 Hello and good evening. Thank you for joining us tonight. My name is Fabio Gigi. I'm the chair of the Japan Research Center here at SOAS and it is my great delight to introduce the speaker for tonight. An excellent talk for the last of our series before Reading Week. We'll continue after Reading Week, so please do come back. I was hoping, I think there will a few people will join us a bit later. You know, we have assignments coming up on Friday, which was maybe not such a good idea, but there was such a demand for the, you know, having a diverse array of deadlines that now students have excuses almost every week not to come. Anyway, so our speaker today is Dr. Roselle Mead. She's a lecturer in Japanese studies in the School of Modern Languages at Cardiff University and she researches translation in 19th and 20th century Japan with a particular interest in how narratives and concepts are transfigured through translation. And I think I can say this is also very closely related to science and technology studies, which is a shared interest. And if you remember past installments last year of the lecture series, we've dealt with the history of science in Japan in particular. Roselle Mead is a co-editor along with Claire Shee and Kim of the Handbook of East Asian Translation and her recent articles include Minakata Kumagusu in London, challenging Eurocentrism in the pages of Nature, which was published in Notes and Records, the Royal Society Journal for the History of Science, and Science Across the Meiji Divide vernacular literary genres as vectors of science in modern Japan. So we'll follow a traditional academic format with the talk first. Please hold your questions to the end of the talk. If you are joining us online, you can feed into your questions either into the Q&A function or into the chat. Her talk tonight bears the title, A Black Hero for Japanese Youth, recounting the life of Toussaint-le-Virture in Meiji, Japan. Please give a big welcome to Dr. Roselle Mead. Thank you very much for that very kind introduction. It is very nice to be back at SOAS. I studied here. I studied translation here and it was at SOAS that I started to see translation not just as a practice but also as a sort of object of study, something that could give insights into wider contextual and societal, wider societal context. And so, yeah, that's the approach that I take to translation. And I've done so ever since. All of the works that Dr. Gigi mentioned look at translation and how concepts are transfigured as they move. So it's less about questions of fidelity and about what translation can tell us about the context in which it occurs. So it's with that eye that I approach Japanese translations of the Haitian revolution and its foremost revolutionary hero Toussaint-le-Virture. So some might find it interesting to discover that there are a multitude of writings about the Haitian revolution and about Toussaint-le-Virture in Japanese. But these date back to the late 19th century and continue to the very least to the last decade of the 20th century. So the work that I will discuss today is part of a wider study that looks at these multiple renderings of the Haitian revolution in Japanese and how these are transfigured and reconfigured according to the priorities and agendas of their Japanese writers and to understand more about the context in which they mobilise the Haitian revolution. So they're making arguments for Japanese context but using the Haitian revolution. Today I just focused on one of these translations. It was published in 1890 and it's likely to be the earliest account of the Haitian revolution in Japanese. Although I focus on only one of these multiple renderings that I've mentioned, I think this one work reveals some commonalities that other renderings even into the 20th century share. The first and perhaps a provocative statement is that attempts to grapple with issues of race in Japan have always been informed by an engagement with the idea of blackness. So to borrow Robert Tierney's words, which he used in a different context, the Japanese understanding of race has consistently had a triadic character. So it involved not just entanglements or the encounter between Asia and Europe but also entanglements with Africa and its diasporas. And I think that this is an important point that continues to be overlooked in discussions of race in Japan but in Asia more generally. Japan's encounter with Europe and with Europeans has been from the very beginning intertwined with its encounter with Africans. So I'll start again with that. So Japan's encounter with Europe and with Europeans has from the very beginning been intertwined with its encounter with Africans. Japanese contact with Portuguese and Spanish, Iberian, Jesuit missionaries in the 16th and 17th centuries and then with Dutch merchants throughout the Tokugawa period brought contact with enslaved Africans. Then in the mid 19th century, when Japan and the United States came into contact, African Americans were also part of that encounter. When Commodore Matthew Perry came with his huge coterie, he brought along with him and deliberately so black sailors and bodyguards to play a prominent role in the pageantry of his arrival. These encounters continue into the treaty port period. Of course treaty ports were highly cosmopolitan melting pots and you had soldiers from various European colonial territories rubbing shoulders together. So this is one of the images that Midori Fujita uses in her work that charts these encounters and representations of these encounters with black people in Japan. So this yosei or caricature was produced in the Edo period. So in the early 19th century by Utagawa Kuniyoshi and it is a caricature of Asahina Yoshihide who's a Kamakura era military commander and this is just one of the many representations of black people during the Edo period. So if you've had a chance to look at it, what you will notice is that this picture or this print is made up of the bodies of various humans. If you look at the hands, the head, all of these are bodies but what you will notice is if you look at the hair at the back of his head you can see two black bodies there. So if you look there's one hanging off the top on the top not and one underneath there. So this is just one example and in the work Fujita Midori takes us through this long line of representations that bears testament to this encounter with black others. I should make the point however that at this point black does not necessarily equate with African, black is a color of skin, not a marker of origin and so at this point these ideas of blackness are not necessarily related to notions of origin but that does become the case. So that was my sort of first point about the commonalities of these translations is that that importance of blackness to understanding race. The second commonality in the multiple renderings of Tucson-Lovatura and the Haitian Revolution is the position of the United States. So the towering political economic and cultural influence of the United States shapes how the Haitian Revolution is received in Japan and we'll see that it is an American publication that is the source of the 1890 biography of Tucson-Lovatura. Okay so first I'll give a very