BOOK LAUNCH AND RECEPTION: Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan

Kate McDonald (History, UCSB)

With commentary by: Ken Ruoff (History, Center for Japanese Studies, Portland State University), and Sabine Frühstück (Modern Japanese Cultural Studies, East Asia Center, UCSB)

Please join us to celebrate the publication of Kate McDonald’s new book, Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan. Placing Empire examines the spatial politics of Japanese imperialism through a study of Japanese travel and tourism to Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan between the late nineteenth century and the early 1950s. In a departure from standard histories of Japan, this book shows how debates over the role of colonized lands reshaped the social and spatial imaginary of the modern Japanese nation. In turn, this socio-spatial imaginary affected the ways in which colonial difference was conceptualized and enacted. The book thus illuminates how ideas of place became central to the production of new forms of colonial hierarchy as empires around the globe transitioned from an era of territorial acquisition to one of territorial maintenance.

Sponsored by the Dept. of History, the East Asia Center, the Dept. of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, and the IHC’s Reinventing Japan RFG.