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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - COTCA (Cultures of Occupation in Twentieth-century Asia)

Teaser

Summary

How has foreign occupation shaped culture? What has been the lasting cultural legacy of foreign occupation in those societies where it represented the usual state of affairs for much of the modern era? These are key questions which, in light of ongoing cases of occupation around the world, remain crucial in the 21st century. Cultures of Occupation in Twentieth-century Asia (COTCA) will address these questions by analysing how occupation -- be it under colonial, wartime or Cold War powers -- gave rise to unique visual, auditory and spatial regimes in East and Southeast Asia. The core objective of this project is to produce a paradigm shift in the study of occupation, and to challenge the \'collaboration\'/\'resistance\' dichotomy which has defined the field thus far. It will adopt a transnational, intertextual and comparative approach to the study of cultural expression produced under occupation across the 20th century. It will also break new methodological ground by drawing on and contributing to recent developments in visual, auditory and spatial history as a means of highlighting intersections and cultural convergences across different types of occupation.

The COTCA team consists of the PI, 2 postdoctoral researchers and 3 PhD students. The Project is run according to 3 \'streams\': Stream 1 is \'Representations of occupation\'; Stream 2 is \'sounds of occupation\'; and Stream 3 is \'Spaces of occupation\'. Each of these streams involves the stream leaders (the PI on Stream 1, Postdoc1 on Stream 2 and Postdoc2 on Stream 3) undertaking based on hitherto rarely considered examples. These include: A visual history of Japanese-occupied China (led by the PI); soundscapes of the US presence in the Philippines (led by Postdoc1); and spaces of occupation in colonial Malaya (led by Postdoc2). In addition, each of the 3 PhD students is pursuing a research project which corresponds with the methodological and conceptual approach of the stream within which they are working. In Stream, this includes Phd1, who is looking at representations of the American presence in the Philippines across the 20th century; in Stream 2, PhD2 is examining sound and music in Japanese occupied Beijing; and in Stream 3, PhD3 is examining spaces of consumption in colonial Hong Kong.

COTCA is also building a Digital Archive which will enable researchers to trace the development of narratives, tropes and motifs common to \'occupation\' cultural expression in Asia across national and temporal borders. The data for Case Study 1 (the Japanese occupation of China) is already on-line, while a Chinese version of this data will be uploaded at the end of Year 3 of the Project.

Work performed

Work commenced on Stream 1 of COTCA (\'Representations of Occupation) in Year 1 (starting July 2016), with the PI starting research on Case Study 1 (\'The visual history of the Japanese occupation of China\'), and recruiting PhD1 (working on visual representations of the US presence in the Philippines) in September 2016. The PI undertook a preliminary period of fieldwork in China for Case Study 1 in November 2016 (mainly conducting research in Shanghai and Nanjing), while also starting work in preparation for Workshop 1 (\'Visual Histories of Occupation\'), to be held in 2017. Some of the results of this preliminary research were used to inform a 13,0000 word article on the iconography of the occupation in wartime China, which the PI first presented at the Association of Asian Studies conference (Toronto) in March 2017, and later submitted to the Journal of Chinese History (where it was accepted for publication in 2018). In addition, it formed the basis for the Stream 1 monograph, on the visual history of Japanese-occupied China, which the PI work on over the course of Year 1. In addition, the PI organised and ran the Stream 1 Workshop, entitled \'Visual Histories of Occupation\' at the University of Nottingham at the end of Year 1 (i.e., in June 2018). This event involving some 10 external speakers from universities in the UK, Germany, Canada, Australia and Taiwan who shared an interest in the visual aspects of \'occupation\' in various regions of the world.

At the end of Year 1 and start of Year 2, the PI undertook a further period of research, being based at Stanford University (which holds some of the most extensive collections of visual sources relating to the Japanese occupation of China). The research collected would later be used to feature in the Digital Archive, and to inform the monograph and a number of the papers that the PI has been working on.