brief account of the Haitian Revolution and Tucson-Lovatura's role in it. I keep it brief as I presume a SOAS audience is likely to need very little introduction. Okay so the site of the Haitian Revolution is in the then French colony of Saint-Domingue, the west of Hispaniola or little Spain so called by Christopher Columbus. After the arrival of Columbus there are attempts to enslave and use the labor of indigenous Tainan-Siboni peoples due to repression so this is in response to revolt by indigenous people and disease the indigenous Taino population declines sharply and so the labor of this indigenous population depleted by genocide is replaced by that of enslaved Africans. At the time of the beginning of the revolt and so this is in 1791 Saint-Domingue was described as lapel des Antilles. It was France to the pearl of the Antilles of the Caribbean. It was France's most important colonial territory with sugar, coffee and indigo produced by the enslaved population accounting for half of the amounts consumed in Europe and America's and Americas at the time. Plans for the uprising of 1791 were hatched, it is said, at the Boa-Kémen gathering that you see depicted here. At the center is the African-born Boukman d'Ati and you can see in white Cecile Fatima, she is the daughter of an enslaved African woman and a white Frenchman. It's through this gathering which has a very strong spiritual and religious dimension that the 1791 uprisings begin. One of the peculiarities of Saint-Domingue society was its large and economically powerful free population of Jean du Couleur, so people of color. So it must be stressed that these are this is economically powerful so they have plantations, they use enslaved labor, but they don't have political or social power. They are largely, but not exclusively, people of mixed heritage, usually enslaved African mothers and French fathers and they have plantations, as I said, and they own slaves. With the French Revolution of 1789, they see an opportunity to argue for their political rights. This appeal is at first violently repressed, but eventually the Jean du Couleur are granted citizenship in 1792 to Quelle Revolt. Later, the island is attacked by the Spanish and the British and France offers freedom to the slaves to join the French troops and it's at this point that we see the emergence of Toussaint Riveture. So Toussaint Riveture is a military hero who leads troops to defeat the Spanish and the British. When Napoleon ascends to power, so this is in the French Revolution, he wants to reimpose slavery on the territory. So the slaves are offered, enslaved population are offered freedom because of the fight against the Spanish and British to co-opt them into that. However, with Napoleon's rise, there's an attempt to reimpose slavery, but Riveture, he turns the tables on the French defeats Napoleon's troops and defeats them. And so, in effect, you have a free population, but still tied to France. In the end, however, Napoleon sends for Riveture to be kidnapped. And he's taken to France where he is imprisoned and he dies in 1803. However, as Riveture prophetically announced when he was captured, they had cut down only the trunk of the Tree of Liberty of the Blacks. It will grow back from the roots because they are deep and numerous. So on New Year's Day, 1804, Saint-Domingue is declared independent and renamed IT. IT is an indigenous name, meaning mountainous, so Haiti is a land of the mountains. It becomes only the second independent state in the Americas and the world's first black republic. And it's important because the country does then say it's a black republic. And by essence, by being a citizen of Haiti, you are designated as black. Of course, at this point, Toussaint Riveture has died. And one of his lieutenants, Jean-Jacques Desalines, is the one who declares independence and declares himself emperor. So Toussaint Riveture was born enslaved in Saint-Domingue in about 1843. However, by the time of the Haitian Revolution, he had been manumitted. So in other words, he was a free man and was an overseer on a plantation owning himself. He owned, sorry, enslaved persons. He was literate and had high status. As mentioned, he demonstrated acute military naus, leading troops to defeat the foremost European imperial powers of the age. So Toussaint Riveture was introduced to the Japanese reading public in 1890 through the pages of the Japanese juvenile magazine Shonenen, meaning the youth's garden. So even prior to before his death, Riveture had been the subject of extensive biography. By the time of his death, there were already accounts of his life in France, Britain, Germany, Italy, and many other places. But and we can be quite certain of this, not in Japan. So you can sense the shock in this introduction, which I've copied here, in the editor's introduction of the discovery of this black hero who led an army of enslaved Africans to victory against European powers. From its cover, the third November 1890 issue was like any other. However, once it was opened, it was clear than rather than the usual mix of letters from readers, general interest articles, short stories, that it was in fact a pamphlet. And this pamphlet was singularly devoted to Toussaint Riveture, who was introduced as a black hero. And in the introduction, the writer, the editor of the magazine, he said that this person who he was about to introduce, ranked not among but above well-known heroes such as Washington and Napoleon. And these were people who went only by single names and needed no introduction. But he went on to say, despite being a hero whose equal had not been seen in thousands of years, these are his words, he was certain that the magazine's readers had not heard of him. The reason that the editor was so compelled to introduce Toussaint Riveture was that he expected this biography to overturn what had by 1890 become a consensus, the existence of a concept called race and a belief that these races could be ranked in a hierarchy. But I'll take a sip before moving on. So scholars of the major period, including, for example, Yuki Terazaka, have pointed out that as a scientific concept, race was introduced and popularized in Japan in the 1870s and the 1880s through the adoption of social Darwinism and anthropology. Of course, there was what might be called Indigenous racism, as some describe it, prior to this period. But these attitudes did not necessarily mean that there was a very developed concept of race. I should point out that in what follows in discussing this period and this topic, certain terms, of course, outdated terms will be used, which are obviously considered pejorative. So I should let you know that in advance. So scientific studies of race started with the arrival of European and American scholars invited to Japan at the beginning of the 1870s. And as the concept of race was introduced, so too was the notion of racial hierarchy. In this hierarchy, the uppermost position was, of course, occupied by Europeans with East Asians in the middle and African and various Indigenous peoples at the bottom. And there were many variations and elaborations of this basic model, but overall, its tenets were the same. Broadly speaking, there were two main approaches to