Book Launch: Waiting for the Cool Moon: Anti-imperialist Struggles in the Heart of Japan’s Empire by Wendy Matsumura

Book Launch: Waiting for the Cool Moon: Anti-imperialist Struggles in the Heart of Japan’s Empire by Wendy Matsumura

This book launch is being held in-person on Thursday, March 28, 10-11:30 AM in the EAS Lounge, 14 floor, John P. Robarts Research Library. Faculty, students, staff, and the public are cordially invited to this event series. Registration is required: https://forms.gle/FNM5ZYW4jss2eLB29

EVENT DESCRIPTION:

We are pleased to host a book launch and graduate student workshop on March 28, 2024, featuring invited speaker Professor Wendy Matsumura (Associate Professor in History at University of California, San Diego). Professor Matsumura will speak with us about her second monograph, Waiting for the Cool Moon: Anti-Imperialist Struggles in the Heart of Japan’s Empire (Duke University Press, 2024). Building on the methodological insights from critical race theory and Indigenous studies, Waiting for the Cool Moon traces the transformation of the Japanese small farm household (shono noka) into the material and discursive foundation of the national community and its members into conquistador humanists following the post-World War One agrarian crisis. The book launch will be moderated by Grayson Lee (Ph.D candidate in Faculty of Information at UofT), with Mayumo Inoue (Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at Hitotsubashi University) and Sabrina Teng-io Chung (Ph.D. candidate in East Asian Studies at UofT) serving as discussants.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Wendy Matsumura is Associate Professor of modern Japanese history and Okinawa studies at UC San Diego. She received her Ph.D. in History from New York University in 2007. She is the author of two monographs, both from Duke University Press. The first, published in 2015, The Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor, and Theorizations of Community, traced the way that Okinawa, an entity that only came into existence as a territorial and political category in the late 1870s transformed into a diasporic, cultural community included in, but distinct from the Japanese nation-state by the early 1930s. It argued that the production a belief in

Okinawa as an organic, trans-historical community was inextricably linked to capitalist crises that found their temporary resolution in appeals to Okinawan community. Matsumura’s second monograph, published in 2024, Waiting for the Cool Moon: Anti-Imperialist Struggles in the Heart of Japan’s Empire, traced the transformation of the Japanese small farm household (shono noka) into the material and discursive foundation of the national community and its members into conquistador humanists following the post-World War One agrarian crisis. In addition to conventional academic venues, her work has been published in Viewpoint magazine, The Funambulist, Society & Space, and other more public-facing outlets.

Discussant:

Mayumo Inoue is an associate professor of comparative literature at Hitotsubashi University. His publications include the co-edited collection Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia (with Steve Choe, Hong Kong University Press, 2019) as well as the articles on aesthetics and poetics in the works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Charles Olson, and Kiyota Masanobu in the imperial context of the U.S. and East Asia including Okinawa in A Blackwell Companion to American Poetry, Discourse, and American Quarterly. His essays in Japanese have appeared in the journals such as Gendai Shiso, Ecce, and las barcas. He is also a founding member of an Okinawa-based art journal las barcas.

Sabrina Teng-io Chung is a Ph.D. candidate in East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation examines the U.S. and Japanese colonial governance of Okinawa’s urban built environment through the lens of transpacific studies, inter-Asia cultural studies, and critical infrastructure studies. Her publication has appeared in Society and Space (online edition). She translated investigative reporting articles from independent Chinese-language news outlets including The Reporter and Initium Media. She also co-founded the "Thinking Infrastructures in Global Asia: New Perspectives and Approaches" Working Group, which is sponsored by the Jackman Humanities Institute. Her research has been supported by the School of Cities Graduate Fellows Program and the MOFA Taiwan Fellowship.

Moderator:

Grayson Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. He utilizes an interdisciplinary approach and his research interests have been in Transpacific studies, the Cold War in Asia, the South Korean digital culture industry, and legacies of race, war, and mass violence. He is a recipient of the Canada Graduate Scholarship – Doctorship program and his current research explores the “K-Cop Wave,” the development of Korea’s police technology exports throughout the Global South, and the intersections between imperialism, policing, and militarization. Outside of academia, he is a managing editor for the Youth Critics Initiative, a partnership program between the Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival and TACLA. His creative work has been published in Held Magazine and Wayward Kindred, a comics anthology. He is also a digital collage artist and a member of Heung Coalition, a transnational leftist Korean collective.