That's what I've felt like during my many hours in the office the past week and a half. There are a lot of benefits to being associate chair--a course release each semester, a small stipend (even smaller for me since I'm only doing it for the fall), a get-out-of-other-departmental-committee-work-free card), and let's not forget the soul-corrupting power (bwaa ha ha!)--but parking your computer and a few books in one of the rooms in the departmental office complex is most definitely not one of them.
Back in Fukuoka, my office time was my own. Even though I invited students to visit me every class, I didn't have to post any office hours, most of my students were loath to visit another campus (or university), and my 21st Century Program students were hesitant to intrude on me. Not so in Fredonia. Even though I've kept my office hours to a minimum for me (an hour and a half a day for the first four days of the week), I'm actually spending closer to 12-16 hours a week in that room, for the first month of the semester at least. There's just too much that needs to get done--new faculty need mentoring, advisees need advice, internship seekers need coordinating, students appealing various things need to be heard out and referred to the appropriate people, the spring 2008 schedule needs to be compiled, job ad language needs to be approved, committees need to be formed, minutes for the first department meeting need to be typed up, a colleague's teaching evaluations from last semester need to be summarized, a new dean needs to be consulted, and e-correspondence needs to be maintained. And that's just for starters. Between the departmental secretary and the chair, very little of this is my responsibility alone, but I have my hand in to a greater or lesser degree on just about all of it. The upshot is, very little time is left over for, say, getting my course web pages in shape, learning my students' names, tweaking my lesson plans, getting some reading for my courses in, or surfing the MLA bibliography. You know, the kinds of things I use my time in the office for when I'm not associate chair. It's gotten so bad at times the past two weeks I've found myself bouncing from task to task without finishing any of them. And when I actually get a chance to focus on, say, my own teaching, well, my focus is shot.
I know this, too, will pass, and I'll someday figure out how to be more efficient in the office at Fredonia--just as I eventually adjusted to my commute in Fukuoka and became a champion subway reader. But I'll tell you: a year away from service of any kind sure leaves you rusty. And wondering how you did so much more of it before your leave....
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
Third Try's the Charm?
I'm teaching my Postcolonial Hawthorne course for the third time this semester--first was at Kyushu University in Fall 2006, next at Seinan Gakuin University in Spring 2007, and now here. Those already interested in the intricacies of course design may find the differences between the first two and the last less boring than the vast majority of those whose lives will never be brightened by this post.
Apparently I was the last in my department to get the memo that postcolonial theory is dead. But that PMLA forum I missed in May will actually be perfect for the course, the basic goal of which remains to ask whether Hawthorne ought to be considered a postcolonial writer or not and why, with a particular focus on the implications and stakes of the answers to these questions.
Apparently I was the last in my department to get the memo that postcolonial theory is dead. But that PMLA forum I missed in May will actually be perfect for the course, the basic goal of which remains to ask whether Hawthorne ought to be considered a postcolonial writer or not and why, with a particular focus on the implications and stakes of the answers to these questions.
Friday, August 31, 2007
On Growing Up Too Fast
Onechan's been saying some things since we moved away from Fukuoka that are really heart-breaking. Here are a few:
These aren't so bad on their own, but in context, they are. I'm not just talking body language and tone of voice. I'm talking about the kind of reception onechan and the tsuma have been getting when they primarily use Japanese out in public here in western NY. (I guess imoto would be getting it, too, if she used more than two words regularly.) Let's just say that they've already gotten more nasty looks and cold shoulders in just over two weeks here than I got the entire year using English in public anywhere in Japan. It would be bad enough on its own, but onechan is old enough to notice it.
Fortunately, it hasn't been all bad. Reuniting with her friends has been great, if awkward at first. With her best friend, onechan slipped into her Fukuoka friendship mode, chattering away in Japanese almost continuously while role-playing various games. In a larger group of old and new faculty kid friends, she went back to her mode on the first few weeks of yochien--quiet observation, tagging along, imitating what the kids were doing, and eventually loosening up.
And it's not like it's not going to get better quickly. Her Fredonia hoikuen is set up remarkably similarly to her Fukuoka yochien, and she started playing with the kids in her room right away when we visited it last week. She's been speaking English her whole life, unlike Japanese, which she's really only started speaking seriously with people other than her mom since January, so it shouldn't take her long to be able to express herself as well in English as Japanese. Her Buffalo hoikuen every Saturday will at least get her speaking and learning Japanese on a regular basis, not to mention interacting with Japanese and Japanese-American kids. And the tsuma and I are doing everything we can to help her stay bilingual, have lots of play time her friends in Fredonia on Sundays, and learn to deal with the eyes on her when she speaks Japanese in public.
But still, it's a complicated homecoming--and worse, onechan is starting to notice the complications. It had to happen eventually, but a part of me was hoping it would come much much later. Staying up worrying about it isn't going to make it any better, so time to sign off. (But I can't help noticing that the day care costs for both girls going twice a week here in western NY are roughly twice what they were in Fukuoka for onechan to go to yochien every weekday, plus get swimming lessons on Fridays with many of her classmates....)
- "I want to be a baby again."
- "I miss my friends at the yochien."
- "I miss my friends at Chiba."
- "I miss my friends at [her old day care place in Fredonia]." [This after realizing that yesterday was her last day there--next Tuesday she starts at the university children's center we're calling her hoikuen to link it to and distinguish it from her yochien.]
- "I want an onechan. A big girl." [This after playing with an 8-year-old all day yesterday and a 5-going-on-6-year-old half the day today.]
These aren't so bad on their own, but in context, they are. I'm not just talking body language and tone of voice. I'm talking about the kind of reception onechan and the tsuma have been getting when they primarily use Japanese out in public here in western NY. (I guess imoto would be getting it, too, if she used more than two words regularly.) Let's just say that they've already gotten more nasty looks and cold shoulders in just over two weeks here than I got the entire year using English in public anywhere in Japan. It would be bad enough on its own, but onechan is old enough to notice it.
Fortunately, it hasn't been all bad. Reuniting with her friends has been great, if awkward at first. With her best friend, onechan slipped into her Fukuoka friendship mode, chattering away in Japanese almost continuously while role-playing various games. In a larger group of old and new faculty kid friends, she went back to her mode on the first few weeks of yochien--quiet observation, tagging along, imitating what the kids were doing, and eventually loosening up.
And it's not like it's not going to get better quickly. Her Fredonia hoikuen is set up remarkably similarly to her Fukuoka yochien, and she started playing with the kids in her room right away when we visited it last week. She's been speaking English her whole life, unlike Japanese, which she's really only started speaking seriously with people other than her mom since January, so it shouldn't take her long to be able to express herself as well in English as Japanese. Her Buffalo hoikuen every Saturday will at least get her speaking and learning Japanese on a regular basis, not to mention interacting with Japanese and Japanese-American kids. And the tsuma and I are doing everything we can to help her stay bilingual, have lots of play time her friends in Fredonia on Sundays, and learn to deal with the eyes on her when she speaks Japanese in public.
But still, it's a complicated homecoming--and worse, onechan is starting to notice the complications. It had to happen eventually, but a part of me was hoping it would come much much later. Staying up worrying about it isn't going to make it any better, so time to sign off. (But I can't help noticing that the day care costs for both girls going twice a week here in western NY are roughly twice what they were in Fukuoka for onechan to go to yochien every weekday, plus get swimming lessons on Fridays with many of her classmates....)
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Itai vs. Dame: On Conversations with a 16-Month-Old
Imoto's first language, to the extent she uses language, is Japanese. I'll be writing about onechan's adjustment to life in English tomorrow, but today I want to look at imoto's. Unlike her older sister, who started using words like "wan-wan" (the sound a dog makes in Japanese, but also the name of the lead character on Inai Inai Ba, both girls' favorite toddlers' show on Japanese tv) and "atta" (that--often in reference to a dog she spotted in the distance while we were driving around) from a very young age and built up quite an extensive vocabulary of complaints in Japanese in the first half of her first year, imoto has been much more what we expected from a toddler hearing both Japanese and English at home. She's a real listener and in Dunkirk has gone back to doing what she was doing our last month in Fukuoka--repeating a lot of words and sounds. (For a stretch there in Chiba, she was talking in phrases and sentences in a language mostly of her own invention.) Every once in a while she'll pull out the right word in the right contest ("ohayo" to baba one morning, "owata" when she finished breakfast this morning), just to show off what she knows. But she's found she can get around all day mainly using only two words: "mama" and "itai."
At first, I thought she was calling me "Mama" mistakenly, or out of a desire to tease me (this is actually quite plausible, given her sense of humor--she started doing "inai inai ba" [peekaboo] to other people and giggling uproariously at the drop of a hat before she was 6 months old, if memory serves [and it usually doesn't]), but then I realized that she uses "mama" to let someone else know that she wants something from them. When pressed, she'll throw in another word--like "gigi" for some kind of drink (again confusing, because that's the baby word for grandpa, really)--to specify what it is she wants. But in most circumstances, she'll repeat "mama" until someone figures out what she wants.
"Itai!" is what you say when you're hurt in Japanese--like "ow" or "ouch" in English. But imoto uses "itai" for anything she doesn't like. She'll throw herself on the ground and repeatedly scream "itai" if stop her from doing something she really wants, for instance, which got us all kinds of looks when she did this in public in Fukuoka, Chiba, and Tokyo. Nothing like the sight of a gaijin carrying around a gaijin-looking toddler who's screaming "itai" into his ear in a supermarket to get the concerned looks....
Imoto's gone from being the Happy Science Girl to being the Fearless Stunt Girl. Thanks to onechan and her friends, imoto is all into climbing everything, "because it's there." So the words she most often hears from the tsuma and me are ones like
That last one usually comes up when onechan's throwing a tantrum of her own and of course becomes an easy target for pinching, poking, and hair-pulling.
These last two weeks, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, imoto has been going with her big sister to the day care place onechan went to most of the year before we left for Fukuoka. From next Tuesday on, however, she's on her own. Onechan is graduating to my university's children's center (more on this tomorrow). Oh, and did I mention that as much of a daddy's girl onechan is, imoto is a mommy's girl, and more? So of course we're more worried about how she's going to adjust to day care in a second language than onechan, for whom our anxieties are more diffuse and complex (on which more tomorrow).
As we were getting ready to leave Japan, I kind of figured that imoto would have the easiest transition of us all, but now I'm wondering if hers is going to be the most difficult, and by how far. It's hard enough for onechan to get her head around the fact that the way she talked to her friends in Japan will be incomprehensible to her friends in Fredonia and Dunkirk, much less the idea that most adults in the U.S. have even less Japanese than her dad (whom she's been teaching about a word a day)--what imoto will make of all this, I have no idea. I know she'll adjust and adapt eventually--but in what ways and with what effects on her personality and her Japanese, I just don't know.
The folks in Buffalo we are just starting to get to know who organize or use the yochien-like day care arrangement on Saturday mornings and Japanese language classes for older kids all emphasize that once the kids hit elementary school, it's tough to get them to keep speaking Japanese at home. But we haven't heard so much yet about 1-year-olds' adjustments. If you have, please let us know--thanks!
At first, I thought she was calling me "Mama" mistakenly, or out of a desire to tease me (this is actually quite plausible, given her sense of humor--she started doing "inai inai ba" [peekaboo] to other people and giggling uproariously at the drop of a hat before she was 6 months old, if memory serves [and it usually doesn't]), but then I realized that she uses "mama" to let someone else know that she wants something from them. When pressed, she'll throw in another word--like "gigi" for some kind of drink (again confusing, because that's the baby word for grandpa, really)--to specify what it is she wants. But in most circumstances, she'll repeat "mama" until someone figures out what she wants.