understanding race and racial hierarchy in the major period. In one view, race was an essential and inherent category, so it could not be transcended. In the other, race was a civilizational marker. So it was something that could be transcended. It was just a snapshot of the current state of human affairs. One intellectual who did much to promote the civilizational understanding was, of course, someone you will know, Fukuzao Yukichi. In his 1869 bestseller, Sekai Kunizukushi, he divided the people of the world into four categories. He did not use the language of race, referring instead to peoples, but the notion of hierarchy is pervasive in his work. He describes the Lois category, comprising what he calls the most inferior people as chaos, and in this group he places the Indigenous peoples of Australia and Inner Africa. The category above this is Barbarian, or Banya, the yet uncivilized, or Mikae, and then at the top are the Bunmeikaika. As examples of this group, he cites the United States and Western European nations, such as Britain, France, and Germany. These coexisting conceptions of racial difference informed major error debates about Japan and its population. Of course, it was a huge concern at this time, the idea of the betterment of Japan's international position. Those who saw race in essentialist terms tended to be proponents of what might call eugenicist approaches. So, for example, in his 1884 essay, Nippon Jinshu Kaerioron, a treatise on the betterment of the Japanese race, the journalist Takahashi Yoshi encouraged marriage between Japanese and European to create what he called taller, heavier, and stronger Japanese people, and in doing so increased the competitiveness of Japan in the international arena. For those of a civilizational bent, emulating European imperialism was the most obvious route to betterment. So as early as 1869, the scholar Hosokawa Junjiro argued that Europeans had made themselves the nobility of the world by importing slaves from China, India, and Africa, and that Japan should emulate them by importing slaves for household tasks and more arduous labor in farming and shipping. The editor of Shonenen, the one who introduces Tucson Louverture, was clearly a proponent of the civilizational approach. So far, I haven't named the editor, but he is most likely Yamagata Te Saburo. Most of the works in this magazine written by him were unattributed, and so this one as well was unattributed. His hand was very clearly over much of the material in the magazine. So prior to his translation of the biography of Tucson Louverture, he had already shown a keen interest in matters of race. So in 1886, he had published a bridge translation of Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex alongside excerpts of Ernst Haeckel's The History of Creation. In a bridging Darwin's work, he focused on selection, sexual selection, selection in relation to sex. Darwin's biographers argue that the focus on sexual selection in this work, The Descent of Man, was motivated by the desire to explain racial difference in humans. Darwin's argument was that preferences from mates explain the differences in skin color, hair, and so on. And so this supported a monogenetic understanding of race. And by that, I mean that we all descend from a common ancestor. And so this undermined what was known as a polygenetic understanding of race, whereby races had different origins, and people and polygenists were typically proponents of slavery. That was one of the key underpinning arguments for slavery. So Louverture's appeal, so the appeal of Tucson Louverture to Yamagata was that he was an example of someone who had transcended the racial hierarchy. And in the introduction to his biography, he argued the following. He said, there may now be inequality on earth, but as far as the heavens were concerned, all men are created equal. Only the ignorant cannot see this. So he did not dispute that there were different levels of civilizational attainment. So he went on to say, yes, there's civilizational attainment, but he argued these change over time. So he was a keen Chinese scholar. And so he pointed to Chinese history, pointing to the fall of Hao Jing, the capital of the Zhou Kingdom in the eighth century, noting that impermanence was a feature of all human affairs. Everything that rises, he said, must at some point decline. So he then uses the language of color, which jars with his civilizational understanding, but he said whites are at the top, and then he uses the color coming to at the time. So he says yellow next, red and then black below. He said, though that is the case now, in the future, the situation will be reversed. And as evidence, he pointed to the glories of non Europeans, such as Shakyamuni and Jenkins Khan, and his argument that civilization little change was possible, was then bolstered by his introduction of Toussaint Louverture. So in his presentation of Toussaint Louverture, Yamagata, so the publisher of the Japanese biography, pushes against received wisdom about the capacity of black people, and in this case, meaning people, African descended people to achieve civilization. In the sense he fits within what the anthropologist David Scott has described as the vindicationist tradition. So David Scott describes vindicationism as an intellectual move to mobilize history to challenge the dehumanization of black people. As Scott points out, in the early 19th century, many abolitionists, especially British ones, believed that once emancipated black people could prove themselves worthy of inclusion in the fellowship of civilized humanity. However, he points out by the second half of the 19th century, things had changed quite radically and attitudes had hardened. And by the 1850s and the 1860s, there was a more aggressive and openly derogatory racialism, to the point that in the 19th century, no sensibility says no sensible, intellectual belief in the inherent intellectual quality of blacks. And this includes even Charles Darwin, who I mentioned before, produced this work to argue, essentially, for abolition of slavery at the time. So as I point out here vindication, vindicationalism is that want to practice of providing evidence to refute a disagreeable or incorrect claim and a practice of reclamation and redemption of what has been denied. And so in talking about the vindicationalist tradition, Scott mentions Reverend James Theodore Holly as a prominent person who kicks off this tradition. He produced this work, as you can see vindication of the capacity of the Negro race. And this is based on Haiti. And so Haiti comes to take on a very prominent and important role in this tradition, which then has a very long trajectory continuing on, of course, until the 20th century. But as we can see from Yamagata's introduction of Toussaint Louverture, the symbolic power of the Haitian revolution is not only, it's not only not only powerful in the Atlantic world. So Haiti's symbolic power in the Atlantic world, it's pinned on three foundational three foundations, the resurrection of enslavement colonialism and racial hierarchy and the idea of white supremacy. So if we look at the symbolic power of the Haitian revolution in Japan, we can see that its power lies only in the last