New Scholarship Inspired by the East Asia Image Collection
An image of the cover of Outcasts of Empire: Japan’s Rule On Taiwan’s ‘Savage Border,’ 1874-1945, by Paul D. Barclay
The East Asia Image Collection anchors and inspires several exciting recent achievements in Asian Studies. Paul Barclay, Professor and Chair of Asian Studies at Lafayette and faculty director of the EAIC, published Outcasts of Empire: Japan’s Rule on Taiwan’s “Savage Border,” 1874–1945 with the University of California Press. According to the website of the Press,
“Outcasts of Empire unveils the causes and consequences of capitalism’s failure to ‘batter down all Chinese walls’ in modern Taiwan. Adopting micro- and macrohistorical perspectives, Paul D. Barclay argues that the interpreters, chiefs, and trading-post operators who mediated state-society relations on Taiwan’s ‘savage border’ during successive Qing and Japanese regimes rose to prominence and faded to obscurity in concert with a series of ‘long nineteenth century’ global transformations.”
An image of the cover of Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan, by Kate McDonald
Also offered by the University of California Press, Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan was published recently by Kate McDonald, Assistant Professor of Modern Japanese History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. McDonald analyzes several images from the EAIC over the course of her study.
Free e-book versions of both monographs are available through Luminos, the University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Read Dr. Barclay’s recent blog post on the University of California Press Blog about the important role of open-access digital scholarship to foster collaborative exchange “between authors and the communities they write about.”
A karuta card pair that appears in the Pacific War Karuta Collection
In addition to inspiring these recent scholarly monographs, the EAIC also underpins the Pacific War Karuta Collection, created by Michaela Kelly, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Scholarship during the 2016-17 academic year. Built on the digital exhibit platform Omeka, this digital project curates holdings in the East Asia Image Collection. The exhibit is a resource for research as well as a dynamic learning tool; EXCEL student Rika Kamiyasu ’20 created an interpretive exhibit on the site comparing images of Japanese and Chinese military subjects in Pacific War era karuta cards.
These projects highlight the diverse range of scholarly inquiry served by the East Asia Image Collection. Visit the EAIC yourself to see what research questions the collection inspires!