Global Asias
Rutgers Meets Japan: A Celebration of Friendship will be held on Saturday, September 12th, 3:00-5:00 PM, at the Kirkpatrick Chapel, Rutgers University, to commemorate the 150th Anniversary of the publication of The Mikado's Empire and the 100th anniversary of the bestowal of the Order of the Rising Sun by the Emperor of Japan upon William Elliot Griffis (Rutgers Class of 1869). Join us to celebrate the 150 years of intellectual and cultural exchange between Rutgers-New Brunswick and Japan!
Also held in conjunction is Japan In/Out of View at the Zimmerli Art Museum. See this article on Rutgers Today featuring Haruko Wakabayashi.
The event is co-sponsored by the SAS Asian Languages and Cultures Department, Rutgers Foundation, Rutgers Global, Rutgers University Libraries, Zimmerli Art Museum, Global Asias Initiative, and the Rutgers Japanese Student Association. It is funded through grants and donations from the New Jersey Historical Commission, Japanese Chamber of Commerce & Industry in New York, the Japanese American Association of New York, and Ito-en.
Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905–1949
Archives of Intimacy offers a rich and innovative study of multiracial social worlds in early-twentieth-century London, Liverpool, and Hong Kong—three port cities linked by their importance to global British shipping networks and circuits of Chinese migration. In these cities, Chinese, Black, South Asian and European people came together to foster multiracial communities which have been largely forgotten, remembered only through sensationalist fictions that reflected white anxieties about racial mixing. Nadine Attewell considers these vibrant multiracial worlds through the eyes of those who knew them best: people of mixed Chinese descent, for whom interracial intimacies were features of everyday life.
Mobilizing a wide range of archival materials, including photographs, community and family histories, and wartime intelligence reports, Attewell reconstructs the social experiences of people like Vera Leung, a working-class woman of Irish and Chinese descent growing up in Liverpool's interwar Chinatown, and Percy Chang, a Jamaican man of Chinese and African descent with a wide social network in Hong Kong. Rather than centering identity as the focus of mixed-race people's struggles, she asks what they did and with whom. Drawing on queer and feminist scholarship and integrating British, Asian, and diasporic histories, Attewell presents new ways of thinking about the everyday meanings of interracial intimacy, and practices of relation and survival under global conditions of colonial capitalist rule.
Portraits of Unbelonging: Photographic Journeys Across Borders
A profound examination of how photographs can both sever and connect, tracing the paths of Ottoman Armenians across state and family archives.
In 1896 the Ottoman sultan issued a decree that allowed Armenians—and only Armenians—to emigrate on the condition that they expatriate and never return to their homeland. A key step in this process was sitting for a photograph. The Ottoman state archived the photographs; the Armenian migrants received passports and left for European ports, most of them bound for the United States. Between 1896 and 1908, more than four thousand Armenians sat for such expatriation photographs. Almost two decades before photographs were attached to passports anywhere in the world, Ottoman Armenian expatriation portraiture is one of the earliest examples of the use of surveillance photography for border control.
Zeynep Devrim Gürsel encountered these photographs in the Ottoman state archives in Istanbul, Turkey. Produced as documents of exclusion at a crucial moment in Ottoman and Armenian history, in Gürsel's hands they become invitations to learn from lives lived in radically uncertain times. Portraits of Unbelonging follows the stories of the individuals in these photographs over a century—from the bureaucratic files that unmade them as Ottoman subjects, to the ship manifests that tracked their migration routes and the naturalization records that documented their new lives as immigrants, and finally into the family albums and stories of their descendants living today. Written in conversation with these descendants, working across borders, Portraits of Unbelonging offers both a genealogy of the document-based global security regimes that govern citizenship and mobility today and an intimate history of unbelonging and belonging.
Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire
The hidden histories of empire, told through the haunted afterlives of colonial migrations.
Indian migrants provided the labor that enabled the British Empire to gain control over a quarter of the world’s population and territory. In the mid-1800s, the British government began building an elaborate bureaucracy to govern its mobile subjects, issuing photo IDs, lists of kin, and wills. It amassed records of workers’ belongings such as handwritten IOUs, crumpled newspaper clippings, and copper bangles. Worldly Afterlives uses this trove of artifacts to recover the stories of the hidden subjects of empire.Navigating the remains of imperial bureaucracy—in archives scattered across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas—Julia Stephens follows migrant families as they traverse the Indian Ocean and the British Empire. She draws on in-depth interviews to show how the histories of empire reverberate in the present through the memories and experiences of their descendants, who collected their own remnants of empire in albums and curio cabinets. We encounter women, subaltern migrants, and people of mixed heritage whose family stories upend ethnonationalist and patriarchal approaches to studying Asian diasporas. What emerges is a social history of Indian migration and a political history of British imperial governance, one that offers a new methodological approach to the historian’s craft.Spanning archives, family collections, cemeteries, online ancestry records, and social media, Worldly Afterlives breaks down boundaries that separate academic, amateur, and public history to open new conversations about the ongoing legacies of empire.A reception will follow the event.
In 1896, the Ottoman sultan decreed that Armenians alone could emigrate, on condition they expatriate permanently and sit for a photograph. Professor Zeynep Devrim Gürsel discovered these expatriation portraits in the Ottoman state archives in Istanbul. Portraits of Unbelonging follows the individuals pictured over a century, from the files that unmade them as Ottoman subjects to the lives and descendants they left behind. Written in conversation with these descendants, the book offers both a genealogy of the document-based security regimes governing citizenship today and an intimate history of belonging.
Marriage and intimacy are frequently overlooked in the study of U.S. immigration. In this talk, historian Sonia C. Gomez will explore how marriage shaped immigration patterns for the Japanese in America. During the period of racial exclusion (1908-1952), intimacy created limited pathways of admission for Japanese women. Permitted to enter the U.S. as wives, their inclusion served broader American interests in the Pacific, setting a precedent for later immigration legislation that privileged spouses and fiancés. This presentation will shed light on the intersection between intimacy, immigration, and U.S. imperialism in the Pacific.