of this, the rejection of the notion of racial hierarchy. In addition to this, Yamagata makes a number of changes that makes him palatable to the Japanese public of the time and his audience of young Japanese leaders. I'll come to that next. Okay, so the major period saw a proliferation of biographies. And so the genre that developed at the time was distinguished from earlier forms of biography by sustained emphasis on an individual figure. So of course, in the past, there were biographies in the form of warrior tales, secular biographies, and so on. But in the major period, a new tradition was superimposed on that. And this took into, had a greater sustained emphasis on an individual. Importantly, those who were initially subjected to biographical treatment in the early major period were Europeans and Americans. And interestingly, Napoleon was the foremost subject. And this actually predates the major period going back into the Edo period. Also important as subjects of biography were industrialists and engineers. You may have heard of Samuel Smiles' self-help, which was translated in 1871, under the title of Saigo Kurishi-hen, Western Success Stories. And this was very popular and reprinted many times. So the genre that emerged in the major period was developed around the European subject. And what happens is that later, Japanese figures are fitted into this biographical mold in an attempt to universalize the list. And so the aim of inserting Japanese figures into this new genre of biography was to transform European, sorry, to transform Japanese and later East Asian figures, literary figures, military figures, and political figures into world-class heroes. So in producing a biography of Toussaint Louverture, Yamagata is making a very powerful political statement. What he is doing is to assert the parity of this black hero with European models. However, if we take a closer look, we can see some complications of this understanding of what Yamagata is doing. So as I've argued elsewhere, the publication in which this work was printed, Shonenen, it was conceived as an outdoor space of adventure. So what Yamagata did with this magazine was that he wanted young boys to imagine themselves being in the great outdoors. And the idea of this was that there would be an outdoor space of adventure where Japanese youth could vicariously engage in exploration and adventure. And so this is to emulate the imperial officer class. So much of the material in this magazine borrows from British magazines of the period talking about what colonial officers are doing. The target audience of Shonenen were middle school students, male students, who were described as society's upper crust. And so they were destined to be the ones to lead the nation in the future. As I discussed in this work, a bit of self-promotion, is that the reason that Yamagata published this magazine in this format was to bolster the imperial project and to socialize young Japanese into imperial subjecthood. In the same year that Yamagata published the biography of Luriture, he appealed for Japan to claim lands in China, the American West, and the South Seas. So by claiming these lands, he said, we will enrich our country. So not only did he propose, encourage overseas conquest, he also platformed those who had similar ideas. As just one example, Shigei Shigetaka, who was a proponent of Nanshin Non, so the colonization of the South Sea islands, he was a frequent contributor to Shonenen. And his 1887 work, Nanyo Gigi, Current Conditions of the South Seas, was actually serialized first in Shonenen. At about this time, Shigei was to argue that it was an urgent task to inspire our countrymen's spirit of overseas expansion. So how do we square Yamagata's championing of imperial expansion with his celebration of Tucson Luriture, who perhaps more than any other individual undermined the argument for imperialism? So we can see quite clearly here that although at first glance it looks as if Yamagata is part of a vindicationalist tradition, and this is one that many black nationalists continued, it wasn't of course exactly the same project. They overlapped, but were not identical. So matters of enslavement and colonialism were not heirs of concern for Yamagata. The only overlap was on the question of race. So stripped of this, these other trappings of the vindicationalist tradition, the story that Yamagata gave only turned out to be an aspirational tale. And you can see that in the introduction to the work where you can see the limits of his ambitions, because at the end he says this biography is really to encourage young Japanese to assert their position in the world. So as the scholar Jeffrey Elton memorably pointed out, one should not suppose that in writing biography, they're writing history. And Charles Forestick, who studies Tucson Luriture, has written on him, has demonstrated what he calls an ideological instrumentalization of Tucson Luriture, which he says begins from the very beginning. Each biographer of Tucson Luriture, he says, engages with proceeding representations of him, aiming to complement, correct or contradict them. And so the Luriture that we encounter today is the product of a cumulative archive of representations rather than any historically authenticable figure. And we should point out that this ideological instrumentalization of Tucson Luriture also extends to black nationalists in the vindicationalist tradition, who themselves have a specific figuration of Tucson Luriture, which often removes, which often aligns much of his biography. This includes Luriture's authoritarian bent. So although Luriture fought for freedom to overthrow the system of chattel slavery, he wanted to retain the plantation system. He really, he saw himself as a French person and wanted to remain part of France. And even after rejecting the system of enslavement, he essentially forced the population to return to the plantations, working as free labor, but to maintain French control of the land. And those who challenged him in important cases were killed. So to understand how we achieve, sort of, we reach this figuration of Tucson Luriture in the Japanese context, we need to see how other, how he was ideologically instrumentalized earlier by other writers. And we have to remember as well that Yamagata is working off of material that he receives in Japan. Although Yamagata doesn't explicitly state the source of his work, all available evidence points to it being Tucson Luriture, a biography and autobiography written by Reverend John Relly Baird, published in 1863. This is the one here on the left. As you can see, this is actually a later edition of the work in the middle, which was published in London 10 years earlier under the title of The Life of Tucson Luriture, the Negro Patriot of Haiti. The London-published version was itself based on other sources, as you can see moving over to the right. This was based on mainly French language works, notably Memoir de la Vie de Tucson Luriture by Saint-Remy. And Baird rewrote it because he thought that Saint-Remy was partial and unjust and he wanted to correct his misinterpretations of the Haitian Revolution. And so he says in the London work, based on the French one, that his aim, sorry, I should