| Title | Transpacific Migration and the Colonial Archive in Imperial Japan | |
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| Book | Mooring the Global Archive: A Japanese Ship and its Migrant Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). | |
| Lecturer | Martin Dusinberre（Professor, University of Zurich） | |
| Date | 2024. 5. 9（Thurs.) 17:30-19:00 | |
| Venue | Room L-821, 8th floor, Central Library, Yotsuya Campus, Sophia University *Visitors from outside the university are kindly asked to register at the library entrance. |
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| No registration necessary, In-person only | ||
| Language | English |
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| By what archives do historians reconstruct the histories of transpacific migrants from Meiji Japan, and how do such archival choices frame the histories we write? For too long, this paper will argue, historians have overlooked Native Hawaiian, Aboriginal First Nation and other Indigenous contexts in our analyses of Japanese migration across the Pacific Ocean, with the consequence that we have privileged certain types of archival traces over others—and certain narratives of “migration” over “colonialism.” Offering case studies from Hawai‘i and Australia, I shall discuss the ways in which labour remittances—and therefore land acquisition in rural Japan—constitute a hitherto understudied aspect of Japan’s settler colonialism in the Pacific; and the ways in which Japanese overseas officials and their surviving archival collections in Tokyo acted to co-produce British and American imperialism in Australia and Hawai‘i respectively. At stake is the fundamental question of how we may better conceptualize the Japanese colonial archive in abstract as well as concrete terms, and what areas of new research in the intersection between Japanese history and Indigenous Studies these conceptualizations might make possible. | ||
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