"Itai!" is what you say when you're hurt in Japanese--like "ow" or "ouch" in English. But imoto uses "itai" for anything she doesn't like. She'll throw herself on the ground and repeatedly scream "itai" if stop her from doing something she really wants, for instance, which got us all kinds of looks when she did this in public in Fukuoka, Chiba, and Tokyo. Nothing like the sight of a gaijin carrying around a gaijin-looking toddler who's screaming "itai" into his ear in a supermarket to get the concerned looks....
Imoto's gone from being the Happy Science Girl to being the Fearless Stunt Girl. Thanks to onechan and her friends, imoto is all into climbing everything, "because it's there." So the words she most often hears from the tsuma and me are ones like
- "dame!" [dah-meh]: stop it!
- "abunai": that's dangerous!
- "kyotskute": be careful!
- "yasashii": be nice/gentle!
That last one usually comes up when onechan's throwing a tantrum of her own and of course becomes an easy target for pinching, poking, and hair-pulling.
These last two weeks, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, imoto has been going with her big sister to the day care place onechan went to most of the year before we left for Fukuoka. From next Tuesday on, however, she's on her own. Onechan is graduating to my university's children's center (more on this tomorrow). Oh, and did I mention that as much of a daddy's girl onechan is, imoto is a mommy's girl, and more? So of course we're more worried about how she's going to adjust to day care in a second language than onechan, for whom our anxieties are more diffuse and complex (on which more tomorrow).
As we were getting ready to leave Japan, I kind of figured that imoto would have the easiest transition of us all, but now I'm wondering if hers is going to be the most difficult, and by how far. It's hard enough for onechan to get her head around the fact that the way she talked to her friends in Japan will be incomprehensible to her friends in Fredonia and Dunkirk, much less the idea that most adults in the U.S. have even less Japanese than her dad (whom she's been teaching about a word a day)--what imoto will make of all this, I have no idea. I know she'll adjust and adapt eventually--but in what ways and with what effects on her personality and her Japanese, I just don't know.
The folks in Buffalo we are just starting to get to know who organize or use the yochien-like day care arrangement on Saturday mornings and Japanese language classes for older kids all emphasize that once the kids hit elementary school, it's tough to get them to keep speaking Japanese at home. But we haven't heard so much yet about 1-year-olds' adjustments. If you have, please let us know--thanks!
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
The Rip Van Winkle Effect
I did everything I could to avoid becoming Associate Chair of my department upon my return to the States from my Fulbright year in Japan, but had to settle for a one-semester gig in the end. If the position didn't give me +10 in boringness and -8 in cleverness, I'd write a witty riff on the above title to convey what a year leave does to my competence at and motivation for departmental service, but I think you get the picture.
In case, you don't, here's a random list of actual Rip Van Winkle moments in the English department office:
And this is just in my first two weeks back in the time zone and first week in the office.
In case, you don't, here's a random list of actual Rip Van Winkle moments in the English department office:
- "Why isn't this computer connecting to the internet? Ah, great, someone from AIT can come Friday afternoon to fix it--wonderful!" [Fast forward to Sunday morning, the first chance I have to get into the office that weekend.] "What?! How can this key not be working? Am I cursed?" [Result: plan to get to the office bright and early Monday morning, but don't actually make it in until the late afternoon.]
- "How could I have forgotten both my user ID and password for the key portal into everything I do as a teacher, advisor, and mentor?!" [Result: a series of increasingly-desperate calls to the Help Desk.]
- "Where is that damn page on the department's contributions to general education? I could have sworn it was easier to find in the old site design!" [Result: cranky email to department listserv, fortunately blocked by the listserv program, which no longer recognizes my address.]
- "I used to be able to use this program to update my home page and course web sites. Why can't I download the upgrade? What the heck do I use instead?!" [Result: More pestering of the Help Desk, followed by a call to the University Web Coordinator, who had fielded a similar panicked question from Fukuoka when the university changed its web security protocols on me. Turns out the correct program had been on my Mac's control strip all along; nobody ever told me that was pretty much the same secure FTP program that I had downloaded for my Japanese PC laptop. Live and learn.]
- "Yeah, it does sound like that course ought to count for that requirement. I wonder why it doesn't. Just what is our procedure for appealing transfer credit assignations these days? And what's the latest articulation agreement with that particular community college?" [Result: Sent the student to the new chair, to whom he would have eventually had to talk, anyway.]
- "I have a vague idea of what our policy on college credits for AP English scores used to be. I wonder what it is now? Time to send another student to the chair!"
- "Yeah, I think you'd better give me extra advisees, so that the new hires don't have to deal with more than 10 advisees their first semester on the job. And how about giving the other extras to a, b, c, and d? What?!--a and b are on leave?! Oh no!"
- "Well, I'm really going to have to talk to my wife before I agree to [that particular potential service commitment I shouldn't blog about]. She's starting a MLS program and all, so we have to see how this semester works out before I decide."
- "I'm sorry I didn't run for any union positions this election cycle. By the time the forms got to me in Japan, I had missed the key deadlines."
And this is just in my first two weeks back in the time zone and first week in the office.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Before/After
Monday, August 27, 2007
Starting Over
It's the first day of school! Which means it's time to announce a new programming schedule here at CitizenSE, now that the blog is on American time (even if I'm not yet).
Teaching Tuesday: I still won't blog about current students, but I will offer some reflections on the way I approach and handle teaching now that I'm back in the U.S. again.
Service Wednesday: After a service-free year in Japan, I should have one or two interesting thoughts on what it's like to ease myself back into the kinds of institution-building activities I devoted a good deal of my pre-tenure time to.
Free-form Thursday: Combines and replaces the old Unexpected Hawthorne Wednesday, CitizenSE Hawthorniana Link-o-rama Friday, and What Would Hawthorne Say.
Family Friday: Onechan will be having a yochien-like experience every Saturday in Buffalo, so combined with her American hoikuen and imoto's beginning onechan's old day-care arrangement on Tuesdays and Thursdays in Fredonia, I'll have plenty of stories to tell.
Research Weekend: A less quirky but more inclusive name than the old CitizenSE's Latest Crazy Hawthorne Idea, but basically fulfills the same function and allows me to make my old Close Reading Tuesday and Intertextual Thursday posts a little more substantive.
Yes, I'm turning CitizenSE into a less research-centric blog than it has been in the past. The leave is most definitely over, but it's not just that. I figure I ought to try to better represent the full range of things I'm doing as a tenured professor. They're new enough and strange enough again to me after gaining some distance on them over the past year, literally and figuratively, that I should be able to do something interesting with them. And since my core audience seems to consist of fantastically-talented and incredibly-prolific graduate students, giving some perspective on (professional) life off the Research I track may be of interest to them.
Looking back over my summer output here, it's clear that the travel, talks, and teaching took a toll on my Hawthorne blogging. Putting myself back on a schedule may help CitizenSE get back on track--and help me regain my momentum on my primary research projects. We'll see!
Teaching Tuesday: I still won't blog about current students, but I will offer some reflections on the way I approach and handle teaching now that I'm back in the U.S. again.
Service Wednesday: After a service-free year in Japan, I should have one or two interesting thoughts on what it's like to ease myself back into the kinds of institution-building activities I devoted a good deal of my pre-tenure time to.
Free-form Thursday: Combines and replaces the old Unexpected Hawthorne Wednesday, CitizenSE Hawthorniana Link-o-rama Friday, and What Would Hawthorne Say.
Family Friday: Onechan will be having a yochien-like experience every Saturday in Buffalo, so combined with her American hoikuen and imoto's beginning onechan's old day-care arrangement on Tuesdays and Thursdays in Fredonia, I'll have plenty of stories to tell.
Research Weekend: A less quirky but more inclusive name than the old CitizenSE's Latest Crazy Hawthorne Idea, but basically fulfills the same function and allows me to make my old Close Reading Tuesday and Intertextual Thursday posts a little more substantive.
Yes, I'm turning CitizenSE into a less research-centric blog than it has been in the past. The leave is most definitely over, but it's not just that. I figure I ought to try to better represent the full range of things I'm doing as a tenured professor. They're new enough and strange enough again to me after gaining some distance on them over the past year, literally and figuratively, that I should be able to do something interesting with them. And since my core audience seems to consist of fantastically-talented and incredibly-prolific graduate students, giving some perspective on (professional) life off the Research I track may be of interest to them.
Looking back over my summer output here, it's clear that the travel, talks, and teaching took a toll on my Hawthorne blogging. Putting myself back on a schedule may help CitizenSE get back on track--and help me regain my momentum on my primary research projects. We'll see!
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Zutto Zutto Tomodachi; and, The Collected Adventures of Sparkychan and Gojochan (Thus Far)
Cross-posted at Mostly Harmless
Has a better ring to it than "best friends 4evah," right? Well, it has about the same meaning. It's a line from the song onechan and her friends sang at the graduation ceremony for the older kids in her yochien this past spring. Since we're leaving Fukuoka before she can get to take part in a similar ceremony herself--in fact, we've already spent a full day in Chiba--I'm taking a break tonight from LPGA blogging to convey a big "sayonara" to all the Fukuoka friends she's leaving.
Maybe their parents can read them the Collected Adventures of Sparkychan and Gojochan (Thus Far), courtesy of Uncle Bill Benzon, and leave a comment or three here for him and onechan....
July 9: For onechan [in response to this and that]
July 10: The discussion continues
July 11: Onechan's Adventure [in response to this]
July 12: Where's Onechan? and Calling Onechan! Calling Onechan!
July 14: Help is on the way and There They Are! Yippieeee! [in response to this]
July 17: Onechan's Choice
July 19: Calling all kidz! Calling all kidz! [in response to this]
July 23: Sigh
July 28: Catch you later alligator
August 1: Where's the bunny rabbit?
[Update (8/3/07): New one--Onechan Tells a Story]
[Update (8/11/07): Another new one--The Little Worm from Kansas]
[Update (8/14/07): And another--Twas brillig]
[Update (8/16/07): And yet another--Sparkychan & Gojochan Adventure Time Mystery Theatre]
[Update (8/21/07): Check the comments on the last installment (thus far) for onechan's and imoto's immediate reactions to Sparkychan and Gojochan showing up in Dunkirk!]
Has a better ring to it than "best friends 4evah," right? Well, it has about the same meaning. It's a line from the song onechan and her friends sang at the graduation ceremony for the older kids in her yochien this past spring. Since we're leaving Fukuoka before she can get to take part in a similar ceremony herself--in fact, we've already spent a full day in Chiba--I'm taking a break tonight from LPGA blogging to convey a big "sayonara" to all the Fukuoka friends she's leaving.
Maybe their parents can read them the Collected Adventures of Sparkychan and Gojochan (Thus Far), courtesy of Uncle Bill Benzon, and leave a comment or three here for him and onechan....
July 9: For onechan [in response to this and that]
July 10: The discussion continues
July 11: Onechan's Adventure [in response to this]
July 12: Where's Onechan? and Calling Onechan! Calling Onechan!
July 14: Help is on the way and There They Are! Yippieeee! [in response to this]
July 17: Onechan's Choice
July 19: Calling all kidz! Calling all kidz! [in response to this]
July 23: Sigh
July 28: Catch you later alligator
August 1: Where's the bunny rabbit?