point out that this work is written by Baird is a Unitarian minister. And what he wants to do is to show that the downtrodden Negro race are capable of the loftiest versions and virtues and the most heroic efforts. And he also wanted to demonstrate how the American system of slavery stymied the spread of God's word. So if you will remember at this point, this is the 1850s and the British territory slavery has been abolished. This is abolished in 1933 and then in 1938 it's finally come into force. But it continues in the US. So his work is a use of the case of Tucson Luriture to speak against the American system of slavery, which he says prevents those in bondage from achieving Christian enlightenment. And so Luriture was actually quite attractive for Baird because Luriture championed Roman Catholicism. So he wanted the national religion of Haiti to be Catholicism. And he liked Luriture because in his words, Luriture rejected superstition. And the superstition, Baird says, takes much of its force from old African traditions and observances, as well as the tripping of my words, takes much of its force from old African traditions and observances, as well as from the peculiar susceptibilities of the Negro temperaments. The American version of the biography published in 1863 was published, of course, in the midst of the US civil war. And it was published in Boston by an anti-slavery activist, John Redpath. So Redpath was actually very interested in Haiti. He published works on Haiti, a guide to Haiti, for example, and he lobbied the US government to give diplomatic recognition to Haiti. So with the US civil war, the question of the martial ability of black enslaved men became a matter of heated debate. And so Baird actually published this work in the US and made multiple changes to it in order to enter that debate. In his introduction, he says, are Negroes fit for officers? And then he says, the life of Toussaint may help to end this debate. The leaders of the Haitian Revolution were all plantation hands, yet they were able warriors and statesmen, all of them. So someone, any enslaved person still toiling in the rice fields or among the sugar canes or hoeing his cotton row in the southern states may be meditating today and destined to begin tomorrow. So the British version in 1853 is very much a Christian tract to argue against, argue for abolition. The one in 1863 in the midst of the civil war, basically asserting that, yes, the big question then was whether the black men should be fighting in the civil war. And that was his answer. Yes, they should. So this ideological instrumentalization, as in to use four, six terms, is obviously evident in the British, American and Japanese, and of course the French, biographical treatments. So in the American editions and the British editions of Baird, it's, Baird goes through, makes a huge attempt to distinguish Louverture from his fellow revolutionaries. So for Baird, Louverture was a Christian leader, promoting his faith among those inclined to heathenism. And so Baird naturally, he will, he peppers his biography with references to the redemptive force of Christianity. So for example, he notes that although Tucson became every day more and more aware that he was a slave, religion allowed him to avoid a murmuring spirit such that he could make the best of his position in which he had been born without yielding to the degrading notion that his hardships were irremediable. So Baird's belief that Christianity could, in his words, make the slave's cabin and abode of the purest happiness of earth led him to champion matrimony amongst the enslaved. So of course, religious matters were of course of little concern to Yamagata. But like Baird, it suited his purpose to portray Louverture as different from his quote unquote bloodthirsty kin. So this is going back to Samuel Mead's description. So describing scenes from the first revolts of 1791, Baird describes the proceedings as so horrible that Tucson could take no part. Yamagata's version does not shy away from these graphic descriptions of violence by the revolutionaries. And in fact, he employs language that associates the behavior of the revolutionaries in Haiti to the headhunting practices of indigenous Taiwanese. And so this is of course coded as particularly barbaric in major discourse as an example of an image from the Japanese translation. That said, in doing so, Yamagata deracializes Louverture and bolsters his heroic credentials by removing references to the humiliated conditions in which the enslaved were subjected. And so here it's important to note that key to the vindicationless tradition of black nationalists, the role of dehumanization, the role of slavery and the dehumanization of black people is central. But remember, of course, for Yamagata, the target is not slavery. So Yamagata largely strips his account of the dehumanization of Tucson Louverture because this would not be compatible with him being a hero. So many elements that are specific to black people's becoming or a new African diaspora identity is removed. And this simply leaves Tucson as a figure of overcoming. So I give some examples here. So Baird, for example, details the horrors of the middle passage. So the transport of enslaved Africans from the west coast of Africa to the Americas. And he mentions that thousands perished by suffocation. Of course, this is removed. He goes into a lot of detail of the regular rates of enslaved women. You see here, for example, lust and brutality outraged mothers and daughters and scrupulously, preferring as victims the young and innocent. That is removed. Mention of violent punishment. So Baird here talks of Tucson harrowing the twang of the driver's whip and seeing the blood streaming from the Negro's body. Yamagata omits all of these discussions of horrors. And this is all necessary to mold Louverture into a figure fit for major biography. But he also makes additions to make him a heroic subject. So, for example, Louverture, as all Meiji heroes, must display moral probity and erudition from an early age. So whereas Baird in the American version portrays shepherding, the job that Louverture did as something common to enslaved people. He says the duty of the young slave was definite in uniform. Yamagata says that Louverture is exemplary at it. Baird, for example, describes Louverture as weak and infirm in his youth. And of course, Yamagata omits this, inserting instead a new detail, saying that Tucson, his character was so peaceful that he could not so much as hurt a flying. And Baird also portrays Louverture's academic ability as modest. He says he seems to have made some progress in the arts of reading, writing, and drawing, and notes that a scholar in the high sense of the term he never became. However, for Yamagata, Louverture was nothing short of a philosopher. So, Yamagata stresses Louverture's love of learning. He lists every single book that he read and was learned. It's a very long list. He says that he would read them through the night. And so, of course, he said that he would read all night and then work all day. So, he obviously needed no sleep. So, during and after work, Yamagata said Louverture's reading would enable him to reflect deeply on matters. And then