Muhammad, Mesopotamia, and the Making of a Pan-Asian Civilization in Imperial Japan: A Talk by Mikiya Koyagi

in discussion with Renée Worringer

SFU Downtown Campus | Harbour Centre | Room 7000
October 17 | 5:30 PM

Description:

Until the second half of the nineteenth century, nobody considered themselves “Asian.” By the turn of the twentieth century, however, this situation had changed drastically, as nationalists from Japan, China, India, Iran, and the Ottoman Empire called for solidarity among Asian peoples. Through the case of Japan, this talk traces how Asia, an external label imposed by Europeans, was reappropriated as a self-referential term among Asians. In particular, I will examine a geographical imaginary that conceptualized Asia as a contiguous civilizational space that stretched from Japan to the Middle East. In their attempt to identify Asia’s civilizational essence, Japanese proponents of this imaginary mobilized globally circulating ideas of race, religion, and civilization. These ideas shaped how they imagined Prophet Muhammad and ancient Mesopotamian civilization as key pieces of evidence that demonstrated Japan’s spiritual and racial sameness with the Middle East.

About the Author

Mikiya Koyagi is a historian of the modern Middle East, with an emphasis on the social and cultural history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Iran. His first book, Iran in Motion: Mobility, Space, and the Trans-Iranian Railway (Stanford: Stanford University Press, April 2021), examines how a state infrastructural project in early twentieth-century Iran redirected provincial, national, and transnational flows of goods, people, and ideas and produced the national space of Iran. The book has received the 2023 Japan Consortium for Area Studies Book Award (Tōryū shō), the 2022 Saidi-Sirjani Book Award, and Honorable Mention from the Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies Book Award and has been translated into Persian as Iran dar Harakat: Jabeja’i, Faza, va Rah Ahan-e Sarasari-ye Iran (Tehran: Shirazeh, 2022). He has also published articles on the history of borderlands, travel, infrastructure, gender, and education in journals such as The International Journal of Middle East Studies, Modern Asian Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Iranian Studies, The Journal of World History and The International Journal of the History of Sport. He is currently working on two book projects. The first project examines the history of intra-Asian connections since the nineteenth century, with a focus on the interactions between Japan and the Muslim world. The second project is a history of the Indo-Afghan-Iranian borderlands since the nineteenth century. Before joining UT Austin in 2018, he taught at New York University.

About the Discussant

Renée Worringer is a Professor of History at the University of Guelph.

This event was cosponsored by SFU’s Global Asia Program and the David Lam Centre.