The Seventh East Asian Colloquium of the Spring Semester is Friday, the 22nd of April.

EAST ASIAN COLLOQUIUM (Presented by the East Asian Studies Center)
PRESENTER: Robert Tierney (Departments of East Asian Languages and Cultures and 
Comparative and World Literature, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
TOPIC: "Anthropology and Literature in Colonial Taiwan"
DATE: Friday, April 22
TIME: 12:00 p.m. - 1:15 p.m.
LOCATION: Ballantine Hall 004

(Light refreshments will be served.  You are also welcome to bring your own lunch.)

While Western scholars introduced the science of anthropology to Japan in the 1870s, Japanese scholars quickly "nationalized" this foreign science and brought it to bear on the aboriginal population of Taiwan, which quickly became the first overseas field in which they could work. As a genre of writing about primitive societies, anthropology offered a model that writers of fiction used to explore the cultures of exotic societies. 


In this paper, I will study the concrete interaction between the writer Sato Haruo, who traveled to Taiwan in 1920, and the anthropologist Mori Ushinosuke.  In 1923, Sato wrote "Machoo" (Demon Bird), a short work based on a passage in a book by Mori.  The narrator of this story impersonates an anthropologist who is studying an episode of persecution in an unnamed barbarian village.  At the same time, the story he tells is an allegory about 
Japanese persecution of Koreans during the Great Kanto Earthquake.  "Demon Bird" is a story that uncovers unexpected links between colony and metropolis. The work is at once a deconstruction of colonial anthropology and an ethnographic critique of the Japanese empire.

Robert Tierney is assistant professor of Japanese literature in the Departments of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  His recent publications include Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame (University of California Press, 2010).   He is currently researching the history of Japanese adaptations of Shakespeare and 
Japan's first anti-imperialist movement.  He may be contacted at 
rtierney@illinois.edu<mailto:rtierney@illinois.edu>.


For more information about any upcoming event, please contact:
East Asian Studies Center
Indiana University
Memorial Hall West 207
1021 East Third Street
Bloomington, IN 47405-7005
(812) 855-3765
easc@indiana.edu<mailto:easc@indiana.edu>