as a final flourish, Yamagata adds that Louverture also had the habit of quoting from books he had read. And that's obviously not a detail in any of the English sources. In 2004, David Scott, the anthropologist who I mentioned before, published Conscripts of Modernity, which was an analysis of another rendering of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution. So, this was by CLR James' work entitled Black Jacobins. The conscript to which Scott refers in the title of the work is Toussaint Louverture. Scott argues that key to capturing the past of colonial subjects lies in recognizing their obligation to live in terms and worlds mounted by the modern West. Modern power, he points out, was constitutive, making the very subject that might desire resistant. He points out that Toussaint Louverture had no choice but to act and strategize on conditions created by European modernity. So Toussaint, a slave turned liberator, for example, to give one example of how he had to work within these conditions. In order, in liberating the slaves, he then said the newly enslaved people had to return to the plantations. And that was because he could not imagine liberty, independence of the very civilization that sought to return him and his people to slavery. The point that Scott makes in his reading of CLR James' Black Jacobins is that James recognizes that it's not, this is not a story of overcoming but one of tragedy. Writing in 1890, Yamagata was perhaps able to sense the costs of revolution, even as he celebrated a revolutionary hero. The independent Republic of Haiti was largely shunned with European and American powers refusing to recognize its independence by establishing diplomatic ties. So they refused to establish diplomatic ties, thereby denying its independence and its existence. So it was ignored. Indeed, France would only do so after Haiti paid reparations and these burdensome reparations were not paid off until the mid 20th century. An immediate consequence of the Haitian Revolution, and let's not forget that for this, it means that France has lost all of Haiti's plantations, which produce, as I said before, half of the coffee, sugar, half of the coffees are consumed in Europe and the Americans. And so a consequence of this was the expansion of slavery elsewhere. The eventual abolition of slavery in the Americas led European and American powers to look to Asia for cheap labor. And Japan soon looked to be sucked into the system of indentured labor, which was intended to replace enslaved African labor. So this picture here is, it shows laborers from Japan who were recruited by the then consul of Hawaii, Eugene Van Reed. The consul of Hawaii based in Yokohama, he attempted to recruit Japanese laborers to work on sugarcane fields in Hawaii. The migrants, as you can see here, were in very destitute conditions. They faced harsh labor conditions and lived in huts of the type you can see here. They were left destitute to the point that many had to be rescued by the Japanese government, who as a consequence decided to exert more direct control over dispatching migrant laborers overseas. In addition, the end of slavery actually saw the rise of new ideologies of domination, one of which was the topic that Yamagata discuss, scientific racism, which came to the fore actually after the evolution of slavery. And so Yamagata, for his time, that felt that this was the most pertinent issue in the Japanese case. So I will conclude here. Just to summarize, I've been showing a few of the changes that Yamagata introduced to mold literature to the template of a major hero. And so by doing so, he domesticates him, he enshrines him, not so much into a Japanese pantheon, but an emerging universal one, which was shaped by representations of European figures. Though Yamagata describes literature as a black hero, he is largely stripped of his blackness and that sense of any link to Africa. So their parents of a Japanese biography of Toussaint Louverture, and in the late 19th century, no less, would seem to undermine assertions, and most notably the assertion of Michel Rove Trouillot, who is a Haitian academic, who argued that the Haitian revolution had been silenced. In 1995, Trouillot asserted that the historical corpus had remained silent on the most radical political revolution of the age. But by silencing, he referred not to a lack of a mention of the Haitian revolution or its heroes, but a lack of understanding of its significance. Little was published in the years following Yamagata's biography about the Haitian revolution or about Toussaint Louverture. Indeed, the next mention of Haiti that I was able to find was by the colonial theorist Nitobe Inazot. Nitobe described colonialism as the spread of civilization, a beneficial process in which advanced people offer their knowledge, technologies, and capital to contribute to the development of undeveloped land. For Nitobe, Haiti was a cautionary tale for those who refuse civilization offered by the colonizer. They are doomed to regress, he asserted. Look at the fate of the former French colony of Haiti, he said. Once a flourishing plantation economy under French rule, having achieved independence, it became a place of disease and stagnation. In a word, the island of augurs. Thank you. Thank you very much for a fantastic, very thought-provoking talk. As you collect your thoughts for questions, I just wanted to say, when I joined SOS in 2013, 10 years ago, I was tasked to teach a course called World Social Theory, and in 2013, it started with Rousseau. So we're not really all that far away from that. And now we have, and it ended with Franz Fanon, only in the very last session. But now, of course, we have CLR James in there as well. But I think it's important to, yes, there is a certain mystique around SOS, right? But often we're not all that good, actually, of absorbing the content that we claim on our websites to be teaching. So starting, I just, I just wanted to start this off, because this is, it's really very fascinating. I wondered whether there was a translation of the Black Jacobins into Japan and what happened to that, because obviously, politically speaking, it's a very different context. I think it was published in 1937. So also, we are in a different sort of time period. But there's also people like Antenoch, Fermin, who tried to combat racist ideas on this, on the same level. He'd read Gobino and thought this is nonsense and responded by writing this wonderful, massive tome, rejecting each and every single ideas they're in. But also, that is really, it hasn't really entered the canon. So I think there is an interesting point to be made about the silencing of the Haitian revolution. But do these have an afterlife in Japan as well? Thank you very much for that question. Regarding CLR James' The Black Jacobin, yeah, that has been, that was translated into, that was published in 1991, if I remember correctly. And it is one of those accounts of the Haitian revolution that I am looking at, but about which I cannot say that much because I'm actually, I'm focusing now on the 19th century ones. But yes, it was translated. As you get to the late 20th century, you start seeing more academic translations, more annotations. I think that's