Description

PROGRAM:
4:00-6:00 Roundtable & Discussion
6:00-7:00 Book signing & Informal reception

This book offers a major challenge to our understandings of nationalism, racism, colonialism and wartime mobilization during the Second World War. In parallel case studies – of Japanese Americans mobilized to serve in the United States Army and Koreans recruited or drafted into the Japanese military – T. Fujitani examines the U.S. and Japanese empires as they struggled to manage racialized populations while waging total war. Fujitani probes government policies and representations of these soldiers (including in film, in literature, and in archival documents) to reveal how characteristics of racism, nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, gender politics, and the family changed on both sides of the Pacific, with repercussions that remain with us today. Writing against the grain of conventional historiography the author demonstrates that the U.S. and Japan became increasingly alike during the course of the war, perhaps most tellingly in their common attempts to disavow racism even as they reproduced it in new ways and forms.

To order the book online with a 20% discount log on to www.ucpress.edu/9780520262232 and use discount code 12M0402.

Takashi Fujitani is Professor of History and the Dr. David Chu Professor and Director in Asia Pacific Studies at the University of Toronto. Much of his past and current research has centered on the intersections of nationalism, colonialism, war, memory, racism, ethnicity, and gender, as well as the disciplinary and area studies boundaries that have figured our ways of studying these issues. His numerous publications include: Splendid Monarchy (UC Press, 1996; Japanese version, NHK Books, 1994; Korean translation, Yeesan Press, 2003); Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Koreans in WWII (UC Press, 2011; Japanese version forthcoming from Iwanami Shoten); and Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s) (co-edited, Duke U. Press, 2001). He is also editor of the series Asia Pacific Modern (UC Press). He has held grants and fellowships from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, Stanford Humanities Center, Social Science Research Council, Institute for Research in Humanities at Kyoto U, Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine, University of California President’s Research Fellowship in the Humanities, American Philosophical Society, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard U, and other institutions. He has served on numerous editorial and institutional boards including for the International Journal of Korean History, Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, Japanese Studies, University of California Press, Stanford Humanities Center, SSRC, and Association for Asian Studies.