The ubume is a ghost of Japanese folklore, once a living woman, who died during either pregnancy or childbirth. This thesis explores how the religious and secular developments of the ubume and related figures create a dichotomy of ideologies that both condemn and liberate women in their roles as mothers. Examples of literary and visual narratives of the ubume as well as the religious practices that were employed for maternity-related concerns are explored within their historical contexts in order to best understand what meaning they held for people at a given time and if that meaning has changed. These meanings and the actions taken to avoid becoming an ubume and to avoid interacting with one create a metanarrative that contributes to our understanding of the historical experience of women.

Foreign Affairs: Policy, Culture, and the Making of Love and War in Vietnam investigates the interplay between war and society leading to and during the Vietnam War. This project intertwines histories of foreign relations, popular culture, and gender and sexuality as lenses for understanding international power relations during the global Cold War more broadly. By examining sexual encounters between American service members and Vietnamese civilian women, this dissertation argues that relationships ranging from prostitution to dating, marriage, and rape played a significant role in the diplomacy, logistics, and international reception of the war. American disregard for South Vietnamese morality laws in favor of bolstering GI morale in the early war years contributed to the instability of the alliance and led to a rise in anti-American activities, health concerns, and military security threats. The length of the war in addition to the difficulty for service members to definitively identify enemy forces placed stress on soldiers. Publicized cases of rape and disagreements over responsibility for orphans or children born outside marriage to U.S. servicemen in the later war years further deteriorated relations. Negotiating these relationships resulted in implicit assignments of power between the United States and their allies in South Vietnam. In addition to the bi-lateral relations between the U.S. and South Vietnam, North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front propaganda citing the GI-civilian relationships sparked security concerns and further threatened the alliance. This dissertation further contends that encounters provided propaganda material for opposition forces, strained the overall war effort at home, and shaped how Americans remember the war.

viii, 169 p. / The Jesuit mission to Japan (1549-1639) has long attracted the attention of historians because it coincided with a number of developments in Japanese history: increasing contact with Western powers, political reunification, and the transition to early modernity. However, few historians have placed the Jesuit mission in the wider context of Christianization, a process that many different peoples and cultures globally experienced during the premodern and early modern periods. This study examines Japan's participation in the world-historical process of Christianization during the first thirty years of the Jesuit apostolate. Making extensive use of Jesuit documents written between 1548 and 1561, this study demonstrates how the Japanese of the sixteenth century experienced Christianization and how that experience connected them to other missionized peoples and cultures across time and space. / Committee in charge: Jeffrey Hanes, Chairperson; Andrew Goble, Member; Robert Haskett, Member / 10000-01-01

Manga masterpiece Message to Adolf’s fictional narrative intertwines the Holocaust, romance, espionage, and friendship in its international World War II-focused narrative. Using theory on nationalism and Japanese memories of WWII, this thesis argues the violence the characters initiate and suffer blurs lines between perpetrator, hero, and victim to critique the power of nationalism. Its message concerning the danger of nationalism is as applicable for global audiences now as when it was published in 1985.

This thesis explores the origin of one of the most engrossing concerns of the post-colonial Indian state, that is, its extensive, intricate, and expensive feeding arrangements for the civilians. It tracks the colonial origin of the post-colonial welfare state, of which state-management of food is one of the most publicized manifestations. This thesis examines the intervention of the late colonial British state in food procurement and distribution in India during the Second World War, and various forms of such intervention, such as the introduction of food rationing and food austerity laws. It argues that the war necessitated actions on the part of the colonial state to secure food supplies to a vastly expanded British Indian Army, to the foreign Allied troops stationed in India, and to the workers employed in war-industries. The thesis brings forth the constitutional and political predicaments that deprived the colonial central government's food administration of success. It further reveals how the bitter bargaining about food imports into India between the Government of India and the War Cabinet in Britain hampered the state efforts to tackle the food crisis. By discussing the religious and cultural codes vis-à-vis food consumption that influenced government food policies, this thesis has situated food in the historiography of consumption in colonial India. In addition to adopting a political approach to study food, it has also applied sociological treatment, particularly while dealing with how the wartime scarcity, and consequent austerity laws, forced people to accept novel consumption cultures. It also contributes to the historiography of 'everyday state'. Through its wartime intervention in everyday food affairs, the colonial state that had been distant and abstract in the perception of most common households, suddenly became a reality to be dealt with in everyday life within the domestic site. Thus, the macro state penetrated micro levels of existence. The colonial state now even developed elaborate food surveillance to gather intelligence about violation of food laws. This thesis unravels the responses of some of the political and religious organizations to state intervention in quotidian food consumption. Following in this vein, through a study of the political use of famine-relief in wartime Bengal, it introduces a new site to the study of communal politics in India, namely, propagation of Hindu communal politics through distribution of food by the Hindu Mahasabha party. Further, it demonstrates how the Muslim League government's failure to prevent the Great Bengal Famine of 1943-44 was politically used by the Mahasabha to oppose the League's emerging demand for the creation of Pakistan.

