CJS Noon Lecture Series: Southward Bound: Voyage Narratives of the Japanese Immigration to Brazil

Bio:

Seth Jacobowitz is Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. He is the translator of The Edogawa Rampo Reader (Kurodahan Press, 2008) and Writing Technology in Meiji Japan (Harvard Asia Center, forthcoming).

Abstract:

This talk examines two pre-war narratives of Japanese immigration to Brazil, Ishikawa Tatsuzo’s novel Sobo (The Emigrants, 1935) and Shimazaki Toson’s travelogue Nanbei imin kenbunroku (A Record of South American Immigration, 1937). It focuses in particular upon representations of the international port towns en route and the ways immigration defined a third way between imperial and colonial modernities.