This conference will bring together scholars of the Japanese empire and scholars of French Indochina to engage in a dialogue on comparative and transnational approaches to the study of imperialism and colonialism in East
Asia. In French Indochina as well as in Japan’s colonies in Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria, authorities endeavored to produce ultra-modern spaces of enlightened life that were built upon traumatizing practices of dislocation and exploitation of both indigenous and colonizing subjects. Their projects mobilized notions of race, ethnicity, gender, and class, but could not contain the tensions within and among these categories of identity and action. As aspects of modern capitalism, French and Japanese imperialisms stimulated new regional and global flows of people, things, and ideas, but French and Japanese metropolitan authorities and colonial states struggled to manage them, at times requiring (or rejecting) international assistance. Moreover, both empires were built upon the spaces of the Sinocentric regional system. Both the French and Japanese empires engaged with Chinese trading networks; as important, they had to manage significant Chinese populations within their respective colonial spaces and spheres of informal power, as well as movements of their subjects into and out of China. Please visit the conference website for more information. Sponsored by the Department of History at North Carolina State University, in conjunction with the Triangle Japan Forum. DATE: April 8-10, 2011 LOCATION: Room 331, Withers Hall, UNC TIME: Please visit the conference website for a detailed schedule of events.