[Update (8/3/07): New one--Onechan Tells a Story]
[Update (8/11/07): Another new one--The Little Worm from Kansas]
[Update (8/14/07): And another--Twas brillig]
[Update (8/16/07): And yet another--Sparkychan & Gojochan Adventure Time Mystery Theatre]
[Update (8/21/07): Check the comments on the last installment (thus far) for onechan's and imoto's immediate reactions to Sparkychan and Gojochan showing up in Dunkirk!]
Monday, July 30, 2007
A Real Citizen of Somewhere Else Moment
So on the way to the local Matsuri festival, the tsuma voted in yesterday's historic parliamentary defeat for the LDP. Inside the junior high school gym, onechan and I had the following conversation.
Onechan: What is mama doing?
Me: She's voting.
O: I want to vote, too!
Me: You can't yet. You have to be older.
O: Go-sai? [Five?]
Me: No, bigger. Like 18 or 20.
O: You should vote, too.
Me: I can't vote in Japan. I can only vote in America.
O: Why?
Me: Well, you have to be a citizen to vote. Mama's a citizen of Japan. I'm a citizen of the U.S.
O: America?
Me: Yeah. So I can only vote in America. And mama can only vote in Japan. But you and imoto can vote in both countries when you get old enough.
O: [not that impressed]
Me: And then when you're even older you'll have to decide which one country you want to be a citizen of.
O: [not that impressed]
Me: OK, mama's done. Time to go to the festival!
O: Yeah!!
Onechan: What is mama doing?
Me: She's voting.
O: I want to vote, too!
Me: You can't yet. You have to be older.
O: Go-sai? [Five?]
Me: No, bigger. Like 18 or 20.
O: You should vote, too.
Me: I can't vote in Japan. I can only vote in America.
O: Why?
Me: Well, you have to be a citizen to vote. Mama's a citizen of Japan. I'm a citizen of the U.S.
O: America?
Me: Yeah. So I can only vote in America. And mama can only vote in Japan. But you and imoto can vote in both countries when you get old enough.
O: [not that impressed]
Me: And then when you're even older you'll have to decide which one country you want to be a citizen of.
O: [not that impressed]
Me: OK, mama's done. Time to go to the festival!
O: Yeah!!
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Berube Mayoral Campaign Kicks Off with Analogy Contest
Cross-posted at Mostly Harmless.
Because it's our last Friday in Fukuoka (for this year, that is) and we have it on good authority that "analogies are mostly the refuge of the simple-minded," I hereby announce that theOfficial Michael Berube Campaign for Mayor of Blogoramaville is leading off with an analogy contest. Just fill in the blanks on any or all of the following in comments!
1. Michael Berube:[x=Republican Presidential Candidate]::a:b
2. Michael Berube:[y=Possible Mayoral Competitor]::c:d
3. Michael Berube:[z=Possible Running Mate]::e:f
4. Michael Berube:g::h:i
And remember to keep it simple, stupid. No similes or metaphors allowed.
Because it's our last Friday in Fukuoka (for this year, that is) and we have it on good authority that "analogies are mostly the refuge of the simple-minded," I hereby announce that the
1. Michael Berube:[x=Republican Presidential Candidate]::a:b
2. Michael Berube:[y=Possible Mayoral Competitor]::c:d
3. Michael Berube:[z=Possible Running Mate]::e:f
4. Michael Berube:g::h:i
And remember to keep it simple, stupid. No similes or metaphors allowed.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Lit Bloggers of the World Unite...
...you have nothing to lose but your self-respect and the esteem of your closest friends and colleagues. No, I'm not talking about the ongoing Mostly Harmless event--although Europhiles and Europeans among you may be interested in it. I'm talking about my campaign to get Michael Berube elected Mayor of Blogoramaville in 2008! Pass it on.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Programming Note
Sorry to report that blogging here will get sparser and lazier for the rest of the month and into August. Although my last class meets in a few minutes, I'll be busy grading and meeting with personal and family friends for farewells during our last two weeks here in Fukuoka. We're cramming a trip to Kagoshima into the second half of this week, as well (here's hoping the forecasts for another early typhoon in southern Kyushu turn out to be wrong this time). And let's not forget boxing, shipping, packing, and giving away our stuff. Fortunately we can leave some things with the tsuma's family in Chiba, where we'll be from July 31 through August 14th, but while there I'll be hanging with onechan and imoto's cousins for the first week and then grading the last set of papers during the second week. So I guess what I'm saying is that Citizen of Somewhere Else will be a bit of a lower priority than it's been even in the past two months. I'll try to make up for the lack of quantity here with quality when I do post. But my five regular readers know how rare that is even when the law of averages is working in my favor! But it's entirely possible the next time you "hear" from me here, this blog will be back on Eastern Standard Time. Or is that Daylight Savings?
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Pattern Recognition: Historicizing U.S. Representations of Japan
This is the overview of U.S. representations of Japan I actually was able to give yesterday at the JASF, despite the storm. Over at Mostly Harmless today I'll give the conclusion to the talk, which speculated on what to expect in the next 25 years, and tomorrow here I'll discuss the Q&A (yes, I left 25 minutes for it, just as I wanted--love it when a plan comes together!).
But why this sudden popularity of Japanese popular culture in the U.S.? How does it relate to the history of U.S. representations of Japan? What light does my own personal history of engagements with Japanese popular culture shed on that larger history I focused on in my previous two talks? How does the history of U.S.-Japanese interactions and interrelations look from the perspective of 2007 rather than, say, 1995 or 1945?
Well, as I sketched out in my first two talks, the image of Japan shifted radically in American eyes, from an exotic, backward culture in the mid-nineteenth century to a modernizing, industrializing rising power at the turn into the twentieth century, to a militarist, imperialist enemy by the middle of that century, and then shifted again, from a key ally in the Cold War to a key economic rival in a post-Cold War era that some feared would lead to a broader competition over which country would be #1 in the next century. In part due to Japan’s economic troubles over much of the past decade, in part due to the decision of Japanese automakers to locate production facilities in the U.S., and in part due to a combination of American economic success and a new political focus on the War on Terror, the era of “Japan-bashing” and Japan panics came to an end much faster than anyone would have anticipated in the early 1990s. As Japanese political and economic leaders found some ways to cooperate with American neoliberals and neoconservatives, as trade frictions eased and American media attention to China and India’s economies seemingly overshadowed Japan’s, cultural exchanges of all kinds between the U.S. and Japan flourished in the 21st century.
What does this all mean? Certainly, for the W.W. II generation and their Baby Boomer children, Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, Nanking and Nagasaki, the Tokyo Tribunals and Article 9, and the samurai and the geisha continue to symbolize the poles and polarities of their representations of and responses to Japan. But I would argue that my generation and younger ones have very different perspectives on Japan--and that they are gaining a hearing from older generations. What I take from my own personal history is that younger Americans have many more windows on Japanese culture, many more lenses through which to examine images of Japan, much more access to uncut and unedited works from Japanese popular culture, a much wider and more varied range of clichés, conventions, stereotypes, and discourses to select from, identify with, question, or modify, and a much more vivid sense of being part of a global, transnational mix of cultures and styles than any Americans before them. As many people of my generation moved into positions in film, television, and literature that allowed them to follow through on the same kind of transnational influences that I had been unwittingly exposed to in my childhood and teenage years, it became clear that they brought a different attitude into their aesthetic, ethical, political, and theoretical dialogues with artists from different countries and cultures than in previous generations.
So I feel there’s cause for optimism in future U.S.-Japan relations based on Japan’s current association among many in the younger generations in America with cutting-edge youth culture, innovative entertainment technologies, and imaginative and varied animation techniques, styles, and stories, not to mention the fact that a wider range of Japanese popular subcultures are entering the mainstream of American popular culture on virtually their own terms than ever before. At the very least, the view from 2007 of the history of American representations of Japan gives more cause for optimism in future U.S.-Japan relations than, say, the view from 1945 or 1995. At most, we may be entering into a period where both Japan and the U.S. comfortably consider and treat each other as equals. But if the history of shifting American images of Japan teaches us anything, it’s just how volatile and subject to rapid reversals they are. It may turn out that the anime craze is our century’s version of japonisme, that the Harajuku cosuplayers are postmodern geisha, that this period will be swept away by history like a similar period in the 1920s. So let’s look ahead as soberly as we can.
Friday, July 13, 2007
The Rise and Fall of the Pacific Rim
Here's my take on 1973-1995 representations of Japan in American culture, which leads nicely into my first Mostly Harmless post from the third and last talk in my "Shifting American Images of Japan" series that may or may not be happening in a few hours (depending on how bad this typhoon turns out to be). If you read that one and its two sequels there, you'll be ready for tomorrow's post here....
For those undercurrents, go to Mostly Harmless--then see my next post for my rejoinder to the rather pessimistic conclusions of my first two talks, which ended their surveys in 1945 and 1995. How does Japan look differently to Americans in 2007 than at either of these low points in U.S.-Japanese relations? I can't answer that question in general, but I do offer a personal perspective over at Mostly Harmless.
By the mid-1970s, however, world politics and global economics again helped contribute to massive transformations in American representations of and relations with Japan. Under the pressure of President Nixon’s turn toward engaging the People’s Republic of China, the American defeat in Vietnam, and the oil shocks that opened and closed the decade, the attitudes, assumptions, and images of the early Cold War underwent a seismic shift. We can track such shocks, aftershocks, and tsunamis in American economic theory, popular culture, diplomacy, and public memory between 1973 and 1995. These images in elite and popular culture, however, don’t merely reflect what I’ll call, building on the work of Christopher Connery, “the rise and fall of the Pacific Rim”; they also pushed many in Japan and the U.S. during the 1990s to consider whether the American Century in Japan was coming to an end. At the close of the Cold War, many influential Americans were wondering—and worrying—where the U.S.-Japan relationship was headed.
Connery argues that Pacific Rim discourse arose in the mid-1970s as the early Cold War views of Japan and Asia became untenable in the U.S.; Japan was by then no longer a latecomer to modernity or a junior partner to the West, but instead a fully modernized and global economic power, leading other East Asian Newly Industrialized Countries down the road of efficiency, quality, high technology, and export-led growth. The Pacific, which formerly had been characterized as an American lake--part of the system of containment of Soviet expansionism--was now seen largely in economic terms, as a new frontier for multinational capital, a place where an American economy suffering from stagflation and energy crises could renew itself, an alternative to European social democracy and Soviet bloc state socialism. The imperative was to learn from Japan, as American futurologists like Alvin Toffler, sociologists like Ezra Vogel, and hosts of management consultants argued that Japan exemplified efficient orchestration of capital, technology, and labor, established best practices in management, and combined economic growth, equitable distribution of wealth, and social cohesion. Even revisionist work in the 1980s, such as Chalmers Johnson’s influential study, MITI and the Japanese Miracle, which emphasized Japan’s plan-rational rather than market-rational approach and characterized it as having a developmental rather than regulatory state, did so largely in order to point out lessons for the United States. By the mid-1980s, when Japan became a creditor nation, the idea that the future would be Japanese was so widespread in the U.S. that two kinds of backlashes developed in American popular culture--what I’ll call, following David Morley and Kevin Robins, techno-orientalism, and what came to be known as “Japan bashing.”
American cyberpunk, from the noir-ish stylings of science fiction films like Blade Runner and science fiction novels like William Gibson’s Neuromancer in the 1980s to the more politicized and parodic portraits in Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash in the early 1990s, picked up on, played with, and projected Pacific Rim discourse’s identification of Japan with the future. By performing variations on a Japan-dominated future--either through focusing on a down-and-out American trying to survive the gritty, corrupt, and violent underworld of Yakuza, urban sprawl, and great disparities of wealth and power, by emphasizing the dehumanizing aspects of life and work in Japanese corporate domes that dot an environmentally and economically devastated U.S., or by portraying Japanese salarymen and entertainers as rigid, racist, and out of touch with reality yet so rich as to be ubiquitous in cyberspace--these works register some of the anxieties evoked by Pacific Rim discourse. Technology in all these works is both enabling and alienating, titillating and threatening. Classic works of Japanese anime like Akira and Ghost in the Shell should be seen as responses to the techno-orientalism of these and other versions of American cyberpunk.
Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, the tensions between Pacific Rim optimism and techno-orientalist anxieties prompted an even more extreme and pessimistic backlash against Japan. “Japan-bashing,” as it came to be known, emphasized fears of Japanese infiltration and invasion that hadn’t been aired so publicly in the U.S. since the World War II era. In fact, as Dower, Morley and Robins, Toshio Ueno, Masao Miyoshi, and many others have documented, the 1980s witnessed a recycling and upgrading of classic stereotypes from American WW II propaganda. Consider the interlocking use of smallness and largeness in the following images from American editorial cartoons and magazine covers. References to “economic Pearl Harbors,” “the Cold War is over and Japan won,” and the prospect of coming trade wars that could trigger actual armed conflicts between the U.S. and Japan began to appear with ever-increasing regularity and repetition in the U.S. business and international press. Hollywood films such as Black Rain and Rising Sun fed into this Japan panic, using the conventions of the thriller, the mystery, and the cross-cultural buddy movie to reach a mass movie-going audience. U.S. labor and government officials alike accused Japan of unfair business practices and lobbied for the opening of Japan to foreign trade and investment. In this climate, Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American, was beaten to death in 1982 by two recently laid-off Detroit auto workers who thought he was Japanese, and Yoshihiro Hattori, a Japanese exchange student was shot and killed by a panicked white Baton Rouge resident when he got lost on his way to a Halloween party in 1992 and knocked on the wrong door at the wrong time.
It is in this context that the two greatest crises in U.S.-Japan relations of the 1990s occurred, during President George H.W. Bush’s Gulf War and the planning for a Smithsonian museum exhibit on the Enola Gay that originally sought to educate the American public about historians’ debates over the decision to use the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both enacted another kind of return of World War II to American diplomacy and public memory. With the Gulf War, Japan came under heavy criticism from the U.S.-led coalition for practicing mere “checkbook diplomacy” and hiding from its global responsibilities behind an outdated peace constitution. Soon later, a coalition of veterans’ organizations and Republican politicians demanded revisions to the plans for a National Air and Space Museum exhibit that they deemed too attentive to Japanese suffering and too skeptical toward the official rationale for the decision to use the atomic bomb. Even after multiple revisions were made, they remained dissatisfied with them, successfully shut down the exhibition, and forced the resignation of leading Smithsonian officials. Ironically, it was largely conservatives and religious leaders who had been the first in the U.S. to criticize the atomic bombings during the late 1940s and early 1950s when Democrats lead U.S. foreign policy; in 1995, with a new Republican majority in Congress looking to influence President Clinton’s foreign and domestic policy agenda, historians who criticized the Cold War consensus on the atomic bombings were accused of political correctness and a patriotism deficit.
By the mid-1990s, then, with the dissolution of Cold War conditions that had turned bitter enemies into staunch allies, American images of Japan had turned so negative that people on both sides of the Pacific worried over the prospects of a return to World War II-era relations. The American Century in Japan seemed to be over, a victim of Japanese overconfidence and American defensiveness. In response to the rise of nihonjinron discourse in Japan and announcements of a “Japan that can say ‘no’” rocketing around the world, Americans once again, just as in World War II, strove to turn positives among Japanese elites into negatives for American audiences. The title of Walter LaFaber’s late-1990s history of U.S.-Japanese relations, The Clash, which was heavily influenced by the fall of the Pacific Rim and the apparent end of the American Century in Japan, says it all—a narrative of inevitable conflict between the two countries was the order of the day. When even sober historians known for their pioneering treatment of tendencies toward American imperialism in U.S. foreign policy start echoing themes of the most nativist Japan-bashers, serious questions must be raised about the possibility for any American to develop a truly objective attitude toward and perspective on Japan.
The power of long-held images and recently-recycled representations to shape perceptions of reality, to color attitudes and feelings toward others, and to affect actions and interactions as well as intercultural communications might well lead to pessimistic conclusions about the capacity even for highly-educated and well-informed Americans with extensive personal experience in Japan to transcend their times. U.S. images of Japan may seem frozen into arrogantly negative or condescendingly positive stereotypes, or arbitrarily tossed on the waves formed by geopolitical and economic shifts and shocks.
Yet even during the 1980s and early 1990s, which many characterized as the lowest point in U.S.-Japan relations since World War II, there were other undercurrents, patterns in American representations of Japan that perhaps are more visible from our standpoint today than a decade ago.
For those undercurrents, go to Mostly Harmless--then see my next post for my rejoinder to the rather pessimistic conclusions of my first two talks, which ended their surveys in 1945 and 1995. How does Japan look differently to Americans in 2007 than at either of these low points in U.S.-Japanese relations? I can't answer that question in general, but I do offer a personal perspective over at Mostly Harmless.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
From Wartime Enemy to Cold War Ally
Yes, Friday the 13th laziness on your bloggy menu today! Here's my survey of shifts in American representations of Japan between 1941 and 1973, delivered last Saturday at the JASF.
Last week, I focused on John Dower’s analysis of the use of animal imagery in American war propaganda to dehumanize Japanese soldiers during the Pacific War. This week, I want to interweave his emphasis with that of University of California at Riverside Asian American Studies scholar Traise Yamamoto, who in Masking Selves, Making Subjects demonstrates how Japanese people and culture were infantilized and feminized in American popular culture over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Combining Dower’s and Yamamoto’s focuses allows me to illustrate how sharply American images of Japan shifted over the course of the 1940s and 1950s and to suggest what’s at stake in that transformation.
Consider this series of cartoons from the beginning, middle, and end of the Pacific War. Throughout, Japanese soldiers are represented as monkeys and apes, but note how the imagery, style, connotations, associations, and allusions shift from treacherous to rampaging to cute. Now examine the gender politics of these wartime images of Japanese soldiers and female victims and how they contrast with these Occupation-era images of Japanese women and American military personnel. Taken together, these images provide an index of changing American representational strategies toward Japan. Indeed, they might even be said to construct for their American audiences a series of versions of Japan: from pesky and annoying enemy, to dangerous and powerful enemy, to savage and bestial enemy, to welcoming and inviting subjects in a demilitarized society. The kimonos the Japanese women wear are particularly significant; they not only allude to pre-modern Japan, but also evoke the “Madame Butterfly” image that many feminist scholars have shown to be so influential on Western perceptions of Japan. Indeed, whether the metaphor is of husband and wife, parent and child, or teacher and student, the underlying story these images tell is of the power relations between the U.S. and Japan during the years of the Pacific War and Occupation.
Such shifts were even more prevalent and overt in materials prepared for those Americans being sent to defeat, occupy, and reconstruct Japan in the mid-1940s. In the 1945 propaganda efforts of On to Tokyo and Know Your Enemy--Japan, Japanese barbarism and lack of individuality were emphasized, according to the established wartime script, yet just a few months after they were released, images of women and children flooded the screen in Our Job in Japan just as its narrative shifted from a critique of Imperial Japan to the prospects of a thoroughly reconstructed, demilitarized, and democratized society. We should pay equal attention to the continuities between this Occupation training film and practically concurrent war-time propaganda as to their disjunctures, for the tension between them signals the divisions among those planning the Occupation of Japan.
As John Dower documents in Embracing Defeat, conflicts between the “Japan crowd” and the “China crowd” among U.S. foreign policy elites intensified as the tide of battle turned in America’s favor in the Pacific War. Soon after August 11, 1945, when Dean Acheson replaced Joseph Grew as undersecretary of state, it quickly became clear that the China crowd--associated with a desire for a more radical reconstruction of Japan than the more conservative reformists among the Japan crowd were advocating for--had won this intellectual, political, and institutional debate. Thus, although the noted Japanologists of the 1940s worked together to craft a U.S. Office of War Information report in December 1944, they were almost completely excluded from General MacArthur’s administration during the Occupation.
In retrospect, however, the distance between both crowds seems rather small. Both urged General MacArthur to rule indirectly through the Emperor, his advisors, and the Japanese state bureaucracy, in order to capitalize on the loyalty of the citizenry to familiar and traditional authority figures. Both were blind to the colonialist structures and implications of the Occupation, particularly in Okinawa. Both saw Japan primarily through the lens of American histories and interests.
And those interests would shift dramatically by the late 1940s, with serious implications for Japan, Asia, and the world. The “reverse course” in the American Occupation of Japan has been covered by a host of distinguished historians; the shifts from purging militarists to purging Communists, from demilitarizing to remilitarizing Japan, and from political to economic reform are too large and complex to cover here. But a quick look at two non-fictional films that focus on the U.S.’s role in East Asia during World War II, the first from 1944 and the second from 1953, can serve to illustrate how dramatically the “home front” image of Japan changed from World War II to the Cold War. The Battle of China, one of the final films in Frank Capra’s Why We Fight war propaganda series, emphasizes the heroism of the Chinese resistance to Japanese imperialism and war atrocities at a time when U.S. war planners thought the road to defeating Imperial Japan ran through China and geopolitical strategists hoped that supporting Chinese nationalist forces against Chinese communists and Japanese imperialists would lead to post-war benefits for the U.S. By contrast, the celebrated Victory at Sea television documentary series, produced after the communists won and the U.S. “lost” China--after, that is, Japan had shifted from wartime enemy to Cold War ally--surveys the exact same history, but this time with an emphasis on the Anglo-American joint effort with their colonized subjects in India and Southeast Asia to free China from Japanese imperialism. This is a story tailored to the Third World in the mid-1950s, implying that American leadership can protect them from Soviet or Chinese domination; the earlier pro-China, anti-Japan narrative is almost completely submerged in this effort to make the East Asian and Southeast Asian theaters in World War II relevant to the needs of the Cold War U.S. in the final months of the Korean War.
Hollywood, too, followed suit during the 1950s, promoting the U.S.-Japanese alliance in films whose plots hinged on American military personnel’s relationships with Japanese women. In sharp contrast to U.S. W.W. II movies like The Purple Heart (1944), which make violent and brutal acts of male Japanese soldiers against U.S. POWs representative of Japan itself, the relationships between male American soldiers and female Japanese civilians in movies such as Japanese War Bride (1952), Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), and Sayonara (1957) allegorized the new relationships between their respective countries. As these movies were produced just as and after new American immigration laws were dramatically transforming policies established in the nativist 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, they represent and enact the continuing stereotyping as well as challenges to racial prejudice happening in the United States during the 1950s around citizenship rights for descendants of Asian immigrants and civil rights for African Americans. Some aspects of American power in Japan and attitudes toward Asians are romanticized and naturalized in these films, but others are questioned and criticized. The love plot and its vicissitudes in each of these 1950s films makes possible a reeducation of sorts of American movie-going audiences. Their domestication of U.S.-Japan relations brought the Cold War home, helping to normalize the drastic shifts in U.S. policy toward Japan over the previous two decades.
Thus, even as some U.S. officials began calling for the rapid remilitarization of Japan, even as Japan became a crucial workshop during the Korean War, even as the American reconstruction effort shifted from the Occupation to a kind of East Asian Marshall Plan, even, that is, as Japan became the hub of American diplomatic, military, and economic efforts to contain Soviet and Chinese communism, the representative images of Japan in American popular culture came to be modernized geisha figures. Even as Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, Nanking and Nagasaki, and the Tokyo Tribunals and Article 9 came to symbolize the poles and polarities of American representations of and responses to Japan, so, too, did the samurai and the geisha. In part due to the emphasis and efforts of state and civil society within Japan and in part due to American preoccupation with communist enemies in the Soviet Union, China, Korea, and Vietnam during the 1950s through early 1970s, however, the feminized, receptive image of Japan seemed to have eclipsed the aggressive, militarist image of the late 1930s and early 1940s.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
That's More Like It! Back to Lazy Blogging, JASF Edition
Time to set the table! What follows is the opening of a talk I gave last Saturday at the Japan-America Society of Fukuoka. For this coming Saturday's talk, which is FINALLY done, check out Mostly Harmless. Given how busy I am in our final month or so in Japan (on this stay, that is!), I'm going to subject my "readers" to more of this talk over the next few days. Not the best of meals, but what can you do?
This talk, “The End of the American Century in Japan? 1941-1995,” picks up where last week’s “From Manifest Destiny to War in the Pacific, 1846-1945” left off. In that talk, I gave a very rough sketch of the changing images of Japan in American eyes, from an exotic and backward culture in the mid-nineteenth century to a modernizing, industrializing rising power at the turn into the twentieth century, to a militarist, imperialist enemy by the middle of that century. I emphasized that such shifts should be understood in the context of American experiences with and representations of other non-U.S. cultures and countries and argued that they are often more revealing of American mindsets than Japanese realities. By showing how certain images and styles of representation get cut and pasted from one group to another or get recycled from one time period to another, I tried to suggest how complex and difficult it can be to understand and analyze them.
Implicit in my talk were the following questions. What is the relation between image and reality? Between attitude and action? How, for instance, did Commodore Matthew Perry’s studies of European writings on Japanese culture and society as he was preparing to lead his first expedition to Japan, along with his experiences fighting Mexicans and Indians in the Mexican War of 1846-1848, influence his strategies and tactics as a negotiator with bakufu representatives? In what ways may Washington war planners, all the way up to President Harry Truman, have been influenced by American war propaganda emphasizing the brutal savagery of the Japanese military and the fanatical loyalty of the Japanese citizenry, particularly in the spring and summer of 1945?
These questions, of course, raise larger and even more difficult ones. To what extent can subjective human beings limited to partial perspectives understand each other objectively? Indeed, is such objectivity possible or desirable? This is not only a question of knowledge, understanding, and truth; it is also a question of how to understand the nature of reality. If we are tempted to argue that Americans often and perhaps even consistently mischaracterized Japan between 1846 and 1945, by what standard do we judge their characterizations to be mistaken? If even Japanese self-images of this time period do not escape the difficulties and complexities of aesthetic and political representation, where is such a standard to be found?
These issues in the relation between representation and reality, in turn, raise questions about how to characterize the first century of U.S.-Japanese relations. Was the Pacific War an inevitable conflict between two rising and expansionist powers with claims to and designs on the Pacific? Was it a blip in an otherwise amicable bilateral partnership? Was it a relatively arbitrary swing of a randomly seesawing relationship?
I’m going to return to these questions at the end of this talk. But first, by focusing on the shifts between 1941 and 1995 in American representations of Japan from wartime enemy to Cold War ally to economic rival, I’ll emphasize just how complex and difficult they are--and how much is at stake in them.
Somebody Tell Neil Gaiman
Thanks to the brilliant Bill Benzon, Gojira's telling Tie-Dye Hana Kuma onechan adventure stories over at Mostly Harmless. Reminds me of certain Sandman issues!
P.S.: Somebody (else?) tell me how to get real titles for my posts!
Thanks to the brilliant Bill Benzon, Gojira's telling Tie-Dye Hana Kuma onechan adventure stories over at Mostly Harmless. Reminds me of certain Sandman issues!
P.S.: Somebody (else?) tell me how to get real titles for my posts!
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
I have no idea why blogger isn't allowing me to enter titles to my posts here and at Mostly Harmless lately, but at least I don't have to decide between "What Does Flannery O'Connor Have to Do with Being a Fulbright Visiting Lecturer?" and "The Life You Change Might Be Your Own." In fact, I'm feeling confident enough about my last JASF lecture that in this quickie post I'll challenge my handful of readers to posit a connection between the above two title options and guess what I talked about last Thursday at the Kyushu Fulbright Alumni Association meeting. Hints in the tags. Well, one. Have fun. Back soon.
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
Born on the 4th of July...
...was one Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1804. Happy Birthday! I really wonder what you'd make of the state of the union.
[Update 7/9/07: and Ralph Luker didn't note it. For shame! But he did point us to this Joseph Nye piece earlier, so I take that back. By the way, I will return to CitizenSE blogging as soon as I finish my last talk. I have to deliver it Saturday and get it to the translator before then, so hopefully that will be sooner rather than later.]
[Update 7/9/07: and Ralph Luker didn't note it. For shame! But he did point us to this Joseph Nye piece earlier, so I take that back. By the way, I will return to CitizenSE blogging as soon as I finish my last talk. I have to deliver it Saturday and get it to the translator before then, so hopefully that will be sooner rather than later.]
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Whoa! Japanese Defense Minister Resigns Over His A-Bomb Remarks
It turns out the exact same day I was giving my first talk on "Shifting American Images of Japan," Defense Minister and Nagasaki native Fumio Kyuma was in my tsuma's hometown sharing his own views on the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan--views close to the mainstream in the U.S., I would add, with the predictable result that Right Blogistan and the 101st Keyboarders are in Red Alert mode. Of course, in Japan, news of his views prompted a wave of highly critical editorials and other responses, leading him to first apologize for his remarks, then retract them, and later resign from his post.
In other news, President Bush shamelessly stands behind discredited Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and commuted Scooter Libby's sentence.
So far the most interesting analysis I've seen has been from Observing Japan. If you know of other interesting ones (even if you don't agree with them), please let me know. I'm sure I'll be getting questions about this during my talk this coming Saturday!
In other news, President Bush shamelessly stands behind discredited Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and commuted Scooter Libby's sentence.
So far the most interesting analysis I've seen has been from Observing Japan. If you know of other interesting ones (even if you don't agree with them), please let me know. I'm sure I'll be getting questions about this during my talk this coming Saturday!
Monday, July 02, 2007
Let's Start July Off With a Bang: Militarization, Propaganda, and the War in the Pacific
OK, so here's the part of my JASF talk that my audience got most into. Too bad I ran out of time. Ah well, gave me material for the opening of the next talk.
What actually took so long was setting up and analyzing my examples. Next talk: more examples!
Militarization, Propaganda, and the War in the Pacific
Having emphasized in the prior two sections of this talk the transnational, multiethnic influences on American representations of mid-nineteenth-century Japan and the ways in which American reexaminations of Meiji Japan were at the same time meditations on the state of the U.S. as it entered the twentieth century, respectively, I want to bring these threads together in this final section on the Pacific War in the 1930s and 1940s. Even though Pearl Harbor and the U.S. war effort quickly crystallized American public opinion vehemently against Japan and most anyone of Japanese descent living in the United States during the war, it’s worth remarking how late--into the late 1930s among many elites and even later in popular culture--the Hearn-London debate from the first decade of the century continued to be played out. Two representative figures here are Robert Heinlein and W.E.B. Du Bois.
Heinlein represents the London school of Japanology. Updating for his contemporaries the media-induced Japanese invasion panic of 1907, London’s own writings on Japan and China, and the 1928-1929 Philip Nowland science fiction novel Armageddon 2419 (which inspired such comic strips featuring Asian villains as Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Flash Gordon), Heinlein’s 1941 science fiction novel Sixth Column posits an Asian invasion of the United States. This popularized image of a “yellow peril” threatening the United States was not just a prejudice of the masses; in 1924, in a culmination of some 40 years of anti-Asian state and federal legislation, the U.S. passed the most restrictive immigration law in its history, completely excluding emigration from Asia (except for the quasi-colony of the Philippines) and drastically reducing emigration from southern and eastern Europe. With the demographic threat contained by the Johnson-Reed Act, the “yellow peril” shifted toward suspicion of the rising regional power in Asia, Japan.
Du Bois, by contrast, is closer to Hearn. As a host of recent studies--most notably by Vijay Prashad, Marc Gallichio, and Bill Mullen--has unearthed, many prominent African-American intellectuals during the 1920s and 1930s looked favorably upon both Taisho and Showa Japan. W.E.B. Du Bois, who during this period developed an innovative socialist critique of racism and colonialism, applauded the Taisho regime’s efforts to codify anti-racism and anti-colonialism in the League of Nations. Given his tendency to excuse the occupation of Korea, perhaps it should come as no surprise that even as the Showa regime leaned more and more toward militarism and expansionism--and even after the staging of the Manchurian Incident--Du Bois continued to hold out hope that the anti-colonial would outweigh the imperial in Japanese international politics. Only after 1937 did Du Bois pin his anti-colonial hopes on China and shift to a critique of Japanese depradations against Chinese civilians.
For different reasons, many U.S elites began to peg American national interests with China over the course of the 1930s, as well. Between the popularity of Pearl Buck’s 1931 novel The Good Earth, outrage at Japanese crimes against humanity with the bombing of Shanghai and the rape of Nanking, and the hope that Chinese nationalists would see the United States as a possible ally in their fight against European and Japanese imperialism, opinion leaders in the U.S. began to quietly agitate for war against Japan.
After years of such efforts, the U.S. public was primed for a nearly unanimous shift in representations of Japan by the U.S. government, media, and entertainment industries following the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. And indeed, between documentaries like Frank Capra’s series Why We Fight, Hollywood movies like The Purple Heart that focused on Japanese atrocities against American POWs, comic books like Captain America, editorials and editorial cartoons in major newspapers and magazines, and even animated shorts featuring Bugs Bunny and Popeye, whatever debates over and ambivalence in the pre-war American images of Japan were washed away by a wave of anti-Japanese war propaganda.
John Dower has traced a fascinating shift in this propaganda over the course of the war. At first, as the Japanese military was winning battle after battle, American propagandists labored to convince the American public to take the threat from Japan seriously and to give up their stereotypes of the Japanese as small, harmless, incompetent, and even ludicrous when it came to fighting with modern weapons of war. Next, as the bloodiness of the battles and difficulty of seeing a way to victory became apparent, propagandists shifted to producing and questioning images of Japanese as super-soldiers. The sneaky, back-stabbing monkey images used to symbolize Japanese soldiers during the first year of the war were transformed into images of gigantic, powerful, rampaging apes, for instance. Then, as the tide of battle turned in the U.S.’s favor, images of Japanese as vermin to be exterminated began to appear, followed by a return to the mocking, parodic images from the first weeks of the war.
Christina Jarvis has updated and expanded Dower’s work to focus on how the image of war-time allies, such as Chinese and Filipino peoples, became rehabilitated during the war. During the 1930s, for instance, Filipino farm laborers in the American west were often bitterly discriminated against and attacked, as documented in Carlos Bulosan’s autobiography, America Is in the Heart. But once their compatriots were seen as the victims of Japanese imperialism in need of rescue by the U.S. military, attitudes toward diasporic Filipinos in the U.S. shifted, as well. The case of China is even more dramatic, as these scenes from The Battle of China, one of the last films in the Why We Fight series, demonstrate.
The work of Dower, Jarvis, and other historians of American war propaganda raise controversial questions that scholars of the aerial bombing campaigns and of the decision to use the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have also considered. What role did this propaganda play in the decision to bomb civilian populations and dozens of major Japanese cities? Dower analyzes how American propagandists manipulated Japanese war propaganda, turning positives from the Showa regime’s perspective into negatives for the American public’s consumption; this suggests a degree of self-consciousness about the construction and orchestration of images of and from Japan. But did American war planners come to believe their own propaganda that the Japanese people were fanatically devoted to the Emperor, who was a tool of military elites, and needed to be shocked and awed out of their self-destructive reverence? Or after pushing for years for total and unconditional surrender of the Japanese government and sowing the seeds of racialized hatred of the Japanese people, were they constrained by the public opinion they helped cultivate? Over the past several decades, historians have debated the strategic, military, technical, scientific aspects of the American air campaign and the timing of the use of atomic weaponry, considering the full range of alternatives open to U.S. war planners. What a study of the first century of American representations of Japan can bring to the foreground is the relative role played by wartime stereotype, myth, discourse, ideology, and propaganda in the framing and sifting of alternatives. Even if we accept arguments that atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to hasten the war and save American lives that would have been lost in an invasion of Kyushu--the traditional view--or instead that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were meant as object lessons for the Soviet Union--the most controversial rival interpretation--it still is worth emphasizing that in either case the lives of Japanese civilians must have been construed as acceptable losses (as indeed they must during the entire incendiary bombing campaign of Japanese cities). Surely war hates and racism played a significant role in this calculation, even if (or especially if) it was done unthinkingly.
What actually took so long was setting up and analyzing my examples. Next talk: more examples!
Friday, June 29, 2007
White-Blindness
In honor of BitchPhD's brilliant and impassioned takedown of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts's "reasoning" while explaining why the Court struck down some voluntary desegregation plans, I'll direct my handful of loyal readers and googlers lost in blogoramaville to my mid-'90s pre-blog graduate-student web-rant on whiteness, which was reprinted in slightly different form as "White-Blindness" in the 1998 and 2005 editions of The Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity in the United States (and which I last updated in 2005 to bring a few personal references up to date).
[Update: For more on race, you must check out Daniel Gall's plans for Hug the Shoggoth. If this isn't on your blogroll, it should be!]
Special bonus for those too lazy to click, here's my now-dated-yet-still-sadly-relevant piece, with dead links restored thanks to the Internet Archive and a few extra comments and sources thrown in for fun:
If you're coming from my OJ Page, you're probably wondering why I highlighted "white." I'll try to make the explanation brief and make it make sense even if you haven't come from there, and get on to the point of this page.
Why should it matter that I'm white in my opinion over OJ's guilt or innocence? What does my being white have to do with considering the evidence and making a decision? In short, what does race have to do with issues of evaluation, judgment, or epistemology? Hasn't the notion of race itself been shown to be incoherent, self-contradictory, fallacious, without basis in scientific fact or religious doctrine? So what influence can an illusion have on people or their habits of mind?
Well, I suspect that most people would say that the answers are simple: it shouldn't matter, it shouldn't have anything to do with it, nothing, yes, and nothing. But I'm not so sure the answers to these questions are at all simple (and I have a sneaking suspicion that "most people" really means "most white people"). I certainly understand and feel the appeal that the utopic vision of color-blindness underlying these questions and answers has, given the horrible history that race-thinking has been such a constitutive part of in modernity, from the slave trade and slavery to genocide to ethnic cleansing. But I want to question the assumption that if we stop noticing race, if we stop talking about race, if we stop thinking of ourselves as belonging to any race but the human, then the system of racial oppression that those who have identified themselves as white have established will simply go away. I want to question the assumption that to "stop" doing any of these things is a simple and easy process. I want to question the assumption so endemic to "color-blind" thinking on race that the best way to fight racism is to attack the notion of race by showing it to be a cognitive error.
You can see, then, that I fully subscribe to the insight of the social construction of race, but that I do not conflate the idea of "social construction" with the notion of "fallacy" or "cognitive error" or "illusion." I prefer to think the idea of social construction through the lens of such concepts as "ideology," "narrative" and "public fantasy." (But more on that elsewhere.) Thus I can fully agree that I am not "essentially" white (particularly because, as Karen Sacks and Sander Gilman have shown, Jews became white in the New World; David Roediger, Theodore Allen, and Noel Ignatiev have made similar arguments on behalf of Irish immigrants to the U.S. in the nineteenth century--for cites, see below), but at the same time I can not ignore, downplay, or dismiss the privilege being positioned as white tends to bestow, and not only in this country. Nor can I simply assume that how I've been positioned in and by U.S. race discourses and formations has nothing to do with how I experience or reflect upon the world.
So let me pose an alternative set of questions that will bring out why I think my being white has a lot to do with how I understand the OJ case: How does my self-perception and self-identification as "white" (as well as perceptions and identifications by others) affect my perceptions, experiences, thoughts, and judgments, not to mention my life chances? What does thinking of myself as "white" enable me to recognize or cause me to gloss over or elide? What relation does my "whiteness" have to other aspects of my "identity"--class, gender, sexuality, religion, political affiliations, order and area of birth, and on and on to even less obvious ones like the enjoyment I get out of watching The Tick, Daria, South Park, The Simpsons, Dr. Katz, Beavis and Butt-head, and, well, just about anything on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim)?
Here's why I think these questions are better than the first three above. For one thing, those questions take for granted as natural and eternal the existence of "the white race." I would counter that this concept is of relatively recent origin, and that thinking of whiteness or race as some simple biological fact is a mistake. I discuss why this is so at length in my race page, so I'll just say it again briefly here. When I say that it matters that I'm white in how I view the OJ case, I don't mean that my whiteness is this accident of birth that has locked me into an inability to understand people of "other races" ("it's a white thing, I can't understand"). Rather, I mean that being treated as white throughout my entire life (along with a whole range of other socially significant categories--male, middle class, short, Jewish, from upstate NY [no, not just north of NYC--the real thing!], and so on) has contributed toward shaping my habits of mind and emotions, including what I tend to take for granted and my gut reactions, my attitudes toward the police, crime, authority, and the law, where I've lived, who I hang with and am close to, and so on. What I'm saying is that "being white" is a learned phenomenon, and until I started thinking about what kinds of lessons I was learning (usually after a friend took the time to call me out on something), I didn't even recognize that I was being taught, much less question the value of the lessons I had been learning.
For another thing, the first three questions above assume that color-blindness is always in and of itself a good thing. But think about that word. When you are color-blind, you only see in black and white, right? (Well, not exactly, they tell me I'm red/green color blind, although I can almost always tell them apart in real-life situations; still, I don't play those damn orange golf balls! But you can see the point here, right?) Isn't that counter-productive? Doesn't it actually reduce the question of race--the experience of living in a thoroughly racialized society--to a binary, instead of opening it up for interrogation? I can go on with this line of argument (the problems you run into when you reduce the complex history of race discourse, racial formations, and racial oppression to the realms of color, vision, and perception, particularly if you are committed to an anti-racist agenda that amounts to more than diversity management), but let's for the moment take this kind of "I treat people as people" position charitably. I submit that if you are truly committed to color-blindness, then your task shouldn't be to go around lecturing to all those (usually people of color) who are still caught in the grips of race-consciousness, but instead to make the case to whites of the necessity of color-blindness, that is, the recognition and rejection of white racial privilege. (For a less charitable take on "color blindness"--not to mention the first serious response to these comments of mine to date--check out Nkenge Maideyi Zenzele's "The Problem with Color Blindness".)
For those to whom this way of thinking is new, I would like to recommend a few works that were crucial in advancing the discussion and analysis of "whiteness" and "the white race" and which are indispensable today:
The reason I cite these classics along with the more recent African Americanist work on whiteness is that any exploration of whiteness today is practically worthless if it doesn't engage, question, and respond to them. People of color have had to figure out white people and survive under white supremacy for centuries. These works represent the tip of the iceberg of black thinking on whiteness. Check out collections like Home Girls, This Bridge Called My Back, ...But Some of Us Are Brave, Homegirls, Haciendo Caras: Making Face/Making Soul, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Criticism in the Borderlands, The Ethnic Canon, Mapping Multiculturalism, Race Consciousness, and The House that Race Built for a slightly larger (and broader) portion of the iceberg.
This is not the place to go into my full response to the important work of a journal like Race Traitor or David Roediger's Towards the Abolition of Whiteness or Ian Haney Lopez's White by Law, but I can at least recommend these and other works on the history and politics of whiteness (in no particular order, with no attempt at completeness, and perpetually [if rather belatedly] under construction):
You might also check out the following links:
[Update: For more on race, you must check out Daniel Gall's plans for Hug the Shoggoth. If this isn't on your blogroll, it should be!]
Special bonus for those too lazy to click, here's my now-dated-yet-still-sadly-relevant piece, with dead links restored thanks to the Internet Archive and a few extra comments and sources thrown in for fun:
If you're coming from my OJ Page, you're probably wondering why I highlighted "white." I'll try to make the explanation brief and make it make sense even if you haven't come from there, and get on to the point of this page.
Why should it matter that I'm white in my opinion over OJ's guilt or innocence? What does my being white have to do with considering the evidence and making a decision? In short, what does race have to do with issues of evaluation, judgment, or epistemology? Hasn't the notion of race itself been shown to be incoherent, self-contradictory, fallacious, without basis in scientific fact or religious doctrine? So what influence can an illusion have on people or their habits of mind?
Well, I suspect that most people would say that the answers are simple: it shouldn't matter, it shouldn't have anything to do with it, nothing, yes, and nothing. But I'm not so sure the answers to these questions are at all simple (and I have a sneaking suspicion that "most people" really means "most white people"). I certainly understand and feel the appeal that the utopic vision of color-blindness underlying these questions and answers has, given the horrible history that race-thinking has been such a constitutive part of in modernity, from the slave trade and slavery to genocide to ethnic cleansing. But I want to question the assumption that if we stop noticing race, if we stop talking about race, if we stop thinking of ourselves as belonging to any race but the human, then the system of racial oppression that those who have identified themselves as white have established will simply go away. I want to question the assumption that to "stop" doing any of these things is a simple and easy process. I want to question the assumption so endemic to "color-blind" thinking on race that the best way to fight racism is to attack the notion of race by showing it to be a cognitive error.
You can see, then, that I fully subscribe to the insight of the social construction of race, but that I do not conflate the idea of "social construction" with the notion of "fallacy" or "cognitive error" or "illusion." I prefer to think the idea of social construction through the lens of such concepts as "ideology," "narrative" and "public fantasy." (But more on that elsewhere.) Thus I can fully agree that I am not "essentially" white (particularly because, as Karen Sacks and Sander Gilman have shown, Jews became white in the New World; David Roediger, Theodore Allen, and Noel Ignatiev have made similar arguments on behalf of Irish immigrants to the U.S. in the nineteenth century--for cites, see below), but at the same time I can not ignore, downplay, or dismiss the privilege being positioned as white tends to bestow, and not only in this country. Nor can I simply assume that how I've been positioned in and by U.S. race discourses and formations has nothing to do with how I experience or reflect upon the world.
