Postcolonial positioning and Japanese imperial affect in interwar Dada prose poems

Between the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) and the Mukden Incident (1931), Japan’s mounting colonial presence manifested itself in the activities of the South Manchuria Railway Company as well as in the Japanese forces’ skirmishes for control of the region. The poet Kitagawa Fuyuhiko (1900–1990) would draw on his memories of Manchuria, where he lived until attending college in Kyoto, to situate hyperobjects and colonial minutiae in counter-hegemonic anticolonial and antiwar prose poems. His subtractive poetic configurations – not Surrealist but certainly building on Dada precedents – isolate incongruous elements (evental traces) in Alain Badiou’s sense of being faithful to a critique of the ethics of a colonial apparatus. Having grown up within the colonial enterprise himself, and subject to high-minded Japanese media representations and instilled imperial affects, Kitagawa positions himself against the machinic drive for colonial profits and the abuse of labour and prostitutes. This article thus situates aesthetic strategies for displacing imperial affect as projected onto spaces of Japanese expansion so as to document radically anticolonial subject possibilities among Japanese nationals themselves. As postcolonial artefacts, these prose poems suggest the contradictions of European modernity writ in the Japanese rhetoric of cosmopolitan East Asian development and liberation as cultural production that aestheticises colonial extraction of labour and raw materials.     

明代宫廷画家职官状况述略

明代宫廷画家的官职、称谓不一,任职混杂,史料记载零散、简略,给宫廷画家身份的辨认造成一定的困难。从宫廷内部管理状况来看,画家的官职多样且分散,涉及多个职官体系,官职中有相当一部分为虚职,在具体管理方面权归内廷太监。本文力图从明代职官体系和内廷隶属等方面切入,区分辨别宫廷画家的官职与称谓,从而进一步认识明代宫廷画家的身份定位,了解明代宫廷绘画创作的运作状况。     

晚清议改科举新探

废除科举并非清统治者的初衷。迄道光至光绪,长达半个多世纪,议改科举的主流,多以讲求实学、增广科目、取材标准多样化为基本取向,希望以老树嫁接新枝的方法,激活科举制生机。朝臣疆吏们先后至少有18份以上要求增设科目的改革方案,正式奏呈清廷,最高执政者亦并多次谕令部院大臣讨论议复。由于整个统治集团的观念更新滞后,礼部等机构恪守夷夏之大防,阻挠变制,总理衙门鉴于反对派势大而采取等待姿态,经济特科的举办又一波三折,以虎头蛇尾告终,使得科举制失去了逐步内在更新的最佳时机,后起者不得不考虑除旧布新的彻底变革。     

Imperial Remains and Imperial Invitations: Centering Race within the Contemporary Large-Scale Infrastructures of East Africa

In this paper we combine infrastructure studies and black radical traditions to foreground how imperial remains deeply inform the logics that bring forth contemporary large-scale infrastructures in Africa. The objective, prompted by the ongoing avid promotion of such architectures on the continent, is to contribute to an analysis that centres race in these projects. Our argument is that these initiatives have to be understood in relation to inherited material and discursive scaffoldings that remain from the colonial period, through what we refer to as imperial remains and imperial invitations. These remains and invitations demonstrate how recent mega infrastructures inhere, in their planning, financing and implementation, a colonial racialism, despite rhetorical claims to the opposite. Empirically, we draw, principally, on China built and financed infrastructure projects from Kenya, and theoretically upon black radical traditions in order to foreground a longer genealogy of black pathologising and resistance to it on the continent.     

乾清宫空间功能的转换与制度变迁（上）

乾清宫是明清皇宫中位于内廷的宫殿,在明代是皇帝的寝宫,清康熙八年,皇帝居住场所从保和殿迁入乾清宫,这座明代皇帝寝宫遂被改造成清帝的理政中心。随着乾清宫空间功能的改变,清代一些重要的制度也随之出现,如乾清门御门听政、乾清宫召对臣工、懋勤殿秋谳勾到等。而且乾清宫功能的转变,直接影响了外臣进入内廷的行为方式。本文通过对文献资料的梳理,论证了乾清宫空间功能转变的原因、过程及相应制度的产生。     

Imperial Outposts and the War Beyond: Singapore,Hong Kong and the British Empire’s Land Force Contribution to the Korean War

