Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show

Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show PDF Author: Richard Wiley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
A sword-swinging page-turner infused with a heady mix of Japanese etiquette, American ideals, and Machiavellian philosophy, written by a PEN/Faulkner Award winner.

Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show

Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show PDF Author: Richard Wiley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book

Book Description
A sword-swinging page-turner infused with a heady mix of Japanese etiquette, American ideals, and Machiavellian philosophy, written by a PEN/Faulkner Award winner.

The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma

The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma PDF Author: Emily Roxworthy
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824865049
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
In The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma, Emily Roxworthy contests the notion that the U.S. government’s internment policies during World War II had little impact on the postwar lives of most Japanese Americans. After the curtain was lowered on the war following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many Americans behaved as if the “theatre of war” had ended and life could return to normal. Roxworthy demonstrates that this theatrical logic of segregating the real from the staged, the authentic experience from the political display, grew out of the manner in which internment was agitated for and instituted by the U.S. government and media. During the war, Japanese Americans struggled to define themselves within the web of this theatrical logic, and they continue to reenact this trauma in public and private to this day. The political spectacles staged by the FBI and the American mass media were heir to a theatricalizing discourse that can be traced back to Commodore Matthew Perry’s “opening” of Japan in 1853. Westerners, particularly Americans, drew upon it to orientalize—disempower, demonize, and conquer—those of Japanese descent, who were characterized as natural-born actors who could not be trusted. Roxworthy provides the first detailed reconstruction of the FBI’s raids on Japanese American communities, which relied on this discourse to justify their highly choreographed searches, seizures, and arrests. Her book also makes clear how wartime newspapers (particularly those of the notoriously anti-Asian Hearst Press) melodramatically framed the evacuation and internment so as to discourage white Americans from sympathizing with their former neighbors of Japanese descent. Roxworthy juxtaposes her analysis of these political spectacles with the first inclusive look at cultural performances staged by issei and nisei (first- and second-generation Japanese Americans) at two of the most prominent “relocation centers”: California’s Manzanar and Tule Lake. The camp performances enlarge our understanding of the impulse to create art under oppressive conditions. Taken together, wartime political spectacles and the performative attempts at resistance by internees demonstrate the logic of racial performativity that underwrites American national identity. The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma details the complex formula by which racial performativity proved to be a force for both oppression and resistance during World War II.

The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven

The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven PDF Author: Mark W. Driscoll
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478012749
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
In The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven Mark W. Driscoll examines nineteenth-century Western imperialism in Asia and the devastating effects of "climate caucasianism"—the white West's pursuit of rapacious extraction at the expense of natural environments and people of color conflated with them. Drawing on an array of primary sources in Chinese, Japanese, and French, Driscoll reframes the Opium Wars as "wars for drugs" and demonstrates that these wars to unleash narco- and human traffickers kickstarted the most important event of the Anthropocene: the military substitution of Qing China's world-leading carbon-neutral economy for an unsustainable Anglo-American capitalism powered by coal. Driscoll also reveals how subaltern actors, including outlaw societies and dispossessed samurai groups, became ecological protectors, defending their locales while driving decolonization in Japan and overthrowing a millennia of dynastic rule in China. Driscoll contends that the methods of these protectors resonate with contemporary Indigenous-led movements for environmental justice.

The Blackface Minstrel Show in Mass Media

The Blackface Minstrel Show in Mass Media PDF Author: Tim Brooks
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476676763
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
 The minstrel show occupies a complex and controversial space in the history of American popular culture. Today considered a shameful relic of America's racist past, it nonetheless offered many black performers of the 19th and early 20th centuries their only opportunity to succeed in a white-dominated entertainment world, where white performers in blackface had by the 1830s established minstrelsy as an enduringly popular national art form. This book traces the often overlooked history of the "modern" minstrel show through the advent of 20th century mass media--when stars like Al Jolson, Bing Crosby and Mickey Rooney continued a long tradition of affecting black music, dance and theatrical styles for mainly white audiences--to its abrupt end in the 1950s. A companion two-CD reissue of recordings discussed in the book is available from Archeophone Records at www.archeophone.com.

