Tag: Exploring Race in East Asia

Flyer for Zoom talk "Supporting the Faith, Building the Empire: Imperial Japan's Islamic Policies in World War II" on 4/21 from 4PM to 5:30PM

Kelly Hammond, “Supporting the Faith, Building the Empire: Imperial Japan’s Islamic Policies in World War II”

This talk will examine some of the ways that the Japanese Empire curried favors to Muslims in China, and later throughout East Asia, in the lead up to and throughout World War II. Drawing on examples from my recent book, China’s Muslims and Japan’s Empire: Centering Islam in World War II, the talk will present viewers with concrete policies and explore some of the ways that the Japanese Government envisioned themselves as the benevolent protectors of Islam while at the same time advancing their imperial, expansionist visions. For their part, Muslims from around the colonial world found the anti-western and anti-Soviet rhetoric expounded by the Japanese Empire appealing to a certain extent. By placing Muslims at the center of Japan’s imperial ambitions, it becomes clear that their visions for empire went far beyond what we would now consider to be the geographic boundaries of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere into predominantly Islamic spaces like Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa.

JOIN US FOR A LIVE TALK AND Q&A
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 21 4PM TO 5:30PM (PST)
Zoom: http://bit.ly/EACTalks
Zoom ID: 925 5728 2471

SPEAKER: Kelly Hammond is an Assistant Professor of East Asian history at the University of Arkansas. Her recent work has been supported by the ACLS/Luce Foundation, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. She is an associate editor for the Journal of Asian Studies.

Flyer for Zoom talk "Thinking about Race and Ethnicity in Imperial China" by Shao-yun Yang on 5/27 at 4-5:30PM

Thinking about Race and Ethnicity in Imperial China

For much of the twentieth century, discussions of imperial-era Chinese identity were framed according to three conceptual categories then current in the social sciences: culture, race, and nation. In the 1980s, Western historians began shifting to a new conceptual framework: ethnicity. Despite skepticism in some quarters, ethnicity remains the framework within which most historians analyze politicized identities encompassing aspects of both culture and nation. But does “race” as a concept still have any place in this picture? What if we applied the broader and more structural understanding of race used by critical race theory (CRT), as scholars in the fields of Classics and Medieval Studies have lately begun to do? In this talk, I will survey the development of imperial Chinese ethnic discourses from the Han to the Qing and propose that “race”—as understood by many CRT scholars in terms of institutionalized, legally enforceable hierarchies of ethnic inequality within a state—was applicable primarily to “conquest dynasty” situations of minority rule. I will also argue that certain discourses previously characterized as racist or nationalist could be more usefully interpreted as two distinct but related traditions of foreign relations thinking that I term “Chinese supremacism” and “civilization-state discourse.”

About the Speaker

Shao-yun Yang is Associate Professor of East Asian History at Denison University. An intellectual historian specializing in medieval Chinese ideas relating to empire and ethnicity, he is the author of The Way of the Barbarians: Redrawing Ethnic Boundaries in Tang and Song China (University of Washington Press, 2019) and several articles, book chapters, and translations. His current projects include a sourcebook on race and ethnicity in imperial China and a Cambridge Element on “Tang China and the World.”