The Affect of Difference: Representations of Race in East Asian Empire ed. by Christopher P. Hanscom, Dennis Washburn (review)

The Affect of Difference: Representations of Race in East Asian Empire is a welcome contribution to a body of scholarship illuminating the varied mechanisms and tropes that create, shape, amplify, and modify racial other ness, identities, and experiences in imperial contexts across East Asia. The editors lay out three crucial interventions to which the volume is committed. First, they move beyond conventional temporal periodization to emphasize the persisting, overlapping, and adaptable nature of numerous imperial entities and ideologies. Second, they shift from the typical focus on Japan’s empire to empire writ large in East Asia. To that end, the authors engage in transnational, diasporic, and comparative readings of colonial texts and tools, people and places, and messages and movements. Third, and most important, this collection concentrates on the centrality of affect in shaping everyday lived experience amid imperial regimes of signification, classification, surveillance, and discipline. Hanscom and Washburn offer this helpful clarification: “Affect exists at the intersection of ideology and the experience of social, political, and everyday realities; it is through the production of affect that an easy division between the material and the discursive is complicated” (p. 6).

The introduction and 14 diverse chapters examine Hokkaido, Taiwan, Korea, China, Manchuria, the Japanese metropole, and specific Asian cities and regions, as well as the United States, Russia, and Brazil. The volume reaches from early modern Japan through Asia’s long wartime era and into the postwar and contemporary periods. Drawing from history, literary studies, cultural studies, visual studies, anthropology, art history, and comparative literature, the authors analyze a particularly rich array of media. These include not only the usual sources, such as journals, newspapers, literature, and bureaucratic writings, but also folk songs and photographs, films and radio programing, postcards and posters, slogans and slurs, and public relations magazines and children’s literature. Throughout, a keen and critical eye is turned to the textual, visual, sonic, chronic, and spatial coding of alterity while underscoring the fissures in, transformations of, and resistance to affective formulations.

The Affect of Difference earns a proper place in the collection of critical texts that bring to light the complex intersections of colonial operations of power, discursive constructions of race, gender, class, and modernity, and formations of identity and collective imaginations. One can point to Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia as a foundational anthology that established indispensable analytical standards and inspired and informed many incisive monographs and edited works over the last two decades.¹ Hanscom and Washburn’s volume is building on this scholarly legacy along with other recent treatments that invest in broadening territorial, temporal, and/or topical perspectives, for instance, to name just a few, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque, Reading Colonial Japan, and Race for Empire.²

Still, what sets this work apart is its sustained and fruitful engagement with affect theory. The contributors draw on the writings of core scholars, including Sara Ahmed, Laurent Berlant, Melissa Gregg, Lawrence Grossberg, Brian Massumi, and Gregory J. Seigworth. Affect theory can sometimes be reduced to discussions of the mere evidence and/or simplified instrumentalization of emotions, but here we get careful readings of the deep entanglements of sentiments, feelings, and atmospheres with logics bolstered by bureaucratic, scientific, medical, military, and artistic authority, which suffuse, animate, and define material realities for the colonized and colonizer across the empire. Each chapter elucidates how affect structures the processes by which bodies are violated, punished, or perfected and subjects deemed savage, civilized, or worthy. Additionally, two authors, Todd Henry and William H. Bridges IV, proffer new concepts, namely “affective racisms” and “circuits of affection” respectively, which coax out fresh nuances on the articulation, amplification, and circulation of racial difference.

It is difficult to do justice to the depth and detail of this wide-ranging project, but I offer groupings of chapters to illustrate how multiple threads...