Sovereignty and Emperor’s Child: The Logic of Dispossession and Protection of Ainu Mosir

Sovereignty and Emperor’s Child: The Logic of Dispossession and Protection of Ainu Mosir
Dr. Katsuya Hirano, Visiting Speaker

Speaker Biography: Katsuya Hirano teaches history at UCLA. He is the author of The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan (Univ. of Chicago Press).

He has published numerous articles and book chapters on cultural and intellectual history of
early modern and modern Japan, Fukushima nuclear disaster, settler colonialism, and critical
theory, including “Thanatopolitics in the Making of Japan’s Hokkaido: Settler Colonialism and Primitive Accumulation” (Critical Historical Studies). His current book project examines the
intersection of racism and capitalism in the making of the modern Ainu with a focus on the
settler-colonization of the land that once belonged to the indigenous people. The Japanese government passed the Former Native Protection Law in 1899 as a way to respond to the deteriorating conditions of the Ainu life. The talk addresses the contradictory logic of protection articulated in the law by considering it in relation to the ways in which the concept of the imperial sovereignty facilitated the racialization and dispossession of the indigenous Ainu.