exchange of migrant bodies, expansionist ideas, colonial expertise, and capital in the Asia-Pacific basin before World War II. The trajectories of Japanese transpacific migrants exemplified a prevalent national structure of thought and practice that not only functioned to shore up the backbone of Japan’s empire building but also promoted the borderless quest for Japanese overseas development. Eiichiro Azuma offers new interpretive perspectives that will allow readers to understand Japanese settler colonialism’s capacity to operate outside the aegis of the home empire.
- The State's Sexuality: Prostitution and Postcolonial Nation Building in South Korea
20
The State's Sexuality uncovers how the lives and work of women engaged in prostitution, long considered the most abased members of society, have been strategically intertwined with the lofty purpose of building South Korea's postcolonial nation-state. Through a complicated, contradictory patchwork of laws and regulations, which Park Jeong-Mi conceptualizes as a "toleration-regulation regime," the South Korean state did not merely exclude sex workers from ordinary citizenship; it also mobilized them for national security, national development, and the making of a gendered citizenry. In the process, the newly independent state was constructed, augmented, and consolidated. Sex workers often protested such draconian policies and sometimes utilized state apparatuses to get recognition as citizens. Based on expansive, meticulous archival research and sophisticated interpretation of historical records and women's voices, Park rewrites the dynamic history of South Korea from 1945 to the present through the lens of prostitution.
Andre Schmid
Andre Schmid is Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto.
Related to Asia Pacific Modern
Related ebooks
Foreign Correspondents in Japan Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBase Encounters: The US Armed Forces in South Korea Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUnderstanding Vietnam Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Korea's Fight for Freedom Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCity of Sediments: A History of Seoul in the Age of Colonialism Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJapan in the American Century Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEarly Korean Literature: Selections and Introductions Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCommunist Multiculturalism: Ethnic Revival in Southwest China Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsShanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Vicious Circuits: Korea’s IMF Cinema and the End of the American Century Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Condition of the Working Class in Turkey: Labour under Neoliberal Authoritarianism Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFrog in the Well: Portraits of Japan by Watanabe Kazan, 1793-1841 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWar in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Age of Hiroshima Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSinging to the Dead: A Missioner's Life among Refugees from Burma Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEmbodied Engineering: Gendered Labor, Food Security, and Taste in Twentieth-Century Mali Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRace for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Utopia and Modernity in China: Contradictions in Transition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPopulist Collaborators: The Ilchinhoe and the Japanese Colonization of Korea, 1896–1910 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsConstructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931-1945 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJapan's Postwar Party Politics Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMessy Europe: Crisis, Race, and Nation-State in a Postcolonial World Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsParadox and Representation: Silenced Voices in the Narratives of Nakagami Kenji Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJapan and Its World: Two Centuries of Change Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5America at War since 1945: Politics and Diplomacy in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsUnsettled Frontiers: Market Formation in the Cambodia-Vietnam Borderlands Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCarving Status at Kŭmgangsan Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Asian History For You
The Art of War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Gulag Archipelago: The Authorized Abridgement Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Art of War: The Definitive Interpretation of Sun Tzu's Classic Book of Strategy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Voices from Chernobyl Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Shogun: The Life of Tokugawa Ieyasu Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Last Yakuza: life and death in the Japanese underworld Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unit 731: Testimony Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Forgotten Highlander: An Incredible WWII Story of Survival in the Pacific Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/577 Days of February: Living and Dying in Ukraine, Told by the Nation’s Own Journalists Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5To Love and Be Loved: A Personal Portrait of Mother Teresa Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Charlie Wilson's War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unit 731: The Forgotten Asian Auschwitz Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 2]: An Experiment in Literary Investigation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Confession Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Summary of Caste (Oprah's Book Club): by Isabel Wilkerson - The Origins of Our Discontents - A Comprehensive Summary Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCapitalism: A Ghost Story Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A History Of Secret Societies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Helmet For My Pillow [Illustrated Edition] Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Behold Your Queen!: A Story of Esther Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Way And Its Power; A Study Of The Tao Tê Ching Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related categories
Reviews for Asia Pacific Modern
4 ratings0 reviews