Stream 2 came on-line in Year 2 of the Project with the Stream lead, Postdoc1, being recruited from a competitive field of candidates in the Spring of 2017, and starting in post in October 2017. Postdoc 2 started to prepare for his research for case Study 2, looking at the \'sounds of occupation\' in the US-controlled Philippines, as well as the more broad theoretical aspects which were to be addressed under the Stream (and has already had a journal article on this topic accepted for publication). PhD2 also started in post in this Stream in Year 2, undertaking a PhD on \'soundscapes of occupation\' in Japanese-occupied Beijing. Postdoc 2 also organised and ran the second workshop of the Project in May 2018, under the title \'Resonating Occupation\'. This workshop, held at the University of Nottingham, involved scholars from the UK, the US, Canada, India, Malaysia, Israel and other countries.

COTCA\'s first major conference, entitled \'Cultures of Occupation: Establishing a Transational Dialogue\', was held over 3 days in January 2018, and involved some 24 speakers from universities and institutions in the UK, Germany, France, Austria, India, Japan, the United States, Australia, Israel and other countries, covering research in \'cultures of occupation\' in Asia, Europe, the Pacific, the Middle East and other parts of the world. This conference included a keynote address by Prof Mire Koikari from the University of Hawaii, and a special presentation by members of the Exterritory Project at Haifa University in Israel. The PI is currently working on compiling an edited volume based on some the research presented at this event.

Year 2 also saw the multi-disciplinary COTCA Seminar Series come on-line. This series has involved 5 external speakers each year since then, with scholars from all career staged (postdoctoral researcher to emeritus professors) from various institutions around Europe and the world, being invited to present their work on \'cultures of occupation in 20th century Asia at Nottingham\'. This seminar series, ran in tandem with the Nottingham Asia Research Institute programme,

Final results

As a result of the work carried out during the first two and a half years of COTCA, we have started to see the development of the \'new paradigm\' that was outlined in the original Grant Agreement, and are pleased to report that the very notion of a field of \'occupation cultural history\' is now something that many of our research collaborators are starting to discuss. This in and of itself forced a reconsideration of the many region- or country-specific studies of \'the occupation\' (which often stress the \'exceptionalism\' of certain cases of occupation). Such achievements are the result of the extensively comparative angle that COTCA had adopted (with the Project taking on an arguably more comparative approach than was envisaged even in the original grant, especially in terms of the conference, workshops and seminars). It is in the second half of the project that most of the results of these advances will be disseminated as publications, especially in the PI\'s monograph (now with the publisher) -- in which a new notion of \'iconographies of occupation\' has been developed, drawing on but moving beyond the work of scholars in visual cultures under specific cases of occupation, and combining these with methods from the field of visual rhetoric -- and, perhaps more importantly, in the first edited volume emanating from the project, which is being prepared for submission to Bloomsbury. In this latter output, the PI has drafted a lengthy introduction which is based on the lengthy discussions encouraged during Conference 1, and in which he shows how the comparisons that the conference helped to highlight were not simply \'transnational\', but often involved transcultural practices which have hitherto not been noted in earlier studies.

Methodologically, the work on \'visual history\' which has been undertaken in Stream 1 is perhaps most advanced (as a result of the fact that Stream 1 started in Year 1). Building on the ideas first circulated by scholars in and related fields, COTCA is starting to show how the use of visual sources highlights all kinds of nuanced cultural expression that earlier studies on, for example, literature or cinema under occupation have overlooked. Such ideas are perhaps best articulated in the PI\'s article on the \'occupied lens\' (now under peer review at an appropriate journal), in which the PI explores how otherwise unremarkable portrait photography can be deployed in new ways under the context of foreign occupation.

Methodological and conceptual advances undertaken in Streams 2 and 3 will be more clearly defined in the second half of the project (as these streams only started in Year 2 and Year 3 respectively).