Southeast Asia Center
Monday May 15, 2006
3:30-5:00pm (reception immediately following)
Communications 206
Oh Sein Kyi, Sein Kyi,
You have erred, you have erred.
To Tokyo he has left, your Japanese lord.
Left you, he has, rotund with child.
The body of historical narratives on the Japanese Occupation of Southeast Asia during the Second World War is marked by a contrast. In the largely Euro-American meta-narrative of the battle between the free, Allied forces and the fascist, Axis camp, Japans policies and conducts in Southeast Asia are represented through atrocities such as the infamous comfort women, the maltreatment of POWs in forced labor camps along the Death Railway, and Sookching or the purging of Chinese communities. The Japan-centric perspective, in contrast, sees the occupation of Southeast Asia during the war through the lens of pan-Asianism, with its benign familial ideology and the expressed goal of liberating fellow Asian peoples from the shackles of European colonialism. While these meta-narratives of the Second World War in Southeast Asia, articulated through the tropes of trauma and liberation, have been illustrative of the Euro-American and the Japanese interpretations of the war, they have failed to examine the reception of the war in Southeast Asia itself.
The talk examines historical narratives of the Japanese Occupation of Burma during the Second World War (1942-1945) and brings into dialogue the predominant Euro-American, Japanese, and Burmese narratives of the Occupation. Dr. Ikeya will present various visual and literary representations of the Occupation, including oral histories, and explore the varied ways in which the Occupation was received locally and within a broader context of Japans rise as a non-European, modern, imperial power, or, the light of Asia. Around what lieux de mmoire have individual and collective Burmese memories of the Occupation cohered? Which representations of the impact of the Japans emergence and defeat as an Asian imperial power and the place of WWII in the history of Southeast Asia came to be dominant and why? The talk will conclude with a discussion of one of the few memories about the Japanese Occupation that survive in the Burmese collective memory: a song that chastises a Burmese woman who is abandoned with child by a Japanese soldier. How are we to interpret this song about Sein Kyi and the symbolic role it has come to play in the historical representation of the Occupation?
Chie Ikeya received her Ph.D. in History from Cornell University in 2005 for her dissertation, "Gender, History and Modernity: Representing Women in Twentieth Century Colonial Burma, and is currently a 2005-2006 Rockefeller Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Project for Critical Asian Studies at the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington.