We cordially invite you to the 3rd JF-GJS Fellow Talk Series on March 7th (Thu), 2024. This event will be held online. To join this event, please fill in the registration form below.
Date and time: March 7 (Thu), 2024, 10:30 AM-12:00 PM (JST)
Venue: Online (Zoom)
Title: Waiting for the Cool Moon: Anti-Imperialist Struggles in the Heart of Japan’s Empire – Book Talk and Research Methods and Ethics Discussion
Speaker: Wendy Matsumura, Associate Professor of History, UC San Diego
Wendy Matsumura is Associate Professor of modern Japanese history and Okinawa studies at UC San Diego. She is the author of The Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor, and Theorizations of Community (2015), and Waiting for the Cool Moon: Anti-Imperialist Struggles in the Heart of Japan’s Empire (2024). Waiting for the Cool Moon traces the transformation of the Japanese small farm household (shono noka) into the material and discursive foundation of the national community and its members into conquistador humanists following the post-World War One agrarian crisis. Informed by radical Black and Indigenous Studies scholarship and based on a critical reading of archival materials of the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, Nōka Keizai Chōsa (Farm Household Surveys) stored at Kyoto University’s Faculty of Agriculture and records of peasant and labor struggle housed at Hōsei University’s Ōhara Institute for Social Research, it engages in a critique of the colonial violence at the root of Japanese nation-state formation and traces of acts of place-making by racialized and gendered actors who continuously carved out worlds of freedom.
Moderator・Discussant: Mairead Hynes, PhD Candidate at Columbia University and JF-GJS Fellow at IASA
Language: English
egistration: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcuduuuqz0rE9KOzEQZbWmPjGaKjUVpU0Zt
Abstract:
This event will be organized in three parts: the first will be a conventional book talk, where Matsumura will lay out the theoretical stakes and argument of her recently published monograph, Waiting for the Cool Moon: Anti-Imperialist Struggles in the Heart of Japan’s Empire. In addition to theoretical stakes and argument, she will discuss issues of archival destruction and recovery that she grappled with as she worked with a distinct set of documents, the Farm Household Surveys managed by the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture. The second part, a conversation with discussant Mairead Hynes, will discuss the methodological and ethical issues that each scholar has grappled with in their projects. This discussion is an extension of many conversations that the two had during their times at Doshisha University and Kyoto University, respectively. The final part of this event invites attendees to share the lessons they have learned as scholars working in their respective fields on Japan/Asia, in a spirit of building spaces where we can not merely present our research findings, but where we can think through ethical, theoretical, and methodological challenges together.
Organizer: JF-GJS Initiative
Contact: mch2203[at]columbia.edu (Mairead Hynes)