Nanyo Orientalism

This book mainly deals with twentieth-century discourses on postcolonial relationships between Japanese and Pacific Islanders, as have been produced and transformed through the world powers' colonial dynamics over the islands and sea. It examines Japanese images or representations of the area, especially Micronesia on which the term Nanyo centered and considers responses from Pacific Island writers in English. Through such comparisons of Japanese and Pacific Islander texts, this book connects "postcolonial" representations of the Pacific from Japan and the Pacific Islands to examine trans-Pacific cultural movements involved with Japan. In doing so, it brings to light the Pacific as a locale of diverse subjects coming together over imperialist regimes. This book presents the incomplete, unstable, and fluid decolonizations produced from vantage points of the colonizer colonized, diasporic returnees, emigrants, and hybrids. The Pacific reemerges as a palimpsestic communal space concerned with wa: harmony, unity, peace, mildness, pacific, and Japanese. Relating and encompassing imperial and anti-imperial cultures, and drawing their fangs, the wa space produces "oceanic" decolonization. Nanyo-Orientalism is an important book for Japanese and Pacific studies, comparative literature and culture, and postcolonial studies.

This book mainly deals with twentieth-century discourses on postcolonial relationships between Japanese and Pacific Islanders, as have been produced and transformed through the world powers' colonial dynamics over the islands and sea. It examines Japanese images or representations of the area, especially Micronesia on which the term Nanyo centered and considers responses from Pacific Island writers in English.Through such comparisons of Japanese and Pacific Islander texts, this book connects "postcolonial" representations of the Pacific from Japan and the Pacific Islands to examine trans-Pacific cultural movements involved with Japan. In doing so, it brings to light the Pacific as a locale of diverse subjects coming together over imperialist regimes.This book presents the incomplete, unstable, and fluid decolonizations produced from vantage points of the colonizer colonized, diasporic returnees, emigrants, and hybrids. The Pacific reemerges as a palimpsestic communal space concerned with wa: harmony, unity, peace, mildness, pacific, and Japanese. Relating and encompassing imperial and anti-imperial cultures, and drawing their fangs, the wa space produces "oceanic" decolonization. Nanyo-Orientalism is an important book for Japanese and Pacific studies, comparative literature and culture, and postcolonial studies.

Imagined Racial Laboratories reveals the watermarks of science in the dynamics of racialisation in Southeast Asia, during and after the colonial period. Bringing together a set of critical histories of race sciences, it illuminates the racialised dimensions of colony and nation in the region. It demonstrates that racialisation took — and continues to take — mutable and multiple forms that often connect, perhaps more than differentiate, colonial and national periods across a variety of Southeast Asian settings. Thus, imagined races have contributed as much to the invention of modern Southeast Asia as have other fabled imagined communities.

This book offers a wide-ranging survey of Australian engagement with the Pacific Islands in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through over 100 hitherto largely unexplored accounts of travel, the author explores how representations of the Pacific Islands in letters, diaries, reminiscences, books, newspapers and magazines contributed to popular ideas of the Pacific Islands in Australia. It offers a range of valuable insights into continuities and changes in Australian regional perspectives, showing that ordinary Australians were more closely connected to the Pacific Islands than has previously been acknowledged. Addressing the theme of travel as a historical, literary and imaginative process, this cultural history probes issues of nation and empire, race and science, commerce and tourism by focusing on significant episodes and encounters in history. This is a foundational text for future studies of Australia’s relations with the Pacific, and histories of travel generally.

"A grandson’s photo album. Old postcards. English porcelain. A granite headstone. These are just a few of the material objects that help reconstruct the histories of colonial people who lived during Japan’s empire. These objects, along with oral histories and visual imagery, reveal aspects of lives that reliance on the colonial archive alone cannot. They help answer the primary question of Lost Histories: Is it possible to write the history of Japan’s colonial subjects? Kirsten Ziomek contends that it is possible, and in the process she brings us closer to understanding the complexities of their lives.Lost Histories provides a geographically and temporally holistic view of the Japanese empire from the early 1900s to the 1970s. The experiences of the four least-examined groups of Japanese colonial subjects—the Ainu, Taiwan’s indigenous people, Micronesians, and Okinawans—are the centerpiece of the book. By reconstructing individual life histories and following these people as they crossed colonial borders to the metropolis and beyond, Ziomek conveys the dynamic nature of an empire in motion and explains how individuals navigated the vagaries of imperial life."

This collection of essays expands the study of that immensely widely read and much-adapted novel, beyond the first book – The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (usually known simply as Robinson Crusoe) – to take in the far less well-known Farther Adventures and the almost unread Serious Reflections, beyond Defoe’s texts, to their re-writing and adaptation and beyond the Atlantic and South American context to an Asian and Pacific context. The essays consider both how Asia is represented in the books (in terms of politics, economics, religion), and how the book has been received, adapted, and taught, particularly in Asian contexts.

Ideas about how to study and understand cultural history—particularly literature—are rapidly changing as new digital archives and tools for searching them become available. This is not the first information age, however, to challenge ideas about how and why we value literature and the role numbers might play in this process. The Values in Numbers tells the longer history of this evolving global conversation from the perspective of Japan and maps its potential futures for the study of Japanese literature and world literature more broadly. Hoyt Long offers both a reinterpretation of modern Japanese literature through computational methods and an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of looking at literature through numbers. He weaves explanations of these methods and their application to literature together with critical reflection on the kinds of reasoning such methodologies facilitate. Chapters guide readers through increasingly complex techniques while making novel arguments about topics of fundamental concern, including the role of quantitative thinking in Japanese literary criticism; the canonization of modern literature in print and digital media; the rise of psychological fiction as a genre; the transnational circulation of modernist forms; and discourses of race under empire. Long models how computational methods can be applied outside English-language contexts and to languages written in non-Latin scripts. Drawing from fields as diverse as the history of science, book history, world literature, and critical race theory, this book demonstrates the value of numbers in literary study and the values literary critics can bring to the reading of difference in numbers.