really interesting to see how people are engaging with the work. And what I actually found quite interesting is that it's not just that work by CLR James that has been translated into Japanese. His works, his more, his works on post-colonial Caribbean life as well have been translated into Japanese. So there is, I think an appetite for this type of information. Excellent. Yes, opening up to the crowd. Yes, please. Well, thank you very much for a very rich, stimulating talk. I just wanted to put a word in for another name, but entirely negatively really, Herbert Spencer. In as far as I believe that it was Spencer who was translated into Japanese and Chinese before Darwin and was the major influence in political thought. To simplify, Darwin was a naturalist biologist who threw off many shakus, that's all, but whereas Spencer was writing on evolution out of the political process with a racialized background, which is not, and that was showing influencing thought at the time, not Japanese as well. Yeah, yes, that's correct. The influence of Spencer was huge. Obviously, not just in the case of introducing what we might take, call social Darwinism, but his work on education, for example, hugely influential. I think because Spencer was the way to which many people had encountered Darwin that then led to a desire to actually read Darwin itself more closely. And so Yamagata's translations of Darwin, I think, are part of that sort of reaction against reading Darwin's second hand through this sort of politicized lens. Not many people really, but hands up, please read the audio in the speech. Okay, so I've been teaching this for a number of years, but to be fair, I don't think many people read that Yamagata's translation either. I think in this sense, the translation was him working through these ideas. It was definitely a personal project. It's not an easy book to read. Thank you. Yes, Ruchi. So he is initially a teacher, so his training, his big area of focus is education. And so hopefully I'm the one remembering is correct. He works initially as a translator for the government for the Ministry of Education. And so he does lots of textbooks. So yeah, he comes as a translator. But after that, he does a lot of sort of personal work, these translations of Darwin and so on. But most notably, he creates this magazine, Sean NN, in 1888, as a sort of extracurricular complement to the education system. So he's very interested in education, but he doesn't want to really step on the toes of those. The education is the preserve of the government. He wants to create an outdoor external space for these middle school students to transpose their textbook understanding to the real world through this book, through this magazine. And so this magazine, again, he's a translator, has lots of translations from you can see through it that he reads very widely over the international press, especially the British press and British magazine. So there's a lot of content there from that. And he has a very wide network amongst Japanese intellectuals, some of whom I mentioned in the talk, who then also contribute to this magazine. So I guess his legacy, if you will, is the establishment of this new idea of an adolescent magazine that can complement the education system. It's hard to know for sure, but a very crude measure is how easy it is to get them today. And it's not hard to get them today. It only lasted six years. It was shut down in the aftermath of the first Sino-Japanese war. And so, but yeah, in that period, there wasn't much competition in that early period. And so I think it did quite well. But I don't know. In his book, he has an autobiography, he says that about 10,000 copies were printed each issue. So that's what he says. But yeah, which would be really good, actually. Yeah, but in terms of the influence of this work, for example, it doesn't seem to, yeah, there doesn't seem to be much written or much followed up. Usually you can look at the letters to the editor of the following issue to see how certain things went down. And there's very little mention of this work even then. Yes. Thank you very much. I wasn't quite clear why this chose Tucson as a subject of translation. If it requires too much work to be racialized, because presumably there were other heroes around in the 1970s that could have been chosen. I sort of wanted to use about Tucson that speaks to the president and the Japanese public. So he maybe to racialize is probably the wrong word because I think he chooses him because he is black. And so because he is black, and he is this hero, and hero in sort of vernacular that the major public can understand because he's a military hero. And in his rendering a very literate moral person. And the very fact that he is black and able to subvert the racial hierarchy by defeating European powers in battle makes him ideal for the point that he wants to make. The point about maybe de-racialization is not so much as he's not black because he does say a black hero. But in this figuration of Tucson literature in the Japanese context, it's not what makes him appealing to like a black nationalist who wants to use him for the vindicationalist sort of writings. That is removed from the Japanese version because the sort of focus for Yamagata is simply this idea of racial hierarchy and nothing else, not about colonization or even so much enslavement. I don't know, just thank you so much for that very inspiring talk and I really enjoyed it. I'm just thinking, just guessing, but because 1880s, 1890s, well, I don't like to generalize, but Japan through some intellectuals were reacting to rapid westernization. And by that time, the mobilization programs have been finished, but then they sort of started to think about, I don't know, sort of Japanese sort of identity and sort of went against westernization. So I don't know, maybe he had that sort of element as well by choosing black hero instead of white heroes. I don't know, I would just, yeah. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, that's a really good point. I think, yeah, and it fits within the sort of broadening of the canon of the subjects for biography because, yes, in the 1870s, they start off as being like European scientists, engineers, industrialists, and then it expands to literary figures, politicians, statesmen. And then you start seeing the broadening of the canon by bringing in deliberately Asian figures because the idea is that you can put them into this mold and it's broader, it's not just Europeans. So, yeah, it fits entirely within that. I actually made reference to a work by, I think his name's Miyagi. Anyway, he discusses Koyagi. He discusses biography of the Prophet Muhammad in Japanese, and he's the one who makes this point that 1890s turn of the century, you really see this move to create a broader canon, broader idea of who should be subject to biography. Yes. It's just a comment. It's interesting that this sort of searching of the black heroes occurring in the 1870s and the 80s that we're saying, and of course, it happened at the same time that European colonial powers being exerted, I mean, this is the 1880s, of course, as the title is Scramble for Africa, and so European colonial powers being exerted, so they're