Research master thesis | Asian Studies (research) (MA)
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This thesis analyses the development of Ryukyuan narratives of political legitimacy under the influence of the imperial Chinese tributary system. For centuries, the Ryukyu Kingdom, which was...Show moreThis thesis analyses the development of Ryukyuan narratives of political legitimacy under the influence of the imperial Chinese tributary system. For centuries, the Ryukyu Kingdom, which was annexed by Meiji Period Japan in 1879 and is today divided among Japan's Okinawa and Kagoshima Prefectures, formed an important linking bridge between China and Japan, East Asia's two dominant political entities. Based on a close reading and partial translation of relevant passages from several historical documents, most notably the kingdom's two official histories Chūzan Seikan and Chūzan Seifu, the thesis investigates the socio-political shift in succeeding conceptualisations of Ryukyuan kingship, the monarch's political legitimacy, and the country's state doctrine that occurred from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Show less
Research master thesis | Asian Studies (research) (MA)
open access
In this thesis, I focus the issue of alienation and estrangement of identity in the situation of Japan's cultural confrontation with the West, as (re)presented in the works of contemporary Japanese...Show moreIn this thesis, I focus the issue of alienation and estrangement of identity in the situation of Japan's cultural confrontation with the West, as (re)presented in the works of contemporary Japanese literature, from a postcolonial perspective. I refer to Frantz Fanon's theoretical narrative of the psychological alienation of (former) colonial subjects to construct my analytical framework, to examine the works of Fukuzawa Yukichi, Tawada Yōko and Mizumura Minae. In the case of Fukuzawa, one of the leading intellectuals in Meiji Japan, I unfold the complexity of local intellectual response to the invasion of Western civilization, to offer an overview of the historical background. In the case of Tawada and Mizumura, two distinctive figures in contemporary Japanese literature characterized by their transcultural writing that transgresses conventionally defined boundaries, I examine the theme of alienation and the distortion of identity in a situation where a Japanese is placed in confrontation with the overwhelming force of Western culture, as presented in their works.In my analysis, I hope reveal the resemblance between the situation that the authors in question deal with and the experience of the black population as is portrayed in Fanon's text, which hopefully would draw attention to the complicated picture of (post)colonial experience in Japan.Show less
Research master thesis | Asian Studies (research) (MA)
open access
This thesis investigates different notions of space and the role they played in processes of colonization and religious conversion in Eastern Indonesia at the beginning of the 19th century....Show moreThis thesis investigates different notions of space and the role they played in processes of colonization and religious conversion in Eastern Indonesia at the beginning of the 19th century. Specifically, it focusses on the 1824 trip of the Dourga which re-instated political and religious ties between the Dutch administration in Ambon and the various island societies in the region. It proposes to treat space as medium of cultural exchange.Show less