Extreme Exoticism

Extreme Exoticism PDF Author: W. Anthony Sheppard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190072717
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 608

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Book Description
To what extent can music be employed to shape one culture's understanding of another? In the American imagination, Japan has represented the "most alien" nation for over 150 years. This perceived difference has inspired fantasies--of both desire and repulsion--through which Japanese culture has profoundly impacted the arts and industry of the U.S. While the influence of Japan on American and European painting, architecture, design, theater, and literature has been celebrated in numerous books and exhibitions, the role of music has been virtually ignored until now. W. Anthony Sheppard's Extreme Exoticism offers a detailed documentation and wide-ranging investigation of music's role in shaping American perceptions of the Japanese, the influence of Japanese music on American composers, and the place of Japanese Americans in American musical life. Presenting numerous American encounters with and representations of Japanese music and Japan, this book reveals how music functions in exotic representation across a variety of genres and media, and how Japanese music has at various times served as a sign of modernist experimentation, a sounding board for defining American music, and a tool for reshaping conceptions of race and gender. From the Tin Pan Alley songs of the Russo-Japanese war period to Weezer's Pinkerton album, music has continued to inscribe Japan as the land of extreme exoticism.

The End of the Shoguns and the Birth of Modern Japan, 2nd Edition

The End of the Shoguns and the Birth of Modern Japan, 2nd Edition PDF Author: Mark E. Cunningham
Publisher: Twenty-First Century Books
ISBN: 146770377X
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
How did the end of the shoguns pave the way for modern Japan? Between the eighth and twelfth centuries, emperors ruled Japan. But powerful families gained the loyalty of the samurai - the emperors’ warriors. In 1185 one local lord took control as shogun, leader of the samurai armies. For the next seven hundred years, the emperors were ceremonial figures, and the shoguns ruled Japan, banning interaction with the Western world. In the nineteenth century, Westerners demanded that Japan open to trade under the threat of invasion. Japan’s shogunate realized it didn’t have the military technology to fight them. When the shogun government made concessions to the Westerners, Japanese lords were outraged and returned their support to the emperor. The shogunate crumbled. In 1868 Emperor Meiji became ruler of Japan. He opened Japan to modern technology, and his military advisers created a global fighting force. The end of the shoguns, which led to the birth of modern Japan, was one of the world’s pivotal moments.

The Familiar Made Strange

The Familiar Made Strange PDF Author: Brooke L. Blower
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801455456
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
In The Familiar Made Strange, twelve distinguished historians offer original and playful readings of American icons and artifacts that cut across rather than stop at the nation’s borders to model new interpretive approaches to studying United States history. These leading practitioners of the "transnational turn" pause to consider such famous icons as John Singleton Copley’s painting Watson and the Shark, Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photograph V-J Day, 1945, Times Square, and Alfred Kinsey’s reports on sexual behavior, as well as more surprising but revealing artifacts like Josephine Baker’s banana skirt and William Howard Taft’s underpants. Together, they present a road map to the varying scales, angles and methods of transnational analysis that shed light on American politics, empire, gender, and the operation of power in everyday life.

Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World

Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World PDF Author: Claire Jean Kim
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009222252
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
An exploration of how Asian Americans are uniquely positioned relative to whites and Black people in the U.S. racial order.

Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production

Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production PDF Author: William H. Bridges, IV
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498505481
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
This book analyzes the complex conversations taking place in texts of all sorts traveling between Africans, African diasporas, and Japanese across disciplinary, geographic, racial, ethnic, and cultural borders.

Mooring the Global Archive

Mooring the Global Archive PDF Author: Martin Dusinberre
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009346512
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Martin Dusinberre follows the Yamashiro-maru steamship across Asian and Pacific waters in an innovative history of Japan's engagement with the outside world in the late-nineteenth century. This compelling in-depth analysis reconstructs the lives of some of the thousands of male and female migrants who left Japan for work in Hawai'i, Southeast Asia and Australia. These stories bring together transpacific historiographies of settler colonialism, labour history and resource extraction in new ways. Drawing on an unconventional and deeply material archive, from gravestones to government files, paintings to song, and from digitized records to the very earth itself, Dusinberre addresses key questions of method and authorial positionality in the writing of global history. This engaging investigation into archival practice asks, what is the global archive, where is it cited, and who are 'we' as we cite it? This title is also available as Open Access.