Powers and Possibilities: Transnational Experiences, Technologies of Empire, and East Asian-US Cultural Encounters in the 20th Century

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

Critically engaging in “transnationalist” history and cultural studies methods, this panel examines diverse connective experiences between East Asia and the United States in the 20th century, with emphases on the circulation of ideas and cultural influences, technological developments, and intra-imperial relationships. In North China, Okinawa, Seoul, and Tokyo, transnational contacts within and beyond the scope of empire shaped both specific power relations and the possibilities of emancipation from such relations. This panel will examine how East Asians and other peoples encountered, transformed, and struggled against imperial powers—the US and Japan, as well as the Soviet Union and China—within the broader context of US-Asia relations. The presenters will discuss local populations’ cultural, social, and political experiences and perspectives as situated in global exchanges. In disentangling these transnational experiences, we will examine the interconnected technologies and institutional conditions that shaped them. These include missionary filmmaking in late Republican China, print industries in colonial Korea and the Japanese metropole, US radio networks in post-WWII occupied Japan, and educational systems in US-occupied Okinawa. We explore how people engaged in a variety of activities in and against such technological contexts, including missionary enterprises, anti-imperial movements, military broadcasting, and overseas educational projects. As such, the panel weaves together imagined possibilities and multilayered perspectives, in parallel with transnational and imperial encounters in East Asia, as a central part of modern global culture.

Area of Study

• Northeast Asia

Session Organizer

• Hiroaki Matsusaka, University of Michigan

Chair

• Leslie Pincus, University of Michigan

Individual Presentations

• Narrating “Capitalist Hell” Across the Pacific: Japanese and Korean Anti-imperialism and American Experience in the 1920s and 1930s - Hiroaki Matsusaka, University of Michigan

• The Sign of the Cross: Hope, Nostalgia, and American Missionary Filmmaking in Postwar China, 1947-1949 - Joseph W. Ho, University of Michigan

• The Secondary Intention: The Armed Forces Radio Service and the United States Propaganda Effort in Japan during the Occupation and the Korean War - Eui-Young Nam, University of Tokyo

• Students of Democracy: Cold War Practice and Control in Study Abroad Programs during the US Occupation of Okinawa - Kinuko Maehara Yamazato, University of the Ryukyus