Browsing by Subject "Transnational history"

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The pre-Columbian exchange : the circulation of the ancient Peruvian dead in the Americas and Atlantic World
(2016-06-08) Heaney, Christopher Hardy; Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge; Garfield, Seth, 1967-; Bsumek, Erika; Covey, R. Alan; Fabian, Ann; Walker, Charles F
This dissertation is a history of how pre-colonial Andean skulls and mummies were looted, circulated, studied, and displayed in Peru, the Americas, and Atlantic World, from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-twentieth. Engaging with Andean beliefs in the numinous subjecthood of the seemingly inanimate, it practices a research methodology that treats the dead as both actors and legible texts, whose transits from high-altitude Andean tombs to the bone rooms of museums are lifetimes worthy of study; and whose indigenous and Spanish interlocutors and their knowledge-practices prove central to the development of what became archaeology and physical anthropology in the Americas. By beginning in 1532, it shows how Spanish and Andean grave-opening practices established a hemispheric regime of legalized looting that appropriated indigenous sovereignty, and circulated the image of the wealthy and embalmed Inca corpse in the wider Atlantic world. Believing the Inca dead superior to the mummies of Egypt, the English sought indigenous graves of their own before casting Peru and its embodied history as singular in the Americas. Upon independence, Peru’s non-indigenous elites claimed Inca mummies as an emblem of ancient, scientific, and elite sovereignty, building a National Museum around them, and sending one in 1821 to the King of England. From these circulations, the “ancient Peruvian” dead became the single largest population in the Americas’ foundational museums, but the discovery in Peru of trepanned crania—subjects of surgery—undercut skull-collecting’s Euro-centric assumptions. Indigenous Peruvians proved central to this process, writing back to Euro-American universal history by referring to the dead as texts of medical healing and study and building their own museums around them. The founding document of the Americas’ engagement with the indigenous past, and indigenous America’s engagement with global history, emerges as a papery, preserved, and imperial mummy from Peru; its codicils the un-measurable crania that both reinforced and destabilized scientific racism.
Through the kaleidoscope : Uchiyama bookstore and Sino-Japanese visionaries in war and peace
(2013-05) Kato, Naoko, active 2013; Metzler, Mark, 1957-
The Republican period in Chinese history (1911-1949) is generally seen as a series of anti-imperialist and anti-foreign movements that coincide with the development of Chinese nationalism. The continual ties between Chinese nationalists and Japanese intellectuals are often overlooked. In the midst of the Sino-Japanese war, Uchiyama Kanzō, a Christian pacifist who was the owner of the bookstore, acted as a cultural liaison between May Fourth Chinese revolutionaries who were returned students from Japan, and Japanese left-wing activists working for the Communist cause, or visiting Japanese writers eager to meet their Chinese counterparts. I explore the relationship between Japanese and Chinese cultural literati in Shanghai, using Uchiyama Bookstore as the focal point. The ongoing Sino-Japanese tensions surrounding the "history problem" overemphasize the views of the right-wing nationalists and the Japanese state, dismissing the crucial role of left-wing groups. Uchiyama is a key link to understanding the ideological connection between Pan Asian anti-war activists in the pre-war period with peace activists in post-war Japan who were often accused of being "China's hand." Uchiyama, valued for his prewar connections with prominent Chinese intellectuals, becomes one of the founding members of Sino-Japan organizations upon his return to Japan after the war. I situate non-governmental Sino-Japanese organizations within the larger peace movement in Japan, which are transnational, in contrast with intergovernmental organizations that operate on the basis of nation-states. This work will contribute towards a growing recognition of histories that transcend nations, by focusing on both Chinese and Japanese cosmopolitan individuals who continued to form ties with each other, even as their respective nation-states were either at war, or did not have normalized diplomatic relations. I hope to also shed new light on histories of Republican China and post-war Japan, as well as explore issues related to empire and globalization in East Asia.