THIS LECTURE HAS BEEN CANCELLED: "Taming the Formosan Savage: The Japanese Colonial Postcard as Photograph, Object, and Image," Paul Barclay - CJS Noon Lecture

November 19, 2009
12:00PM - 01:00PM, Room 1636, School of Social Work Building, 1080 S. University, Ann Arbor

Host Department: Center for Japanese Studies (CJS)

Free and Open to the Public.

Further Information

 

In the 1870s, Japanese statesmen justified the occupation of Taiwan's Hengchun by asserting that Qing sovereignty ended abruptly at a hypothetical boundary line separating Chinese villages and fields from Indigenous population centers. The notion that Taiwan was ethnically bifurcated into discreet territories reasserted itself when Japan assumed the mantle of government in 1895. Notwithstanding this crude but persistent conception of Taiwan’s human geography, 1890s Japanese travel accounts revealed the existence of a Han-Malay contact zone of unknown proportions. Here, ethnically hybrid “interpreters” and “headmen” held sway. Photographs of tattooed Indigenous women wearing combinations of Chinese and Atayal garments symbolized this contact zone, constituting the most frequently reproduced postcard images of the “savage district.” As the Japanese state transformed this unruly contact zone into a manageable boundary line, photographs of Indigenous women were shorn of indicators of Han affiliation. By the 1930s, the borderland hybrid was revived with photographs of Indigenous women in Japanese attire. Colonial photography thus participated in the redefinition of Taiwan along the axis of Japanese temporality, presenting an erstwhile Qing borderland as a primordial site for the infamous assimilation policies known as "imperialization."

Paul D. Barclay is Associate Professor at Lafayette College. He received his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1999. Professor Barclay's research focuses on Japanese colonialism in Taiwan. His articles appear in Humanities Research, Journal of Asian Studies, and Japanese Studies, among others. Barclay is general editor of the Gerald Warner Taiwan Image Collection.

Note: This lecture is part of CJS's special "History of Photography" series.

Contact Information: 734.764.6307 or umcjs@umich.edu