Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Von der hinteren Coverseite

""The Age of the World Target" is a catalyzing tour-de-force. Rey Chow provides a poignant, persuasive staging of a topic that will shape the future of literary and cultural studies: the role of particular poststructuralist claims within the fields of area studies, identity politics, and comparative literature."--Bill Brown, author of "A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature"

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

THE AGE OF THE WORLD TARGET

Duke University Press

Contents

Preface.....................................................................................................ixIntroduction. European Theory in America....................................................................1I The Age of the World Target: Atomic Bombs, Alterity, Area Studies.........................................25II The Interruption of Referentiality; or, Poststructuralism's Outside......................................45III The Old/New Question of Comparison in Literary Studies: A Post-European Perspective.....................71Notes.......................................................................................................93Index.......................................................................................................117

Chapter One

They did not want to risk wasting the precious weapon, and decided that it must be dropped visually and not by radar ... -Barton J. Bernstein, "The Atomic Bombings Reconsidered," Foreign Affairs (January/February 1995): 140

There has not yet developed a discourse in the American public space that does anything more than identify with power, despite the dangers of that power in a world which has shrunk so small and has become so impressively interconnected. -Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1994), 300

For most people who know something about the United States' intervention in the Second World War, one image seems to predominate and preempt the rest: the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, pictorialized in the now familiar image of the mushroom cloud, with effects of radiation and devastation of human life on a scale never before imaginable. Alternatively, we can also say that our knowledge about what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki is inseparable from the image of the mushroom cloud. As knowledge, "Hiroshima" and "Nagasaki" come to us inevitably as representation and, specifically, as a picture. Moreover, it is not a picture in the older sense of a mimetic replication of reality; rather, it has become in itself a sign of terror, a kind of gigantic demonstration with us, the spectators, as the potential target.

For someone such as myself, who grew up among survivors of Japan's invasion of China in the period 1937-45-banian kangzhan or the "Eight-Year War of Resistance" as it is still called among the Chinese-the image of the atomic bomb has always stood as a signifier of another kind of violence, another type of erasure. As a child, I was far more accustomed to hearing about Japanese atrocities against Chinese men and women during the war than I was to hearing about U.S. atrocities against Japan. Among the stories of the war was how the arrival of the Americans brought relief, peace, and victory for China; however hard the times were, it was said to be a moment of "liberation." As I grow older, this kind of knowledge gathered from oral narratives persists in my mind not as proof of historical accuracy but rather as a kind of emotional dissonance, a sense of something out-of-joint that becomes noticeable because it falls outside the articulations generated by the overpowering image of the mushroom cloud. It is as if the sheer magnitude of destruction unleashed by the bombs demolished not only entire populations but also the memories and histories of tragedies that had led up to that apocalyptic moment, the memories and histories of those who had been brutalized, kidnapped, raped, and slaughtered in the same war by other forces. As John W. Dower writes:

Hiroshima and Nagasaki became icons of Japanese suffering-perverse national treasures, of a sort, capable of fixating Japanese memory of the war on what had happened to Japan and simultaneously blotting out recollection of the Japanese victimization of others. Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that is, easily became a way of forgetting Nanjing, Bataan, the Burma-Siam railway, Manila, and the countless Japanese atrocities these and other place names signified to non-Japanese.

Lisa Yoneyama sums up this situation succinctly: "Hiroshima memories have been predicated on the grave obfuscation of the prewar Japanese Empire, its colonial practices, and their consequences." To this day many people in Japan still passionately deny the war crimes committed by the Japanese military in East and Southeast Asia, and the label "Japanese" is hardly ever as culturally stigmatized as, say, the label "German," which for many is still a straightforward synonym for "Nazi" and "fascist."

But my aim in this chapter is not exactly that of reinstating historical, literary, or personal accounts of the innumerable instances of victimization during and after the war. Rather, I'd like to explore the significance of the atomic bomb as an epistemic event in a global culture in which everything has become (or is mediated by) visual representation and virtual reality. What are some of the consequences in knowledge production that were unleashed with the blasts in the summer of 1945? To respond to this question, I turn briefly to the civil, pedagogical apparatus known as area studies: whereas it is common knowledge that area studies programs in the United States are a postwar, cold war, government-funded phenomenon, I want to ask how rethinking the most notorious U.S. action in the Second World War-the dropping of two atomic bombs-can complicate and change our conventional understanding of such programs.

Seeing Is Destroying

As an anonymous journalist commented in 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the catastrophes, the bombs that fell on the two Japanese cities in August 1945 ended any pretense of equality between the United States and Japan. It was, he writes, "as if a steel battleship had appeared at Trafalgar, effortlessly and ruthlessly destroying the wooden enemy fleet. There was absolutely no contest." Passages such as this rightly point to the fundamental shift of the technological scale and definition of the war, but what remains to be articulated is the political and ideological significance of this shift.

From a purely scientific perspective, the atomic bomb was, of course, the most advanced invention of the time. Like all scientific inventions, it had to be tested in order to have its effectiveness verified. It was probably no accident that the United States chose as its laboratory, its site of experimentation, a civilian rather than military space, since the former, with a much higher population density, was far more susceptible to demonstrating the upper ranges of the bomb's spectacular potential. The mundane civilian space in the early hours of the morning, with ordinary people beginning their daily routines, offered the promise of numerical satisfaction, of a destruction whose portent defied the imagination. Such civilian spaces had to have been previously untouched by U.S. weaponry so as to offer the highest possible accuracy for the postwar evaluations of the bombing experiments. And, destroying one city was not enough: since the United States had two bombs, one uranium (which was simple and gunlike, and nicknamed Little Boy) and the other plutonium (which worked with the complex and uncertain means...