So let me pose an alternative set of questions that will bring out why I think my being white has a lot to do with how I understand the OJ case: How does my self-perception and self-identification as "white" (as well as perceptions and identifications by others) affect my perceptions, experiences, thoughts, and judgments, not to mention my life chances? What does thinking of myself as "white" enable me to recognize or cause me to gloss over or elide? What relation does my "whiteness" have to other aspects of my "identity"--class, gender, sexuality, religion, political affiliations, order and area of birth, and on and on to even less obvious ones like the enjoyment I get out of watching The Tick, Daria, South Park, The Simpsons, Dr. Katz, Beavis and Butt-head, and, well, just about anything on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim)?
Here's why I think these questions are better than the first three above. For one thing, those questions take for granted as natural and eternal the existence of "the white race." I would counter that this concept is of relatively recent origin, and that thinking of whiteness or race as some simple biological fact is a mistake. I discuss why this is so at length in my race page, so I'll just say it again briefly here. When I say that it matters that I'm white in how I view the OJ case, I don't mean that my whiteness is this accident of birth that has locked me into an inability to understand people of "other races" ("it's a white thing, I can't understand"). Rather, I mean that being treated as white throughout my entire life (along with a whole range of other socially significant categories--male, middle class, short, Jewish, from upstate NY [no, not just north of NYC--the real thing!], and so on) has contributed toward shaping my habits of mind and emotions, including what I tend to take for granted and my gut reactions, my attitudes toward the police, crime, authority, and the law, where I've lived, who I hang with and am close to, and so on. What I'm saying is that "being white" is a learned phenomenon, and until I started thinking about what kinds of lessons I was learning (usually after a friend took the time to call me out on something), I didn't even recognize that I was being taught, much less question the value of the lessons I had been learning.
For another thing, the first three questions above assume that color-blindness is always in and of itself a good thing. But think about that word. When you are color-blind, you only see in black and white, right? (Well, not exactly, they tell me I'm red/green color blind, although I can almost always tell them apart in real-life situations; still, I don't play those damn orange golf balls! But you can see the point here, right?) Isn't that counter-productive? Doesn't it actually reduce the question of race--the experience of living in a thoroughly racialized society--to a binary, instead of opening it up for interrogation? I can go on with this line of argument (the problems you run into when you reduce the complex history of race discourse, racial formations, and racial oppression to the realms of color, vision, and perception, particularly if you are committed to an anti-racist agenda that amounts to more than diversity management), but let's for the moment take this kind of "I treat people as people" position charitably. I submit that if you are truly committed to color-blindness, then your task shouldn't be to go around lecturing to all those (usually people of color) who are still caught in the grips of race-consciousness, but instead to make the case to whites of the necessity of color-blindness, that is, the recognition and rejection of white racial privilege. (For a less charitable take on "color blindness"--not to mention the first serious response to these comments of mine to date--check out Nkenge Maideyi Zenzele's "The Problem with Color Blindness".)
For those to whom this way of thinking is new, I would like to recommend a few works that were crucial in advancing the discussion and analysis of "whiteness" and "the white race" and which are indispensable today:
- W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (especially the opening first few pages and the last chapter, but it runs throughout this 1903 book);
- W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Souls of White Folk," in his mid-'20s essay collection, Darkwater;
- W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (a thick tome from the 1930s that challenges the then-popular racist interpretations of the Reconstruction era [1865-1877], but still a classic, and the source of the "wages of whiteness" thesis);
- W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn (this 1940 autobiography/history of the pre-WW II era is still not often cited in discussions of Du Bois's career, but it is an absolutely crucial text for so many reasons, including an imagined discussion with a white friend in the middle of the book);
- Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (largely ignored by whites in the academy in the 1950s, this is now the bible of the "race and American literature and culture" movement; see also "What America Would Be Like Without Blacks" in Going to the Territory for an update of his ideas, and of course read his novel Invisible Man if you haven't already);
- Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (don't believe the hype that puts him as the black demon to Martin Luther King's black angel; read this for yourself--he's one of the best at exposing white supremacy, not only as it worked in the past, but how it is working in the present as well);
- Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (a major collection of short and accessible essays that problematize the whiteness of the '70s women's movement and put racism squarely on the table in a challenging and constructive manner);
- James Baldwin, "On Being White . . . and Other Lies," in Essence (from 1984; good, short, accessible);
- Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (very recent but very influential book on the literary construction of blackness and whiteness, and of course don't forget to read all her novels and the less well-known essay collections she's edited--on the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas and OJ Simpson spectacles);
- bell hooks, "Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination" (in the collection Cultural Studies and elsewhere);
- Patricia Williams, "The Ethnic Scarring of American Whiteness," in The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, ed. Wahneema Lubiano;
- Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind (excellent historical study that is a response to hooks's and others' work, including George Fredrickson's The Black Image in the White Mind).
The reason I cite these classics along with the more recent African Americanist work on whiteness is that any exploration of whiteness today is practically worthless if it doesn't engage, question, and respond to them. People of color have had to figure out white people and survive under white supremacy for centuries. These works represent the tip of the iceberg of black thinking on whiteness. Check out collections like Home Girls, This Bridge Called My Back, ...But Some of Us Are Brave, Homegirls, Haciendo Caras: Making Face/Making Soul, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Criticism in the Borderlands, The Ethnic Canon, Mapping Multiculturalism, Race Consciousness, and The House that Race Built for a slightly larger (and broader) portion of the iceberg.
This is not the place to go into my full response to the important work of a journal like Race Traitor or David Roediger's Towards the Abolition of Whiteness or Ian Haney Lopez's White by Law, but I can at least recommend these and other works on the history and politics of whiteness (in no particular order, with no attempt at completeness, and perpetually [if rather belatedly] under construction):
- David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; Towards the Abolition of Whiteness ; Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White
- Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism
- Richard Dyer, "White," Screen 29.1 (Winter 1988); White
- Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic
- Cheryl Harris, "Whiteness as Property," in Critical Race Theory, ed. Kimberle Crenshaw, et al.
- Mab Segrest, Memoir of a Race Traitor
- Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale
- Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters
- Eric Lott, Love and Theft
- Karen Sacks, "How Did Jews Become White Folks?" in Race, eds. Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek
- Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race
- Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White; ed., Race Traitor
- Paul Kivel, Uprooting Racism
- Ian Haney Lopez, White by Law
- George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness
- Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color
You might also check out the following links:
- Whiteness Studies, Gregory Jay, University of Wisconsin
- Overview of "White" Talk Today by Howard Winant
- Articles and essays on race, racism, and white privilege, Robert Jensen, University of Texas at Austin
- Race Traitor
- WhitePrivilege.com
- Colours of Resistance
- Something I Wrote Awhile Ago on Affirmative Action
- My Spring 2005 Introduction to Ethnicity/Race Course at SUNY Fredonia
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Pointless Plug
As if linking here to Mostly Harmless's Take Your Blog to the Course: U.S. Women's Open event will help encourage non-golf bloggers to give in to the carnival's spirit.... At least doing so might help explain to CitizenSE's few readers why I have been abusing your sites with comment spam and LPGA concern trolling this week. Despite the fact that so far as I can recall, Hawthorne devoted exactly zero words to golf. He mentioned Utica, NY, more often than golf, that's for sure--which is where my friend Moira Dunn is from, although not where she's at (Pine Needles, in fact).
Monday, June 25, 2007
Modernization, Imperialism, and the Debate Over Japan
The lazy blogging from my upcoming talk continues...
Modernization, Imperialism, and the Debate over Japan
The continuing influence of this initial image of Japan as an exotic and backward society can be seen even in the writings of a sympathetic turn-of-the-century participant-observer like Lafcadio Hearn, who showed a marked preference for traditional and folk culture throughout his fourteen years of living in Japan. It’s not that he was unaware of the rapid modernization, industrialization, and nationalist consolidation of Japan in the Meiji era--surely the parallels between Japanese and American expansionism from the mid-1860s until his death in 1904 (after a civil war, the victors first gained control of core territories, then asserted influence abroad through annexation and occupation) didn’t escape him. Indeed, as distinguished Hearn scholar Roy Starrs has recently argued, it was precisely Hearn’s love of traditional Japanese culture that lead him to excuse and indeed support the very state policies in Japan that lead him to leave the United States and give up his American citizenship. At the end of his 1904 work, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, Hearn justifies the Meiji regime’s wars against China and Russia as attempts to preserve Japanese sovereignty against a gathering threat of European imperialism and cautions the regime to preserve as much of traditional Japanese culture as possible to avoid Western cultural imperialism.
It’s worth contrasting Hearn with another well-travelled American contemporary of his who in his journalism and fiction came to opposite conclusions about the tendency and legitimacy of Meiji-era transformations: Jack London. In such articles as “The Yellow Peril” and “If Japan Should Awaken China,” such short stories as “Goliath” and “The Unparalleled Invasion,” and most notably in his dystopian science fiction novel of 1908, The Iron Heel, London characterizes Japan as a potentially imperialist threat to China, the West, and the international socialist movement. As University of California at Berkeley American literature scholar Colleen Lye demonstrates in her brilliant study America’s Asia, London was particularly worried that Japanese military and management prowess and Chinese size and labor/trading capacity could combine to form a commercially dynamic, technologically advanced rival to Anglo-American civilization.
One way of reading these diametrically opposed attitudes toward and images of Japan from Hearn and London is to link their Pacific writings to late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century debates within American culture over the U.S.’s own modernization, industrialization, national consolidation, and expansionism. Hearn’s sympathy for a putatively anti-colonial Japanese imperialism and London’s horror at a putatively imperialist Japanese anti-colonialism are two sides of the same coin. They express the ambivalence many Americans were feeling toward the transformations of their own society and culture. With Germany and Russia, Japan and the U.S. were leading rising powers in an age characterized by the dominance of the British Empire; each modernizing nation-state had to choose whether to follow or how to modify the templates of European imperialism established by the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and British. It was precisely Japan’s similarities to the U.S. around 1900 that made its actions such a controversial mirror for even dissident Americans of the time.
Modernization, Imperialism, and the Debate over Japan
The continuing influence of this initial image of Japan as an exotic and backward society can be seen even in the writings of a sympathetic turn-of-the-century participant-observer like Lafcadio Hearn, who showed a marked preference for traditional and folk culture throughout his fourteen years of living in Japan. It’s not that he was unaware of the rapid modernization, industrialization, and nationalist consolidation of Japan in the Meiji era--surely the parallels between Japanese and American expansionism from the mid-1860s until his death in 1904 (after a civil war, the victors first gained control of core territories, then asserted influence abroad through annexation and occupation) didn’t escape him. Indeed, as distinguished Hearn scholar Roy Starrs has recently argued, it was precisely Hearn’s love of traditional Japanese culture that lead him to excuse and indeed support the very state policies in Japan that lead him to leave the United States and give up his American citizenship. At the end of his 1904 work, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, Hearn justifies the Meiji regime’s wars against China and Russia as attempts to preserve Japanese sovereignty against a gathering threat of European imperialism and cautions the regime to preserve as much of traditional Japanese culture as possible to avoid Western cultural imperialism.
It’s worth contrasting Hearn with another well-travelled American contemporary of his who in his journalism and fiction came to opposite conclusions about the tendency and legitimacy of Meiji-era transformations: Jack London. In such articles as “The Yellow Peril” and “If Japan Should Awaken China,” such short stories as “Goliath” and “The Unparalleled Invasion,” and most notably in his dystopian science fiction novel of 1908, The Iron Heel, London characterizes Japan as a potentially imperialist threat to China, the West, and the international socialist movement. As University of California at Berkeley American literature scholar Colleen Lye demonstrates in her brilliant study America’s Asia, London was particularly worried that Japanese military and management prowess and Chinese size and labor/trading capacity could combine to form a commercially dynamic, technologically advanced rival to Anglo-American civilization.