Histories of the British Empire’s strategic outposts in the Far East have traditionally focused on their traumatic loss to the Japanese adversary during the Second World War. Only in the past decade-and-a-half have historians begun to examine the post-Second World War importance of these outposts to the continued defence and security of Britain’s empire in the Far East. In taking this line of historical enquiry still further, the article examines how Singapore and Hong Kong were used to project British military power, specifically army deployments, across the Far East, and far beyond the imperial frontier, in support of Britain’s involvement in the 1950–53 Korean War and therefore in pursuit of the empire’s foreign and defence policy objectives. It adopts an essentially operational analysis to this end, relying on operational and army ‘ground-level’ sources from the records of the Colonial, Foreign, and War Offices at the British National Archives. It uncovers the hidden workings of the mechanisms of imperial military power projection through strategic outposts, which ranged from training to logistical support to the exercise of command and control, and how these mechanisms and outposts were utilised by the British Far Eastern land forces involved in the Korean War. In so doing, the article sheds much valuable and original light on the historical importance of these strategic outposts to imperial defence.     

Imperial Geographies of Home: British Domesticity in India, 1886–1925

This paper considers the translation of domestic discourses over imperial space as middle-class British women established homes in India from 1886 to 1925. Unlike studies of imperial domesticity that delineate separate spheres of home and empire, I consider the exercise of imperial power on a domestic scale, by examining advice given in household guides on managing servants and raising British children in India. Rather than view the household merely as confining, I also explore the advice given to British women regarding travel outside their homes in India. The domestic roles of British women reproduced imperial power relations on a household scale, and the political significance of imperial domesticity extended beyond the boundaries of the home.     

The necropolis of Vallerano (Rome, 2nd–3rd century AD): an anthropological perspective on the ancient Romans in the Suburbium

The present study investigates the skeletal remains of individuals who were part of a Roman suburban community, in order to assess lifestyle and living conditions in the town's outskirts during the Roman Imperial age. The existence of the community was linked to the functioning of one of the many villas that surrounded the town of Rome at that time. In order to assess health, several indicators were explored, including mortality, oral pathologies and specific (cribra orbitalia) and aspecific (linear enamel hypoplasia) indicators of nutritional and physiological impairment. The sample, which probably represents the labour force of the villa, shows a high number of individuals dying in the early adult age and very few living beyond 50. Subadults were frequently affected by pathological conditions which may indicate anaemia and/or inflammations and infections, as witnessed by the frequency of cribra orbitalia. Growth was also impaired, as the individuals suffered from systemic disturbances during the early years of life that led to the formation of linear enamel hypoplasia (LEH) in their teeth. Frequency of LEH is very high, as well as its multiple occurrence through time (2.44 defects per individual) and its onset occurs from the earliest age classes. Diet, on the other hand, does not seem to have been particularly carbohydrate based. Oral pathologies are very low, which is consistent with meat consumption complementing a diet rich in low‐calorific products of agriculture and seemingly low in refined carbohydrates. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Subjects,citizens and others: the handling of ethnic differences in the British and the Habsburg Empires (late nineteenth and early twentieth century)

This article focuses on the role of ethnic inclusions and exclusions in administering citizenship and nationality within the British and the Habsburg Empires. The analysis discerns three ways of dealing with ethnically heterogenous populations. One follows the nation-state model and aims for internal ethnic homogeneity and legal equality. This model coined developments in Canada and Hungary. The second obeys an imperialistic pattern and implements legal discrimination between different ethnic groups. It played a decisive role in East Africa and in Bosnia to a certain degree. The third model follows a statist logic and enforces either supra-ethnic neutrality or a politics of recognition. It was most influential in Austria and India. In the British as well as in the Habsburg context ethnic differences gained significance around 1900. This ethnicising of law and administrative practice produced different results, though, in both cases, mainly due to the empires' divergent political structures. Whereas within the Habsburg Empire the three models were juxtaposed, British law and administration came to be dominated by the imperialistic pattern of ethnic discrimination against ‘non-white’ subjects. Thus, the customary distinction between a politically inclusive nationalism in Western Europe and an ethnically exclusive one in the continent's Eastern half – sometimes linked with the difference between ius soli and ius sanguinis – cannot be upheld.     

论晚清同、光两朝的皇后妆奁

皇后妆奁的筹备是清代皇帝大婚的重要内容,诸多机构参与其中,这使得皇后妆奁成为仪式最为隆重、规模最为宏大的嫁妆。本文通过对同、光两朝皇帝大婚档案中有关皇后妆奁资料的梳理,力图揭示清代皇后妆奁的筹办、构成及特点。