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Paul Barclay, associate professor of history, has received a $40,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship for College Teachers and Independent Scholars to continue work on his latest book project.
“Imperial Centrifuge: Japan’s Colonial Subalterns and the Indigenous Peoples of Taiwan, 1873-1930” is a political and cultural history of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan’s highlands. The project investigates the processes by which centralized bureaucracies survey and govern unfamiliar populations by analyzing travel logs, ethnography, memoirs, and police reports of Japan’s men on the ground in Taiwan’s interior mountain vicinity.
“The wide intellectual distance that separates local experts from their bureaucratic superiors is common in modern nation-states that project power far beyond their domestic borders,” Barclay explains. “‘Imperial Centrifuge’ argues that this modern problem is built into the structure of the Westphalian nation-state system. Its worst consequences, however, are due to the rapid pace of economic development demanded by our current international financial order, compounded by the constraints that mass political participation puts upon policy makers to act as nationals instead of honest brokers in contested borderlands. Thus, ‘Imperial Centrifuge’ brings the local – the micropolitics of Japanese-Chinese-Aborigine relations during the colonial period – into dialog with the global – the current political crisis facing metropolitan visionaries who wield the power to influence the lives of peoples about whom they know very little.”
Barclay plans to use the grant for travel and research in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan, to locate newspapers and magazines from the 1890s and 1900s and to interview a 99-year-old associate of one of the characters in his book. He also will travel in Taiwan to work in the archives of the Taiwan Government General and search for the gravesite of a multilingual interpreter from the Tokushima Prefecture who died in the Hualian Prefecture in the 1930s. The fellowship also will support the time it takes to put the finishing touches on the book, including writing, documentation, and arranging illustration and photo licenses.
“I feel vindicated to have independent confirmation that my project is worth the time and effort already expended,” says Barclay. “Like all humanists and social scientists, I regularly write up prospectuses and scrounge around for letters of recommendation to apply for these opportunities. Hitting the big one every once in awhile is a great motivator to keep pressing. The College and my students also benefit because the fellowship permits a full year dedicated to research and writing, which will certainly help me raise the level of classroom intensity upon my return.”
Several Lafayette students have already contributed to ‘Imperial Centrifuge’ through EXCEL Scholars collaborations with Barclay. Haotian Wu ’07 (Jiangsu, China), who is pursuing B.S. degrees in physics and mathematics, conducted research on life in Taiwan and Imperial Japan during the mid 19th and early 20th centuries, studying the rule of the Chinese Qing Dynasty and the history of Taiwan’s aboriginal peoples.
Economics & business and mathematics double major Keming Liang ’08 (Zibo, China), mathematics-economics major Yi Peng ’09 (Palmyra, Pa.), and computer science major Linda Yu ’09 (Shanghai, China) also worked on different aspects of the book. They have compiled tables from handwritten documents and microfilms, helped with correspondence to Taiwan and Japan, translated Chinese documents, and provided cultural background on China.
Barclay also has relied on the 18 students enrolled in his Nation Building in Iraq, Japan, and Vietnam class this spring. They have served as a productive forum for exploring theoretical works that inform the project.
Barclay believes the completed project will help enhance the Asian Studies program, which was introduced to the campus several years ago. He plans to use the materials gathered during his travels as teaching tools in the classroom.
“I will be bringing back to Easton yet more anecdotes, photographs, curios, and artifacts from East Asia to use in my classrooms to illustrate and explain the region’s physical texture and everyday life,” he says. “In my travels, I also get the opportunity to shore up our exchange relationship with Waseda University in Tokyo. I’ll also update my “Contemporary China and Japan” presentations for the Introduction to Asian Studies course offered each spring by Professor Robin Rinehart, [associate professor of religious studies and chair of Asian Studies].”
Now that the project is nearing completion, Barclay is excited to craft the end result. His primary goal is to connect the time period discussed in the book with contemporary society.
“I want to tell a riveting story about Japan’s relations with the outside world before the build-up to World War II,” he explains. “I agree with most Japanese historians in conceptualizing early 20th century Japan as distinct from the Japan of the 1930s and 1940s. In my narration, I hope to universalize the Japanese experience in a way that sheds light on current global problems in foreign affairs, intercultural relations, and expanding commercial networks. I basically deal with adventurous human beings who operate in remote, difficult terrain out of a mixture of motives. Their idealism, greed, hubris, and ingenuity teaches lessons about any number of imperial or neo-imperial adventures that continue to the present. If I cannot make a compelling linkage between the world revealed in my centuries-old Japanese documents and the world of my students and colleagues, I will have failed.”
Barclay discussed “Imperial Centrifuge” last semester as part of the Jones Faculty Lecture series.
In 2004, Barclay collaborated with Neil Englehart, assistant professor of government and law; Joshua Sanborn, associate professor of history; Brian Geraghty ’05,a history and religious studies graduate; Sandamali Wijeratne ’06, anEnglish and international affairs graduate; Vijay Krishnan ’07 (Karnataka, India), an international affairs and economics & business double major; and Milos Jovanovic ’07 (Belgrade, Yugoslavia), a history and international affairs double major, through the Community of Scholars program. They worked to create the most comprehensive and searchable database about the characteristics of empires and colonies throughout the course of history.
Barclay, who has published and presented in both Japanese and English, has traveled extensively to Japan for research on Japanese colonialism in Taiwan. He has published articles in Journal of Asian Studies, Social Science Japan Journal, Education About Asia, Japanese Studies, Taiwan Genjūmin Kenkyū (Studies of Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples), History and Anthropology, and Ethics, Place, Environment. He also has authored chapters in several books, including “Nihon Shokuminchisha to Genjūmin no Kōryū Mondai: Taiwan no ‘Bankai’ ni Okeru Tsūji to Tsūyaku o Megutte” [The Problem of Communications between Japanese Colonists and Aborigines: The Interpreters and Translators on Taiwan’s ‘Savage Border’] in Jinbunchi no Aratana Sōgō ni Mukete: 21 Seiki COE Puroguramu [Facing the New Liberal Arts: Humanistic Study in the Era of Globalization] and “‘They Have for the Coast Dwellers a Traditional Hatred’: Governing Igorots in Northern Luzon and Central Taiwan, 1895-1915” in The American Colonial State of the Philippines: Global Perspectives.
He has presented at the Association of Asian Studies Annual Conference, Mid-Atlantic Region Association of Asian Studies Annual Conference, and American Historical Association Conference. Barclay has been a guest lecturer at the Academia Sinica Institute of Ethnology in Taiwan, Duke University, Keio University in Tokyo, Pace University, and Columbia University.
He is a manuscript reviewer for Journal of Asian Studies, Japanese Studies, The Historian, and University of Hawaii Press.
His special interests include the history of Japan and East Asia, early modern and modern global history, and comparative colonial studies. A member of the Lafayette faculty since 1999, he earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in history from University of Minnesota and a B.S. in secondary education and history from University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Previous faculty recipients of NEH fellowships include Sanborn in 2005; William Bissell, assistant professor of anthropology and sociology, in 2005; and Andrea Smith, assistant professor of anthropology and sociology, in 2002.