The Affect of Difference: Representations of Race in East Asian Empire

377 Pages·2016·6.96 MB·English

by  Christopher P Hanscom

the affect of difference
The Affect of Difference
The Affect of Difference
repres ent at ions of
race in east asian empire
edited by
christopher p. hanscom
and dennis Washburn
University of Hawai‘i Press d Honolulu
© 2016 University of Hawai‘i Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
21 20 19 18 17 16 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Hanscom, Christopher P., editor. | Washburn,
Dennis C., editor.
Title: The affect of difference : repre sen ta tions of race in
East Asian empire / edited by Christopher P. Hanscom
and Dennis Washburn.
Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press,
[2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015044543 | ISBN 9780824852801
cloth : alk. paper
Subjects: LCSH: Race awareness—J apan— Colonies. |
Japan—C olonies—A sia—R ace relations. | Ethnology—
Japan— Colonies. | East Asians— Race identity.
Classification: LCC DS518.45 .A34 2016 | DDC
305.800952— dc23 LC rec ord available at http://l ccn. l oc
. gov / 2015044543
University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid- free
paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and
durability of the Council on Library Resources.
contents
Acknowl edgments vii
1. Introduction: Repre sen ta tions of Race in East Asian Empire 1
christopher p. hanscom and dennis Washburn
2. “Intimate Frontiers”: Disciplining Ethnicity and Ainu Women’s
Sexual Subjectivity in Early Colonial Hokkaido 19
ann- elise leWallen
3. Playing the Race Card in Japanese- Governed Taiwan: Or,
Anthropometric Photo graphs as “Shape- Shifting Jokers” 38
paul d. barclay
4. Assimilation’s Racializing Sensibilities: Colonized Koreans
as Yobos and the “Yobo- ization” of Expatriate Japa nese 81
todd a. henry
5. How Do Abject Bodies Respond? Ethnographies of a
Dispersed Empire 108
chul kim
6. Faces that Change: Physiognomy, Portraiture, and Photography in
Colonial Korea 133
gyeWon kim
7. Speaking Japa nese: Language and the Expectation of Empire 159
kate mcdonald
8. Race b ehind the Walls: Contact and Containment in Japa nese
Images of Urban Manchuria 180
kari shepherdson- scott
9. Imagining an Affective Community in Asia: Japan’s War time
Broadcasting and Voices of Inclusion 207
ji hee jung
10. Racialized Sounds and Cinematic Affect: My Nightingale,
the Rus sian Diaspora, and Musical Film in Manchukuo 225
inyoung bong
11. Chang Hyŏkchu and the Short Twentieth C entury 244
john Whittier treat
12. Japan the Beautiful: 1950s Cosmetic Surgery and the Expressive
Asian Body 260
kim brandt
vi | contents
13. Implied Promises Betrayed: “Intraracial” Alterity during Japan’s
Imperial Period 286
edWard mack
14. The Sun Never Sets on Little Black Sambo: Circ uits of
Affection and the Cultural Hermeneutics of Chibikuro
Sambo— A Transpacific Approach 304
William h. bridges iv
15. Delivering Lu Xun to the Empire: The Afterlife of Lu Xun in
the Works of Takeuchi Yoshimi, Dazai Osamu, and Inoue Hisashi 328
angela yiu
Contributors 347
Index 351
acknoWle dgments
This book grew out of a series of workshops, talks, and colloquia held at Dart-
mouth College and the University of California, Los Angeles, between 2009
and 2013. Bringing a proj ect such as this to completion was made pos si ble only
through the help and support of many individuals and institutions. The editors
are grateful first and foremost to all of the contributors, whose hard work, pa-
tience, and good humor have made our task truly a l abor of love. We benefited
tremendously as well from the advice and expertise of colleagues who partici-
pated in the workshops and colloquia out of which this volume took shape: Ann
Stoler, Leo Ching, Tak Fujitani, Jinhee Lee, Louise Young, Alan Tansman, and
Thomas Lamarre. Fi nally, we express our deepest appreciation to the Dean of
Faculty Office at Dartmouth for the generous support it provided us through its
Venture Fund and a Dartmouth Conference grant. Support from the UCLA In-
ternational Institute and the Cultures in Transnational Perspective Mellon Post-
doctoral Program in the Humanities at UCLA made pos si ble our 2011 workshop
on Visual Repre sen ta tions of Race under Japa nese Empire. The Japan Foundation,
the Korea Foundation (through a grant from the Northeast Asia Council of the
Association for Asian Studies), and the Modern Language Association provided
additional funding, without which we could not have seen this proj ect through
to completion.

1 d christopher p. hanscom and dennis Washburn
Introduction
Repre sen ta tions of Race in East Asian Empire
This volume addresses the question of how repre sen ta tions of race and
the par tic u lar affects they produce shed light on imperial formations
in East Asia in the twentieth c entury. In general, studies of empire in
modern East Asia follow what might be termed a standard nationalist
account that emphasizes the role of nation building in overthrowing colonial
rule. This historiography views racial ideologies as an external imposition follow-
ing a West to East vector and thus tends to elide race as both a descriptive and an
analytical category. The Affect of Difference challenges this master narrative by
avoiding a simplistic periodization of empire or colonization as something that
is over and done with and by using the par tic u lar case of Japa nese empire to es-
tablish a comparative framework for studying the lingering impacts of imperial
formations globally. Further, by interrogating received notions of the history of
Japa nese imperialism without deferring to Eu ro pean cases as the perceived ori-
gin of both practices and theories of empire, the chapters that follow defamil-
iarize long- held assumptions regarding both imperial structures of domination
and the knowledge that naturalizes them— those “schemes of intelligibility that
govern, and leave unaddressed and unquestionable, racial constitution and
(mis)recognition.”1
By focusing the study of Japa nese empire on a consideration of the affects cre-
ated in the production and repre sen ta tion of racial difference, this volume also
inflects empire studies in the direction of the everyday, drawing attention to the
subtle, often unseen ways in which imperial or racist sentiments may operate
beyond the reach of our methodologies. Although almost all of the chapters deal
with cases from the late nineteenth c entury to the end of World War II, taken
together they reveal the multiple layers of imperial and colonial control that ex-
isted before and continued a fter the Japa nese imperial proj ect. Japan’s Asian
empire was rapidly established atop Qing, Chosŏn, and Eu rop ean colonial struc-
tures only to be displaced, following its defeat in 1945, by the expansion of
American power that occurred within the Cold War geopo liti cal order. This
complex history of imperial formations is best engaged by thinking in terms of
East Asian empire rather than concentrating simply on Japan as a singular
model. Moreover, if we are to avoid eliding the moral and po liti cal implications
of the connections between race and empire, we must recognize that the impact
of colonial cultures on the emotional and ideological structures of everyday