One way of reading these diametrically opposed attitudes toward and images of Japan from Hearn and London is to link their Pacific writings to late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century debates within American culture over the U.S.’s own modernization, industrialization, national consolidation, and expansionism. Hearn’s sympathy for a putatively anti-colonial Japanese imperialism and London’s horror at a putatively imperialist Japanese anti-colonialism are two sides of the same coin. They express the ambivalence many Americans were feeling toward the transformations of their own society and culture. With Germany and Russia, Japan and the U.S. were leading rising powers in an age characterized by the dominance of the British Empire; each modernizing nation-state had to choose whether to follow or how to modify the templates of European imperialism established by the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and British. It was precisely Japan’s similarities to the U.S. around 1900 that made its actions such a controversial mirror for even dissident Americans of the time.
Why Close Reading Matters I: Guantánamo Bay Poetry
Yoshie Furuhashi just forwarded the following Wall Street Journal article, Yochi Dreasen's The Prison Poets of Guantánamo Find a Publisher, along with a link to the collection of poetry it is about, Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak (Iowa, 2007) to the MLA's Radical Caucus's listserv. It's particularly relevant to me not just as a scholar and teacher interested in Hawthorne's portrayal of Puritan punishments or as a fan of Alan Moore's comic book series V for Vendetta, but also as a teacher of courses like Introduction to Ethnicity/Race and American Identities. I hope it will be of interest to you, too. Perhaps the following quotations will help inspire you to inquire into the reasoning behind the title of this post:
And maybe those with somewhat freer time than mine might, say, move from taking down Ann Althouse to taking on the American military's approach to literature. If I had the time, I would tell a long story about how Tom Keenan taught a 1980s'-era CIA-authored counter-insurgency manual's discussion of rhetoric in a grad course I was taking on literary theory, but I have holes to plug in one talk and another to start before I sleep....
"While a few detainees at Guantanamo Bay have made efforts to author what they claim to be poetry, given the nature of their writings they have seemingly not done so for the sake of art," says Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, a Defense Department spokesman. "They have attempted to use this medium as merely another tool in their battle of ideas against Western democracies."
U.S. authorities explained why the military has been slow to declassify the poems in a June 2006 letter to one of Mr. Falkoff's colleagues. "Poetry...presents a special risk, and DOD standards are not to approve the release of any poetry in its original form or language," it said. The military says poetry is harder to vet than conventional letters because allusions and imagery in poetry that seem innocent can be used to convey coded messages to other militants.
The letter told defense lawyers to translate any works they wanted to release publicly into English and then submit the translations to the government for review.
The strict security arrangements governing anything written by Guantanamo Bay inmates meant that Mr. Falkoff had to use linguists with secret-level security clearances rather than translators who specialize in poetry. The resulting translations, Mr. Falkoff writes in the book, "cannot do justice to the subtlety and cadences of the originals."
For the military, even some of the translations appeared to go too far. Mr. Falkoff says it rejected three of the five translated poems he submitted, along with a dozen others submitted by his colleagues.
Cmdr. Gordon says he doesn't know how many poems were rejected but adds that the military "absolutely" remains concerned that poetry could be used to pass coded messages to other militants.
And maybe those with somewhat freer time than mine might, say, move from taking down Ann Althouse to taking on the American military's approach to literature. If I had the time, I would tell a long story about how Tom Keenan taught a 1980s'-era CIA-authored counter-insurgency manual's discussion of rhetoric in a grad course I was taking on literary theory, but I have holes to plug in one talk and another to start before I sleep....
Saturday, June 23, 2007
We Take Requests II
When Hug the Shoggoth asks about one of the section titles of next week's talk, CitizenSE listens. And excerpts:
Please tell me how to make this better! And, if possible, shorter!
Westward Expansion, Manifest Destiny, and the “Opening” of Japan
It makes sense to begin a history of shifting American images of Japan with the expeditions headed by Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853 and 1854. But I want to start in the previous decade with the Mexican War of 1846-1848, for there is a direct connection between it and the appearance of the Black Ships off Edo Bay. Beyond the fact that Perry himself was a celebrated veteran of the Mexican War, I will go further and claim that the “opening of Japan” was made possible by the “winning of the West.” To see why this is so, let’s review the larger history of U.S. westward expansion over the course of the nineteenth century and examine notions of American manifest destiny that became popular by mid-century.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, the United States went from being a small nation of thirteen states on the east coast of North America to a large nation in possession and control of much of the continent, including the noncontiguous territories of Alaska and Hawaii. Before the Mexican War, the largest expansion of U.S. borders occurred in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase. What we now know as the Haitian Revolution, the world’s only successful slave revolt, made this purchase possible, as France lost interest in its North American holdings after losing the most valuable colony in the New World at the end of the eighteenth century. It took most of the first half of the nineteenth century for the U.S. to actually control the territory it purchased, as Indian Wars and Indian Removals punctuated crises and compromises over the expansion of American slavery. But by the mid-1840s, after the purchase of the Oregon territory from England, a border dispute between the recently-independent nation of Mexico (formerly New Spain) and the even-more-recently independent Republic of Texas (formerly part of Mexico) provided a pretext for the U.S. to start the Mexican War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the war in 1848 on highly favorable terms to the U.S., along with the California gold rush in 1849, gave the U.S. government great incentive to turn their paper purchase of what is now the American Southwest into actual U.S.-controlled territory, not least to have Pacific ports for exploration, trade, and projection of military forces and strategic interests. Although this process was interrupted by the Civil War and took up much of the second half of the nineteenth century, even by mid-century many American explorers, scientists, and missionaries had joined the whalers and traders criss-crossing the Pacific—not to mention Herman Melville, who published several novels set in the Pacific and Pacific islands years before Perry arrived in Japan.
Having reviewed this process of U.S. westward expansion over both land and sea, we are now in a position to appreciate how white Americans’ prior experiences with, and representations of, enslaved Africans and their African American descendants, American Indians, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, and peoples of the Caribbean and Pacific influenced their views of Japan and the Japanese people. The Perry expeditions also relied on European, particularly Dutch and English, accounts of Japanese culture and society, which were shaped in part by their own histories of colonization of Asia and elsewhere. Combined with the fact that the U.S. delegation wasn’t permitted to visit major Tokugawa cities, it’s no wonder the earliest American representations of Japan focused on exotic landscapes, architecture, and clothing, on village culture, non-Western religion, primitive technology, and simple weaponry, as John Dower’s Black Ships and Samurai documents. They fastened on what their history prepared them to see.
Please tell me how to make this better! And, if possible, shorter!
Thursday, June 21, 2007
To Delight and Instruct: Required Reading for Grad Students (and Others)
Click here. Read and click as directed, until done. End public service announcement. Back to bad bad bad bad bad ok bad bad bad bad bad decent bad bad bad bad [good coming anytime soon?] writing.
Monday, June 18, 2007
Shifting American Images of Japan
Still submerged in the non-bloggy writing process, so I'm going to do a cheap post today which excerpts my opening moves in my first of three lectures on shifting American images of Japan--it gives an overview of the lecture series, so should be of relatively general interest!
So what do you think? Let me know before June 30th!
Thank you, Murahashi-san, for your generous and kind introduction. And thank you for the invitation to speak here once again--or rather, I should say, to follow up on my February talk with this “American Studies 101” lecture series. Its topic, “Shifting American Images of Japan,” has interested me for a long time, since I first became aware that a good deal of the popular culture I grew up on came from Japan or was influenced by Japanese culture, but I only started researching it in earnest two summers ago, back when I began working on my application for a Fulbright grant to teach American Studies in Japan. Having taught the course based on that research, “Representing Japan in American Culture,” to two classes of entering students in Kyushu University’s 21st Century Program this semester and last as a Fulbright Visiting Lecturer, I’m eager to share the results of my research and teaching with a wider audience. So thank you very much for inviting me back here and giving me the opportunity to do just that.
My talk today is entitled “From Manifest Destiny to War in the Pacific, 1846-1945,” but before I attempt to cover 99 years of American images of Japan in 33 minutes, I should say just a little bit more about the lecture series and the course it is based upon. I designed “Representing Japan in American Culture” as an introduction to American cultural studies for first-year undergraduate students in Japan. My goal was to offer a survey of changing American images of Japan, focusing on their form and structure, development and context, and effects and stakes. Along the way, I also emphasized the acquisition and development of certain interpretive methods and intellectual skills, such as close, contextual, and comparative reading and viewing and critical thinking, writing, and speaking. I wanted my students to be able, by the end of the course, to analyze any American image of Japan they happened to come across, from any time period, using a variety of approaches--but especially to consider how it relates to the history of American representations of Japan, what it reveals about American culture and society of its time, how it compares to Japanese self-representations, what it contributes to our understanding of present and future of U.S.-Japanese relations, and what it suggests about the possibilities and pitfalls of cross-cultural representation and intercultural communication. Through weekly readings, viewings, lectures, and discussions, a group presentation, and a final research paper, my students not only got many chances to practice these various analytical methods but also got to practice communicating their ideas and insights in a variety of fora and formats. In a sense, then, this lecture series is my own final exam: how well will I be able to do what I ask of my students? how effectively can I condense the flavor of my Representing Japan course?
Well, I want to start by commenting on one sentence from Murahashi-san’s preview flyer in particular: “By reviewing how America has observed Japan, the lectures will give a unique opportunity to see Japan in the reflections of American eyes and reflect on what those images reveal about American observers.” This language--of image and imagery, viewing and reviewing, vision and revision, reflecting and reflection, sight and insight, eyes and Is, observers and observed--should call to mind a variety of associations, from the inevitable distortions of any reflection to the necessity of perspective to the eyes as the mirror of the soul. It should call our attention to the relations between objectivity and subjectivity, perceptions and ideas, the material and the visual/discursive, and more. But we shouldn’t allow the richness of this language to lead us to assume that U.S.-Japanese representations and relations should be studied in isolation, as if the two countries were alone in the world, endlessly mirroring one another.
To counter this assumption, my goal in these three talks is to introduce you to the broader historical and political contexts in which American representations of Japan are created, circulated, and consumed. By demonstrating how American images of Japan borrow from and are in dialogue with representations of other countries and cultures, I aim to encourage you to look at American and Japanese history differently.
Today, then, I focus on representations of Japan from three time periods--the mid-nineteenth century, the turn into the twentieth century, and the mid-twentieth century--in order to recontextualize the War in the Pacific. My talk is divided into three sections--“Westward Expansion, Manifest Destiny, and the ‘Opening’ of Japan,” “Modernization, Imperialism, and the Debate over Japan,” and “Militarization, Propaganda, and the War in the Pacific”--that look in turn at key patterns in and examples from American images of Japan in the 1840s and 1850s, the 1890s and 1900s, and the 1930s and 1940s.
So what do you think? Let me know before June 30th!
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Perhaps It's Better to Be the Obscurest Blog on teh Internets
Heading off in a few hours to Hiroshima to meet some old friends now living in Oklahoma (that is, when they're not enjoying the best two-week-tour-of-Japan itinerary I've ever seen in my life--and I'm not just saying that b/c it's the only one). So of course I woke up way too early and I thought, "why not catch up on some bloggy doings?" Let's just say I should have stayed in bed. Stay strong, Scott, Chris, Ilyka, Kevin.... This, too, will pass.
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