Japan's Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology

As a transnational history of science, Japan's Empire of Birds: Aristocrats, Anglo-Americans, and Transwar Ornithology focuses on the political aspects of highly mobile Japanese explorer-scientists, or cosmopolitan gentlemen of science, circulating between Japanese and British/American spaces in the transwar period from the 1920s to 1950s.

Annika A. Culver examines a network of zoologists united by their practice of ornithology and aristocratic status. She goes on to explore issues of masculinity and race related to this amidst the backdrop of imperial Japan's interwar period of peaceful internationalism, the rise of fascism, the Japanese takeover of Manchuria, and war in China and the Pacific. Culver concludes by investigating how these scientists repurposed their aims during Japan's Allied Occupation and the Cold War. Inspired by geographer Doreen Massey, themes covered in the volume include social space and place in these specific locations and how identities transform to garner social capital and scientific credibility in transnational associations and travel for non-white scientists.

Author: Annika A. Culver
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 04/21/2022
Pages: 328
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.40lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.75d
ISBN: 9781350184930

About the Author
Culver, Annika A.: - "Annika A. Culver is Associate Professor of East Asian History at Florida State University, USA. She is the author of Glorify the Empire: Japanese Avant-Garde Propaganda in Manchukuo (2013) - winner of the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies (SECAAS) 2015 Book Prize. She is also the co-editor, along with Norman Smith, of Manchukuo Perspectives: Transnational Approaches to Literary Production (2019)."Gerteis, Christopher: - Christopher Gerteis is an historian of Modern and Contemporary Japan at SOAS University of London, UK and The University of Tokyo, Japan. His first book, Gender Struggles: Wage-earning Women and Male-Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan (2009), is an interdisciplinary study of the forgotten history of wage-earning Japanese women who during the 1950s militantly contested the socialist labor movement's revival of many prewar notions of normative gender roles. His second book, Mobilizing Japanese Youth: The Cold War and the Making of the Sixties Generation (forthcoming), examines the forces that shaped the political consciousness of Japanese youth who engaged in political violence during the 1960s and 1970s. It unpacks how notions of class and gender shaped the discourses produced by, and for, young men and women of the 'Sixties Generation'. Dr Gerteis is co-editor of the Bloomsbury book Japan since 1945: from Postwar to Post-Bubble (2012) and is Founding Series Editor of the Bloomsbury series SOAS Studies in Modern and Contemporary. He also served as Chief Editor of the interdisciplinary academic journal Japan Forum from 2014 through 2019.