Spatial Histories of Occupation: Colonialism, Conquest, and Foreign Control in Asia

Spatial Histories of Occupation: Colonialism, Conquest and Foreign Control in Asia explores occupation as spatial processes, structures, and experiences in which administrative power and people's resistance are contested. Spanning the Andaman Islands to the Philippines to Japan, the introduction and following nine chapters of case studies illuminate multilayered crossroads of economic, environmental, and military controls and contestations from the nineteenth century to the present day. The volume collectively challenges a prevalent dichotomy between occupation and colonialism, showing their intersections.Scholars often separately study occupied territories and colonies. In the introduction, the editors trace this occupation/colonialism dichotomy back to the international law that legitimatized the European colonial expansions; the law predicated itself on Eurocentric ideas of denying non-Western and colonized regions access to sovereignty. To understand occupation beyond the legal and Eurocentric framework, the volume engages insights into space, place, and scale by human and cultural geographers. In each chapter, interdisciplinary contributors employ comparative and multiple approaches, including archival and interview research, digital humanities, and material culture. The volume is organized by themes and scales: part 1 focuses on urban spaces and planning, part 2 delves into inland and rural spaces, and part 3 looks at island and maritime spaces.By bringing occupation and colonialism together, the volume helps us think beyond a dominant paradigm in the study of colonialism, a dichotomy between colonizer and colonized (or occupier and occupied), in numerous ways. Perspectives of regions that are “peripheral” to nation-states, empires, and international standards—such as East Timor, the Andaman Islands, and Okinawa—powerfully demonstrate that occupation and colonialism have operated through multiple colonizers. Vannessa Hearman's chapter situates the Indonesian government-led urban transformation of East Timor and clandestine activism by the local youth in the history of Portuguese colonialism and the postindependence expansion of Indonesia. Vishvajit Pandya and Madhumita Mazumdar show how the British occupation of the Andaman Islands destroyed Andamanese cosmologies and their exchange networks by indicating the continuity of their oppression by the Indian government after 1947. Sayaka Sakuma reveals similarities between US militarism and ecological conservationism in Okinawa by illustrating multilayered histories of colonialism by both the United States and Japan. In addition to multiple colonizers, the volume highlights the third domain and groups that scholars have neglected under the paradigm of metropole-colony and colonizer-colonized dichotomies. Kris Alexanderson's chapter investigates the Dutch oceanic policing of communist activities not only in colonial Indonesia but also in China. Her conceptualization of “‘in-between’ spaces of empire” (part of the chapter title) disrupts the metropole-colony dichotomy. Furthermore, chapters by Joanna Lee and Yi Li explore debates over Chinese workers in British Malaya and British Burma, respectively, providing again alternatives to the dichotomy between colonizer and colonized.The volume also offers a stimulating response to a call by Native American studies scholar Nancy Shoemaker, who examined twelve forms of colonialism by problematizing the ways in which historians separately studied settler colonialism and colonialism. She also pointed out that scholars tended to use the term colonialism only for plantation colonies, despite other different forms of dominance and exploitation. Her goal was not to define varieties of colonialism but to show their points of intersection and encourage us to “investigate colonization processes as multifaceted affairs that affected colonizers, the colonized, landholding, labor, and migration in myriad ways.”1Spatial Histories of Occupation analyzes the points of intersection between occupation and the diverse forms of colonialism and complicates occupation/colonization processes. This task was accomplished particularly in Ian Morley's chapter on Daniel Burnham's plan of Manila, David Serfass's chapter on Japan's cartographic control of China, and Abhishek Nanavati's chapter on hydroponic farming during the US occupation of Japan.Reflecting and galvanizing the so-called spatial turn in history, sociology, anthropology, and the broader humanities and social sciences, the volume makes me wonder if it could analyze temporality together with spatiality.2 Indeed, editors are critical to a prevailing understanding of occupation as “impermanence,” which has distinguished occupation from colonialism, annexation, and conquest (3). They also emphasize the importance of studying spatial histories of occupation with “longue durée” (17). One of the contributors noted above, Sakuma, eloquently states that “there is no clear mark of when occupation starts and when it might end” (220). These statements connoting time suggest that collective and comparative examinations of temporality could further enrich spatial histories of occupation and ongoing dialogues surrounding spatial turn.In addition, the use of the term foreign in the subtitle opens up avenues for closer analysis. In most colonial contexts, colonizers are not “foreign” because of their greater access to resources and rights than the colonized. After formal decolonization (independence), such power dynamics changed, putting colonizers into the category of the “foreign”/foreigners. In fact, the volume shows the groups and domains that have operated and been labeled as “foreign” in spatial histories of occupation: for instance, Chinese migrants in British Malaya and Burma, and other domains beyond the metropole-colony dichotomy, such as China in the history of Dutch-ruled Indonesia. The term foreign itself could mean groups and domains beyond the colonizer-colonized and metropole-colony dichotomies.The volume deals with diverse empires and communities across South, Southeast, and East Asia. Despite such a wide-ranging, ambitious attempt, it successfully provides focused discussions about spatial forms of domination and the responses and everyday experiences of marginalized people. This is a great contribution to trans-Asian studies, comparative colonialism, and environmental humanities as well as deeply grounded area studies of Asias.