very so you don't see, of course, you see lots of the resistance to colonial expansion in Africa, but the overall story is the separation of African communities and African societies. So it's interesting that you have this kind of black military hero at exactly the time that African military power is being particularly vulnerable. Yeah, and Yamagata is not arguing against that. In fact, he is for that. He recognises that yeah, this, so yeah, I get the point I try to make, but not very effectively, was that the issues that had animated earlier debates that were key to Tucson's time, the ideas of enslavement empire, those are not issues for Yamagata. The issue for him is white supremacy because his interest is Japanese supremacy. So yeah, it fits exactly with the time because if you want to be involved in empire, you can't be then talking against empire. So so that's what's happening in his work. Thank you for looking at yes, I've done that. Barbara said stop, stop screen sharing so we can see us. Yes. Any other questions? Yes, please. Thank you very much for your lecture. That was fun. I know the absolute reduction you were just going to read about was done by Shiba Shiro. No, no. Shiba Shiro has been four times such. No, no, no, it's all new. Do you know that? What year was this? It's a book. And that report that a lot of heroes revolution or counter heroes such as Morali or Irish independence movement. So for the Shiba Shiro, they are one of the heroes which are against the white movement. So I just wanted to know some relationship with Shiba Shiro. One more question. Are there any common characteristics among the people or heroes raised in the show name or to some groups in the special one? Yes, thank you very much for that. And I would like to speak to you about that because obviously there's a huge gap in the sort of chronology that presented. In terms of the heroes presented by Yamagata, it was common to do profiles in the magazine. And so you had profiles in pretty much every issue. And of course these were supposed to be moral exemplars for the young readers to be able to learn from the behaviour and the dispositions of those people. I guess the main difference with Yamagata is that he's being presented to challenge this idea of race. A big point is made of his race. That's the point that is foregrounded in the title in presenting him. And no one else is given an entire issue. The entire issue is handed over, if you will, to the biography of Tucson overture. So it's very long. It's a 30 page pamphlet. Whereas in the other cases, it will be one or two pages and they just form parts of every issue. Sometimes they're serialised and so they're a bit longer. But yeah, this is clearly, for Yamagata, a different case because he turns over so much attention and so much of the magazine to him. Thank you. Do you know who from that interest in Tucson may be spread elsewhere like to China or anywhere else? I'd be very interested to know that. The answer to that is no, I don't know. But I would be very interested if anyone is aware of that then. Please do get in touch. So yes. Since this is a discussion for years, why does he then claim to go then one? Do you think that there was an erasure of this kind of discussion of Black girls in January in the history of the 21st century? Or do you think that this has been a popular problem that perhaps these things were not doing that so much as the abbreviations for West of Yellow or I think the more sort of models of masculinity that that family mentioned over the idea of chivalry and the values of the sexual masculinity. And I wonder where this is about this kind of history of the female gender of this period and often he wrote the real life, he wrote all of this. Okay, great. Thank you very much. Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I suspect it's a combination to give a bit of a cop out answer. I think part of it is not necessarily that the archives don't or the material doesn't exist is that it's not really analyzed or looked for that as a question as a research question, they haven't really sort of existed. And so that need to catalog to categorize perhaps hasn't been there as much. And I think once you start looking, you're able to find. So for example, I briefly mentioned, for example, the treaty ports and, you know, people rubbing shoulders. And if we look at the treaty ports or general accounts of the treaty ports, it's all about, you know, these diplomats, these travelers, whatever, and there were a minority of the people in those ports is mainly the sailors. And so it's a hugely like you have the world if you will in these treaty ports, which hasn't really been looked at in much detail. So yeah, I think it is definitely an issue of what questions are being asked of the material. And I think if once you start digging into the material, then these become apparent. Thank you. You mentioned it also said that the revolution or the story of it in silence. And I think you said that it was like, it's not a view that I recognize in the literature. I mean, earlier speaker mentioned the Blackjack Convention, as you say, it was in the 1930s, but even, you know, all the literature on the revolution in slavery in the United States, 1980s, all kind of had Haiti as a central factor in the famous publication by Genovese, and I forget if you know what, certainly the 1980s speaks about, you know, from the very to revolution as Haiti as a kind of, as a central focus of, of slavery in the general revolution. So I don't see, I don't see Haiti being silenced at all, as well as what I'm saying. Thank you. It has always had a very important place or role in the sort of Black nationalist tradition of which I would include CLR James and many of the writers that you've mentioned. That's Goyal, I think when he was talking, when he, when he wrote that it'd been silence, his reference was to the broader history of the Age of Revolutions. So we talk about the Age of Revolutions, the Enlightenment, and it's a European story. And so Scott, for example, when he does, he reads CLR James' Blackjack O'Banon, he analyzes it, he then goes on to the most prominent sort of chronicle, chroniclers of Empire, Russian Empire, of Revolution, French Revolution, Russian Revolution, and so on. And in these accounts of the, of the World Age of Revolutions, his Haiti is not mentioned, it's mentioned as a slave revolt rather than enacting the principles of the Enlightenment. And so I think that was the point that he was trying to make. But in, definitely in sort of a Black nationalist tradition, there's, Haiti is always held a prominent role, so yes. Yeah, exactly. Anybody else? Or I think, yes, the most, that was just a thank you for the screen check. Excellent. Okay. Well, thank you very much. We'll stay with an idea of general Eurocentrism, maybe at the end, maybe it's a good place to sort of stop and bear in mind. So thank you very much. It was helpful, fantastic talk. Thank you all for coming. And remember next week is reading week, so there will be a no lecture and we'll continue again with Azaba Yukos talk on Japan and tango, Argentinian tango in Japan, passions, emotions and performance. So do join us. I think that's on the 15th of November. Thank you.