Suchergebnisse

This open access book demonstrates that despite different epistemological starting points, history and speculative fiction perform similar work in "making the strange familiar" and "making the familiar strange" by taking their readers on journeys through space and time. Excellent history, like excellent speculative fiction, should cause readers to reconsider crucial aspects of their society that they normally overlook or lead them to reflect on radically different forms of social organization. Drawing on Gunlög Fur's postcolonial concept of concurrences, and with contributions that explore diverse examples of speculative fiction and historical encounters using a variety of disciplinary approaches, this volume provides new perspectives on colonialism, ecological destruction, the nature of humanity, and how to envision a better future.

This open access book demonstrates that despite different epistemological starting points, history and speculative fiction perform similar work in "making the strange familiar" and "making the familiar strange" by taking their readers on journeys through space and time. Excellent history, like excellent speculative fiction, should cause readers to reconsider crucial aspects of their society that they normally overlook or lead them to reflect on radically different forms of social organization. Drawing on Gunlög Fur's postcolonial concept of concurrences, and with contributions that explore diverse examples of speculative fiction and historical encounters using a variety of disciplinary approaches, this volume provides new perspectives on colonialism, ecological destruction, the nature of humanity, and how to envision a better future.

Immediately following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the new, Western-oriented Japanese government decided to make the colonization of the adjacent northern island of Hokkaido a showcase of and economic engine for Japanese modernity. In so doing, Japanese leaders consciously modelled Japanese settler colonialism there on American models, particularly in the treatment of the indigenous Ainu. As part of this project, a large number of American advisors were hired, including three American professors from Massachusetts Agricultural College who were to found a similar institution in Sapporo. Although the story of these professors is well-known in Japan, their connections to Japanese settler colonialism have never been properly investigated. I argue that these professors, most importantly William Smith Clark and David Pearce Penhallow, served as important conduits of colonial knowledge, spreading both American technologies of settler colonialism to Japan and a positive image of Japanese imperialism in the United States after their return. Most significantly, they spread new, 'scientific' understandings of the Ainu that conformed to classic Western colonial tropes and contributed to their systematic dispossession. In these ways, these American 'brokers of imperialism' worked in tandem with their Japanese employers to both physically and discursively reform Hokkaido into an American-style 'frontier'.

In 1907, Japanese Rule in Formosa was published in London. It was the English translation of Taiwan tōchi shi (1905), a book about Japan's colonization of Taiwan by Japanese popular historian and liberal politician Takekoshi Yosaburō. Japanese Rule in Formosa proved remarkably influential, both at the time and in postwar historiography. Although isolated quotes from the 1907 work are frequently used by present-day historians, little attention has been granted to the political context in which it was published or the accuracy of the translation. The fact that Takekoshi advocated an unambiguous form of colonial rule in which the Japanese constitution would not apply in Taiwan placed him at odds with other leaders of his liberal Seiyūkai party who wanted Taiwan to be merged into Japan's administrative and legal structures. Takekoshi's stance reveals that colonial debates did not always match up with other political or philosophical fault lines. His ideas were, however, consistent and engaged in global, trans-imperial dialogue about assimilation and association in colonial administration. This article will position Takekoshi's work within the contemporaneous Japanese debate over Taiwan's legal status and argue that, although the timing of its publication meant that it had little influence in Japan, it had a significant effect on the attitudes of colonialist scholars in Europe and America towards Japanese imperialism.

In 1876, the Kaitakushi, the Japanese government agency responsible for the settlement of the northern island of Hokkaido, hired three Americans from Massachusetts Agricultural College: William Smith Clark, William Wheeler and David Pearce Penhallow. Their task was to establish a comparable institution in Hokkaido, Sapporo Agricultural College, that would spread American-style scientific agriculture among new settlers. Although recent historical research has highlighted the colonial nature of the modern settlement of Hokkaido and other American advisors' role in transmitting modern technologies of settler colonialism, the tenure of these three professors has never been examined from a postcolonial perspective. This article will investigate the writings of engineer William Wheeler, who served as president of the new college for several years and advised the Kaitakushi on numerous infrastructure projects, to look for clues about his attitudes towards and role in Japanese settler colonialism in Hokkaido. Textual evidence reveals Wheeler's awareness of and complicity in this undertaking.