Entretien avec David Ambaras, chercheur associé du CRJ

Si vous avez manqué la conférence de David Ambaras (North Carolina State University) au CRJ sur son nouveau livre Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire qui a eu lieu le 18 mars 2019, vous pouvez la rattraper en écoutant le nouvel épisode du podcast de New Books in East Asian Studies
Through a series of provocative case studies on mobility, transgression, and intimacy, David Ambaras’s Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018) interrogates the spatial and ideological formations of modern Japan in its first seven decades or so as a nation-state and empire, especially vis-à-vis China. The slippage between the individual and collective/national (geo)body is a critical theme as Ambaras highlights the roles of both media and government narratives in defining a shared national vision of Japan, and the powerful alchemy of pride and anxieties around the transgression of its borders. With case studies on human trafficking, international marriage, middlebrow literature, and a pirate queen (!), this study of marginalized people on the margins throws new light on Japan and maritime East Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Pour en savoir plus : David Ambaras, “Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire” (Cambridge UP, 2018)