There were two-way and non-governmental communications between China and the United States in the field of agriculture throughout twentieth century. During the late nineteenth century, Chinese intellectuals already recognized the importance of western agricultural science and technology, and they began actively to court modern agricultural knowledge from western countries. The Plant Improvement Project (PIP) conducted by Cornell University and the University of Nanking from 1925 to 1931 was the groundbreaking agricultural cooperation in agricultural science and technology between the United States and China. Although most of the activities of this project were non-governmental, organized by two universities, and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the PIP broke new ground. In 1925, Professor H. H. Love of Cornell University was invited to the University of Nanking to lead a five-year cooperative program of crop improvement, which was called the PIP. From 1925 to 1931, Love along with C. H. Myers and R. G. Wiggans of Cornell University went to China to implement PIP. With the joint efforts of specialists from Cornell University and the University of Nanking, many high-yielding crop varieties were bred and distributed to farmers to improve yields and fight hunger; at the same time they trained a professional group of crop breeders and extension workers to continue crop breeding and distribution. PIP sought a new model for China’s application of the American concept of the integration of agricultural research, education, and extension, which resulted in both success and failure. PIP, however, exerted profound influence on the follow-up work not only at Cornell and Nanking but also for the governments of United States and Nationalist China.  <div><br></div><div>Following the PIP, in 1934, aiming to increase the well-being of rural populations, the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) trustee committee approved its first comprehensive program (China Program) for rural reconstruction in China. The RF established the North China Council for Rural Reconstruction (NCCRR) in 1936. By studying the policy, hopes, and outcomes of the NCCRR, this chapter provides a specific example of the problem western civil organizations faced in reshaping non-western rural societies. The NCCRR developed techniques for modernizing rural Chinese society; however, constant warfare, political instability, and funding shortages hindered the success of this endeavor. Its impact on China’s rural development remained after the termination of the China Program in 1944.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Then, to promote China’s post-World War II economic reconstruction and hunger relief, the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry developed their transnational cooperation with the International Harvester Company from 1945 to 1948. In 1945, the Agricultural Engineering Program for China was proposed by Dr. P. W. Tsou, then a member of the Executive Committee of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the resident representative of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry of the Nationalist government in the U.S., to the International Harvester Company. This initiative was supported by International Harvester Company to help China quickly achieve agricultural mechanization. This program was composed with Harvester Fellowships to sponsor Chinese students to learn agricultural engineering in the U.S. and from the committee’s field investigations, demonstrations, and teaching in China. The Chinese Ministry of Education selected ten students who had graduated from agricultural universities and ten students who had graduated from the engineering universities with two to three years of practical work experience. In total twenty students went to the U.S. to study agricultural engineering. Those from engineering universities were sent to the University of Minnesota while those from agricultural universities received admission into master’s program of Iowa State College (later Iowa State University). In two years’ time, they took engineering courses and completed the master’s degree in agricultural engineering. Then, they received a one-year internship at local farms to practice. In September 1948, the first student group returned to China. These twenty students were the first group of Chinese graduate students to study agricultural engineering in the United States. After they returned home, most of them became China’s leading agricultural engineering experts for the People’s Republic of China. In addition, four experienced agricultural engineers (Edwin L. Hansen, Howard F. McColly, Archie A. Stone, and J. Brownlee Davidson) in the United States formed the Committee on Agricultural Engineering to conducted extensive field investigations in China from January 1947 to December 1948 until political and military conditions were not suitable for them to stay in China.