Presented by the A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group. Hosted by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.

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NYU graduate students are invited to join the next workshop hosted by the A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group featuring Mich Ling (Rutgers University, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies). Ling will present a chapter from their dissertation, “Towards a Global Idea of Asian Women: Selective Incorporation and Settler Knowledge Production in the Transpacific Nineteenth Century.”

The A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group hosts monthly workshops for graduate students to foster interdisciplinary discussion and interdepartmental collaboration on each other’s research and interests in Asian/Pacific/American Studies.

NYU campus access guidelines: This is an in-person event, open to graduate students from NYU and nearby universities. Registration is required. Non-NYU guests may be asked to present a government-issued photo ID. NYU guests must present their NYU ID.

Accessibility note: This venue has an elevator and is accessible for wheelchair users. There are single-stall, all gender restrooms available. If you have any access needs, please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu.

Abstract

Towards a Global Idea of Asian Women: Selective Incorporation and Settler Knowledge Production in the Transpacific Nineteenth Century

In the second chapter of their dissertation, Mich Ling critiques Japanese women’s roles in the (re)production of the settler nation and global capitalism by tracing the transpacific networks of capitalist and settler colonial exchange they animate “in and around the Pacific.” Ling does so by following the trajectories of the five girls sent along with the Iwakura Mission to the United States in 1871—specifically, Tsuda Umeko and the Yoshimasu Ryōko. Through an analysis of the newly released Tsuda Umeko 5000-yen banknote, Iwakura Mission members diaries, letters, and publications, and the forgotten mock trial involving Yoshimasu’s assault aboard the SS America, Ling frames modern Japan’s selective incorporation of Japanese women through the logic of possession. By understanding the nineteenth century as a period of selective incorporation instead of exclusion, Ling queries the “periodizations and paradigms” of disciplinary knowledge of North America, Asia and the Pacific. The trajectories of the Iwakura Mission girls are entangled with the history of how Ainu Mosir became Hokkaido, and how some Asian women became “lewd” and “immoral” across US and Japanese legal systems while others became exchange students and mothers of the nation. Their stories reveal how a network of Japanese settlers and capitalists in the nineteenth century utilized knowledge production of gender and sexuality as technologies of possession, producing the woman’s sphere as a crucial financial and political nexus of settler colonialism. In narrating this history, Ling argues that the value of Asian women was a problem of global capitalism that US and Japanese agents of empire worked to settle, standardize, and possess.

Image: 5000-yen banknote featuring Tsuda Umeko. 2024. National Printing Bureau.