Reporter: What kind of research did you do in order to prepare for the publication?
My research has consisted of close readings of a wide variety of texts, most of which were composed in Arabic, from the ninth through the eleventh centuries. These texts include world and regional geographies; topographical histories, which usually describe changes in an urban built environment over time; religious treatises, in which the “merits” of a city or region are enumerated with reference to scriptural traditions and sacred history; literary anthologies, such as collections of anecdotes, quotations, and proverbs on the topic of homesickness; and poetry, such as elegies for cities destroyed in war. I have also analyzed a mapping tradition originating in the tenth century that divides the “Realm of Islam” into sub-regions and maps each of them. Maps from this tradition survive in manuscripts housed in archives all over the world.
Reporter: What would you like someone (perhaps a student) to take away from reading this book?
I hope it challenges the tendency, particularly pronounced in Europe and North America, to underestimate the role played by land in conceptions of community and polity among Arabs and Muslims and to over-emphasize the roles played by kinship and religion. This tendency has been compounded in recent years by views of globalization as a uniquely de-territorializing process. Thus, globalization has been seen as heralding the end of the nation-state, or at least loosening territorial attachments in its constant flows of information, capital, and people. Moreover, political rhetoric about the global dimensions of the “War on Terror” is dominated by the threatening figure of the “Muslim terrorist,” loyal only to a worldwide network of like-minded Muslims committed to otherworldly and utopian (or dystopian) goals rather than local, national, or geopolitical agendas. These assumptions have distracted from the modes in which territories, imagined in new ways and deployed in new forms of discourse, have retained wide relevance in the geographical imagination as well as on the ground in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries--not just among Muslims or in the Middle East, but everywhere. At a time when tensions between the local and the global inspire new notions of rootedness, it is more vital than ever to examine the changing ways in which people have looked to the land to declare loyalty and claim belonging over the centuries.
Jeffrey Bayliss, associate professor of history
On the Margins of Empire: Buraku and Korean Identity and Prewar and Wartime Japan Harvard University Press
Reporter: What is your book about?
The book explores the histories of Japan’s two largest minority groups –
the ethnic Korean community and the descendants of various premodern
outcaste groups collectively referred to as the Burakumin – from the
early 20th century through the end of the Pacific War in 1945. It places
particular emphasis on their experiences, movements for greater civil
rights, and the state’s reaction to these from 1920 to the end of the
war. In the book I explore how popular conceptions and stereotypes of
both of these groups emerged as part of Japan’s early 20th century
process of empire building in East Asia. In other words, I examine the
connections between the rise of empire, on the one hand, and the
creation of increasingly negative stereotypes of these groups, which led
in turn to their increasing ostracism from and socioeconomic
disadvantage vis-à-vis the Japanese majority, thus confining them to the
figurative margins of the Japanese empire by the beginning of the 1920s.
Their reactions to this marginalization followed very similar paths
across that decade, resulting in very similar conceptions of what it
meant to be a Korean or a Burakumin for activists representing either
minority. As Japan entered a fifteen year-long period of warfare
starting in 1931, however, the state’s policies to control and mobilize
each of these groups diverged on the question of how “close” the culture
of each appeared to be to that of the Japanese mainstream. This shift in
turn led to different interpretations of each minority group’s place
within Japanese society and relation to the majority on the part of
minority activists and other representatives; whereas as Buraku
community leaders and most other Burakumin came to support the war
effort in spite of continuing popular prejudice against them, Koreans in
Japan responded to the state’s attempts at community mobilization with
passive resistance and a general lack of enthusiasm, for the most part.
Over time, this divergence also influenced the way that members of these
two minorities interacted in neighborhoods where both groups lived, side
by side.
Reporter: What contributions to this field of study do you hope to make
with this book?
Scholars of Japanese history in Japan and elsewhere have researched both
of these groups in the past, but this is the first work to offer a
parallel reading of the construction of minority identities for both
groups. In doing so, it reveals how the Japanese empire came to
incorporate a de facto “cultural hierarchy” in managing the various
peoples under its charge.
