Global REM: “Brazil as Japanese Kolonialreich: Japanese-Brazilian Migration as World History”
This talk examines the history of early Japanese efforts to promote agricultural emigration to Brazil at the beginning of the twentieth century. It focuses on the intellectual efforts of a group of scholars connected to Hokkaidō Imperial University, a school founded on the American land grant model and an important center for Japanese colonial and agricultural thought. Andre Kobayashi Deckrow's work examines how these Japanese emigration promoters, trained abroad, looked to German colonial theory as a basis for large-scale agricultural settlement in Brazil.
Co-sponsored by the Department of History, Asian American Studies Program, and the Heritage Studies and Public History Program.
If you would like to read Dr. Deckrow's paper ahead of time, please email oxley032@umn.edu to receive it when available.
About the speaker:
Andre Kobayashi Deckrow is a Post-Doctoral Associate in the Heritage Studies and Public History program and the Department of History at the University of Minnesota. He received his Ph.D. from the History-East Asia program at Columbia University. A historian of global migration, his current book project examines Japanese state-sponsored migration to Brazil in the early twentieth century. He is interested in questions of colonialism, national identity, and legal regimes of citizenship. He has also contributed to public history projects in the Twin Cities and Southern California that examine local migration history in global contexts.