In this presentation, Dr. Ambaras will examine the histories of people who moved,
the relationships they created, and the anxieties they provoked, in the spatial and social
borderlands between Japan and China from the 1860s to the 1940s. Japan's imbrication in new
geopolitical structures and spatial flows engendered forms of intimacy that were seen as
problematic, or even horrific, because they transgressed notions of territory marked by stable,
defensible borders and notions of place marked by distinct identities and social roles. Yet rather
than see those borders and roles as already established and thus violated, Dr. Ambaras uses cases
of transgressive intimacy to highlight the ways in which territoriality and spatial imaginaries were
being articulated in the imperial era. Excavating long-forgotten histories of child trafficking,
marriage migration, and piracy, he argues that mobile subjects in marginal locations not only
destabilized official projects for the regulation of territory and the policing of underworlds, but also stimulated fantasies that opened new spaces for the elaboration of imperial power in its
material and discursive forms. Scaling from the global to the local and corporeal, he emphasizes
that for the people who lived it, the Japanese nation-empire was one of several overlapping spatial
formations that emerged from modern Japan's relations with a region in which the historically
central Chinese presence continued to loom large.
