Can the Frontier Write Back?

Abstract

vi Editors’ Introduction Nathan Hopson and Ran Zwigenberg Can the Frontier Write Back? This issue of Verge is about reclaiming one of the F-­ words of academia: frontier (Klein 1996). Sometimes a frontier is just a political border or a border zone (witness frontière in French and biānjiāng in Chinese, for example ), but the word frontier is often highly charged, used to describe the outermost limits of expansion and “progress.” Space is the “final frontier,” Alaska the “last frontier,” and science the “endless frontier.”1 In much of the academic world, the term has been compromised by its association with imperial and colonial expansion into areas of “free land” or expansionism ’s concomitant treatment of “inferior” or “moribund” peoples whose land must be subjected to the whims of extractive capitalism as part of their redemptive, “tough love” education in civilization. Scholars often conceive of frontiers as contact zones, simultaneously productive and destructive “social spaces” in which multiple, often opposing actors and agendas “meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (Pratt 1991, 34).2 In this formulation, the chaotic clash and coalescence of ideas and identities compose a kind of creative destruction in which both the personal and the collective are reshaped and reborn (Hall 2009, 37). Frontier is thus a big-­tent, protean concept, plural even in the singular. It is a constellation of not-­always-­compatible ideas, one that has both evolved over time and remains plastic, multivalent, and multivocal. In April 2014, we cohosted a workshop at Yale University, sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies, exploring not the frontier per se but the utility of the frontier as a conversation starter, as a fertile concept for promoting dialogue and discourse between academics working on diverse aspects of Japanese history and society. Taking inspiration from Tessa Morris-­ Suzuki’s (1994, 1) observation that “the shape of things becomes clearer when one looks at the edge than when one looks at the centre,” we challenged participants to leverage the power of the frontier to Editors’ Introduction vii elucidate aspects of Japanese history that might otherwise be marginalized or overlooked. Our animating questions revolved around the utility of upending or inverting the “frontier gaze” that constitutes “free land” zonesofabsence—­absenceof“civilization”and“civilizedpeople”—­instead looking as much from the frontier as upon the frontier. “This frontier gaze kills the country,” as Deborah Bird Rose (2005, 60) observed, “making everything seem small, distant, and terribly faded.” What, then, can be gained from “writing back” from the frontier?3 The theme of this mini-­conference, “The Significance of ‘the Frontier’ to Japanese History,” borrowed from the most notorious description of the frontier, that of Frederick Jackson Turner’s epochal 1893 paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Turner was responding to the U.S. Census’s momentous declaration three years earlier that the frontier—­at least as a “line” of settlement—­no longer existed. Turner, who believed that the existence of the frontier line was the defining feature of a uniquely American history, reflected on the possible significance of both the frontier and its disappearance. Turner’s American frontier was defined by the westward movement of mostly male, mostly Anglo settlers whose encounter with the “wilderness” of the West stripped off the burdens of European history and society, allowing new (American) values and culture to be born. Though castigated with vigor and rigor by countless academics, especially since the rise of the new social histories in the 1960s, Turner’s heroic vision of American exceptionalism through devolution and re-­ volution retains a powerful hold on the popular imagination as a pervasive explanation for the production of American national identity. Perhaps for that reason, the term is a favorite of technology firms and venture capitalists, for instance.4 Our workshop asked whether the term frontier and its many possible meanings could be recuperated, rescued from its association with colonialism, triumphalism, Anglocentrism, sexism , and so on.5 While acknowledging that the “frontier” label is often complicit in creating and maintaining the hierarchical core–­ periphery, metropole–­ colony power relations between the world’s self-­ declared centers and other-­ designated margins, we came out of the workshop nevertheless believing that...