Global Asias Workshop-Seminar (SPRING 2026)
Wed, Feb 11, 9:00 am–10:15 am ET on Zoom
"Plastic Possessions: Selective Incorporation and the Value of Asian Women in the Nineteenth Century"
Mich Ling (NB-WGSS)
Respondent: Rose Cuison-Villazor (Newark-Law)
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SPRING 2025 Seminar Members:
Cai Barias (American Studies-NB/PSci UMass); Andrew Bellamy (History–NB); Arpita Biswas (WGSS-NB); Rose Cuizon-Villazor (Law-Newark); Anusha Iyer (Childhood Studies-Camden); Mich Ling (WGSS-NB)
Convener: Allan Punzalan Isaac (American Studies; English–NB)
Plastic Possessions: Selective Incorporation and the Value of Asian Women in the Nineteenth Century
Abstract: In 2024, Japan released three new banknotes that feature the faces of “famous cultural figures from the Meiji era and after.” Between the 1,000-yen bill of “the father of Japanese medicine” and the 10,000-yen bill of “the father of capitalism” in Japan is the 5,000-yen bill of Tsuda Umeko, a “pioneer” of women’s education and Japan’s first female exchange student. In an era canonically described in Asian American history as one of exclusion, she was among several Japanese and Chinese women who came to the US in the late nineteenth century as wards to study, with the expectation that they would return to their respective countries to educate others. Though she returned to Japan, she circled back to Hawai’i and the US time and time again to publish, lecture, earn another degree, and secure funding for a transpacific network of orphans and students in the name of women’s education and liberal modernity. Ume was an exceptional figure; later describing herself as a “lonely American” and a “Native Bible woman,” she also recognized her alien status as conditional. Along with a network of merchants, educators, agriculturalists, and scientists, she worked to replicate the experiment of her education, believing that “intelligence, industry, and character” could be disciplined into “the feeble mind of the barbarian.”
The Tsuda banknote is remarkable for what it says about race, gender, and education as innovative technologies claimed by the modern settler nation. Indeed, her own education was proposed and funded by the Kaitakushi (Hokkaido Colonization Office), a new division of the Meiji government that also funded experimental education for Ainu, hoping to turn native students into settler educators as part of their broader plan to turn Ainu Mosir into Hokkaido. These histories within histories raise further questions for us that fall outside the scope of national histories of Japan or of U.S.-Japan diplomatic history. What was the global status of Asian women in the nineteenth century, and what was their value to the emerging settler nations that sought to educate them? I argue that the Tsuda banknote reveals how liberal modernity restructured global hierarchies of power, not through exclusion, but by selectively incorporating people and ideas and possessing them based on notions of their varying plasticity.
Bio: Mich Ling is a PhD candidate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Their research frames East Asian racialization and sexuality as unstable political technologies that emerge through modern struggles for sovereignty in a global context. Their dissertation, Unsettling Subjects: Selective Incorporation, Settler Capitalism, and Asian Diasporic Student Politics, traces settler and capitalist entanglements across the transpacific nineteenth and twentieth centuries, through the gendered figure of the Asian exchange student. Using Black, Indigenous, and materialist feminist analytics, they look to unsettling subject/objects in Asian diasporic history—the banknote, the foreign exchange student, the missionary orphan, the adjunct faculty, the Pacific Islands—tracing their trajectories across entangled US, Japanese, and Chinese political geographies to understand how people and ideas are selectively incorporated into systems of power. Their research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and the Rutgers School of Graduate Studies, among others.