Reports from the ASA.

[sechan19]

Through desire to meet up with a very dear friend, I found myself in the strange world of the American Studies Association annual conference. A number of mind-bending delights awaited me; including the observation of distinguished faculty in the act of getting down to "Whoop! There It Is!" in the Marriott ballroom, and the amusing (though somewhat disheartening) application of the popularity game - graduate school style - in situations both serious and sparring. Regardless, the opportunity to spend a couple nights in the company of the fabulous A. is well worth any expenditure on my part, and I'm happy to say that our first evening together was rapture - with sinful Italian food, a little bit of funk, Gackt's magnum, and a deliciously dangerous Manhattan thrown into the mix of giggling, goofing, and gallivanting.

(I was asked at one point to define the gendering of a Manhattan cocktail, however, and that really threw me for a loop. I'm sorry to admit that, as an unserious academic, I've never bothered to ponder the gender-neutrality [or lack thereof] of alcoholic beverages. But then, again, I'm 丈夫 and tend to do what I want because of that. I've been known to drink my bourbon straight - much to the astonishment of some male friends. I've also been known to drink fuzzy navels and dance around in my pink, rose-print underwear - not to the astonishment of my male friends.)

In browsing through the ASA events listing, I found two back-to-back panels that dealt with issues related to East Asian and Asian nations as they intersected broader issues of American hegemony, colonialism, racial dynamics, politics, and sexuality, etc.

Of particular interest to my was a paper that examined the largely-forgotten "Miss Nagasaki" beauty contest of 1946, which was the brainchild of American servicemen stationed in post-war Nagasaki and which was dubbed, by servicemen newspapers, as the "Miss Atom Bomb" beauty contest. Naturally, the local women of Nagasaki - who had been brutally disfigured by the bomb - were not part of this contest. This use of bomb terminology served to legitimate and normalize the act of dropping the bomb, by implying that the Japanese of Nagasaki were so okay with the situation as to have named their contest after it. Most interestingly, the deployment of the term "Miss Atom Bomb" in place of "Miss Nagasaki" was so pervasive that it dominated accounts of the event even in Japanese history books until the mid 1990s. Thus, this legitimation of the bombing of Nagasaki was perpetuated (in the minds of other Japanese) for quite a long time after the actual event, marginalizing the citizens of Nagasaki and their experience in the process.

Now, granted, the American motivations for "taming" the terminology of the bomb often had little to do with legitimation and a lot to do with their own fears of life during the cold war era, but it is - nevertheless - a particularly ugly example of American imperialism at work.

I was blown away by this presentation.

Comments

[lordameth.livejournal.com]

Very interesting. I often tend to think that I have no interest in American studies, and that it bears no relevance to my own research topics. In point of fact, it generally doesn't, as I focus on pre-Meiji and may be moving into pre-Edo if the mood strikes me as I enter a PhD program next year.

But then these sorts of things come up. ... Really, quite interesting.

A friend of mine is doing her PhD in English medieval history, and I considered for a time joining her at the Leeds Medieval Conference, the largest one in the world or so I've been told. And out of 100+ panels, if I remember the numbers right, there was one or two devoted to Japan. That's one or two more than I expected. Would have been great to go to that with her, see what an English medievalist thinks about Japanese medieval history and such.

[reteva.livejournal.com]

Yeah, everything is getting so interdisciplinary in the wake of a globalized market economy that people are now applying that kind of globalized thinking to subjects that you wouldn't necessarily expect. I too, being headed in the direction of medieval Japanese, would have been really interested to hear an English medievalist's take on Kamakura or Muromachi Japan.

[reteva.livejournal.com]

Okay, I must be more subject to bomb terminology than I was aware. That was completely and totally no pun intended!