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Except for the cooperation with the private sectors in the U.S., the Nationalist government also proposed to the U.S. government cooperation to organize a joint program to provide economic and technical assistance to China’s agricultural industry. In June 1946, the China-United States Agricultural Mission initiated its work. The committee members from the U.S. included Claude B. Hutchison as the head of the U.S. delegation and Raymond T. Moyer as deputy head. Committee members from China included Zou Binwen as the head of the Chinese delegation and Shen Zonghan as the deputy head. After the investigation of fifteen provinces, delegation members provided their findings and suggestions on the reconstruction of Chinese agriculture in their reports. In 1947, the Report of China-United States Agricultural Mission was released by the two governments. This report is a comprehensive agenda for agricultural construction which put forward feasible and systematic plans for agricultural management, crop improvement, and rural education. This plan did not get adopted in mainland China, but it incubated an organizational structure for the Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction and provided a blueprint for agricultural reform in Taiwan. This mission had a profound effect on later cooperation in the field of agricultural science and technology between the two countries, which merits scholarly attention. <br></div><div><br></div><div>Final success of this transnational agricultural communication and cooperation was in Taiwan under the direction of the Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction from 1948 to 1979. This program, funded by the U.S. government, had a distinct success in agricultural development in Taiwan, but it eventually ended after the Carter Administration withdrew diplomatic recognition from Taiwan in 1979. Later this commission became part of the Council of Agriculture in the Executive Yuan of the Republic of China (ROC). <br></div><div><br></div><div>This agricultural communication and interaction between China and the U.S. made long-term impacts to China, the U.S., and the rest of the world. For the ROC and the PRC, these organized programs and cooperation gradually developed agricultural science and technology, increased agricultural production, and cultivated agricultural experts. These programs did not achieve their pre-set purpose to prevent communism from expanding in rural China, however, both the Nationalist government and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) enjoyed those rewards. The ROC directly benefitted from this assistance while PRC also indirectly obtained agricultural science and technology through those trained experts who chose to stay in the mainland after the revolution.<br></div><div><br></div><div>For the United States, these attempts in China helped Americans to expand and reevaluate their global assistance and development projects and governmental agencies, including the Marshall Plan, the Technical Cooperation Administration (TCA), the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), and later the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). <br></div><div><br></div><div>For the rest of the world, new global agricultural cooperation, such as Green Revolution agricultural science, eradicated starvation and famine in many developing countries such as India, Mexico, and the Philippines. Meanwhile, global agricultural cooperation generated new problems including environmental degradation and pesticide contamination. Further international cooperation and agricultural development can be tracked back to the U.S.-China agricultural cooperative experience.<br></div>

abstract: Based on literary works produced by the multiethnic literati of the Jin dynasty (1115–1234), this dissertation examines Chinese conceptions of the Steppe world in the early years of the Mongol era (1206–1260). As I show, late Jin literati, who took arduous journeys in the Eurasian Steppes, initiated transcultural communications between the Chinese and Steppe worlds. Their writings encouraged more Chinese literati to reach out to the Mongols and hence facilitated the spread of the ideal Confucian-style governance to the Mongol empire. In general, I follow the approach of New Historicism in analyzing poetic works. Even though the Mongol conquest of China damaged many northern literary texts, materials surviving from the thirteenth century still feature a great diversity. I brought historical records and inscriptions on stela to study the social conditions under which these literary works were produced. This dissertation aims to contribute a new voice to the ongoing effort to modify the traditional linear understanding of the development of Chinese literary tradition. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation East Asian Languages and Civilizations 2020

The presentation of the body in early imperial Rome can be viewed as the manipulation of a semiotic language of dress, in which various hierarchies that both defined and limited human experience were entrenched. The study of Roman self-presentation illuminates the intersections of categories of identity, as well as the individual's desire and ability to resist essentializing views of Romanness (Romanitas), and to transform destiny through transforming identity. These categories of identity include gender; sexuality or sexual behavior; social status; economic status; ethnicity or place of origin; religion; and age. Applying the model of a matrix of identity deepens our appreciation for the work of self-presentation and its ultimate purposes. In this paper the practices and products used by Romans are described as vital indicators of self-identification, and as segues into Roman social semiotics, providing a more complete view of the possibilities for life in early imperial Rome. In the introduction, the use of queer theory and the function of the matrix model are outlined. Haircare, the maintenance of facial and bodily hair, the use of cosmetics, perfumes, skincare products, and beauty tools, the accessorizing of the body with jewelry, color, and pattern, and the display of these behaviors are examined in the main body chapters. The conclusion discusses the relevance of the matrix model to self-presentation studies in general and possible future uses.

Shūsaku Endō (1923-1996) is well known in Japan and abroad for his novels and his Christian faith. The present work offers for the first time an English translation of his 1973 play, Menamugawa no Nihonjin, which deals with the career of Nagamasa Yamada, a Japanese adventurer who traveled to Siam in the early seventeenth century and became one of the most powerful men in that kingdom. The introduction to the translation looks back at Endō’s career and his little known relationship with theater. The focus shifts to the play’s historical background, inquiring into Endō’s motivations in choosing this subject and how he manipulated his sources to achieve certain goals. The translation is defended and compared to a previous Italian translation. The analysis of the original work and the process of translating it is informed throughout by M.M. Bhaktin’s concept of chronotopes as used in the field of translation studies by Annie Brisset. The introduction is followed by the translation of the entire play of three acts and twelve scenes.

This dissertation intervenes in the fields of South Asian Masculinity Studies, Affect Studies, Critical Disability Studies, Feminist Cultural Studies, and Trauma as well as Memory Studies. The focus of this project is on the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, a nine-month long war between East Pakistan and West Pakistan, which started on 26 March 1971 and ended on 16 December 1971 with Bangladesh, former East Pakistan, emerging as an independent nation. I concentrate on East Pakistani/Bangladeshi muktijoddhas (freedom fighters) who fought in the war, and birangonas (survivors of sexual violence) who were abducted by military officials and their collaborators. Drawing on political speeches, parliamentary debates, press statements, and governmental news reports, I examine how these sources create a narrative of the manly muktijoddha who demonstrates his masculinity through exhibiting courage and disavowing his pain. I further analyze memoirs by freedom fighters who complicate this image of the courageous muktijoddha through recollecting moments of pain and fear during combat. Significant to my analysis are also survivor testimonies of gender, physical, and sexual violence of wartime women in East Pakistan/Bangladesh, which oppose a more singular nationalist rhetoric of the 1971 war that celebrates the male muktijoddha while marginalizing women’s experiences. I delve into how birangona testimonies narrate the women’s trauma of sexual violence and of witnessing their daughters’ abuse by wartime soldiers. In analyzing women’s stories, I highlight the importance of listening to the voices of birangona-mas (survivors who are also mothers), and thereby question the nationalist mythologizing of the muktijoddha’s mother who sends her son to war. In exploring the muktijoddha, the muktijoddha’s mother, and the birangona/birangona-ma, I argue that there are multiple alternative readings of the war that are suppressed by nationalist discourse, which warrant recognition within Liberation War and South Asian history. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / My dissertation focuses on the Bangladesh Liberation War that took place between East Pakistan and West Pakistan from 26 March 1971 till 16 December 1971. This war led to the independence of Bangladesh, former East Pakistan. During the war, Bangladeshi governmental documents and nationalist speeches portrayed the East Pakistani/Bangladeshi freedom fighter or muktijoddha as an ideal masculine figure who fought against West Pakistani soldiers with courage. I analyze memoirs by freedom fighters who show how they both conform to, and disrupt the nationalist portrayal of the courageous muktijoddha. I also examine personal recollections of birangonas (women survivors of sexual violence) who speak of their trauma, reveal narratives of their daughter’s abuse by soldiers and their collaborators, and provide a reading of the wartime woman that challenges the nation’s vested interest in the ideal male muktijoddha. Overall, my project encourages people to rethink the Liberation War from the perspectives of wartime men and women survivors who have witnessed violence and mutilation firsthand.