AHA Session 168
Saturday, January 7, 2023: 10:30 AM-12:00 PM
Regency Ballroom C2 (Loews Philadelphia Hotel, 2nd Foor Mezzanine)
Chair:
Xin Fan, State University of New York at Fredonia
Papers:
Comment:
The Audience
Session Abstract
History textbooks and curriculum are a primary means by which to socialize and educate youth in the history of a nation. History education often functions as a powerful agent of politicalized collective memory through the selection of what is to be remembered and forgotten by members of a political community. This comparative transregional panel discusses how four nations–Japan, China, Taiwan, and Timor-Leste–construct the past and convey historical discourse to students through national education systems during the postwar period in these nations. The first paper by Peter Rothstein argues that while Allied occupation personnel sought to dramatically reform textbook and curriculum production along decentralized lines in order to “demilitarize” Japan and “democratize” history education, on some levels engaging with prewar progressive reformers, shifting priorities in the Occupation and practical concerns led to the retention of many of the central, statist control mechanisms which had existed prior to the war. Focusing on history textbooks in postwar China and Taiwan, Lei Duan’s analysis of the portrayal of wartime history demonstrates the ways in which political and social factors influenced the construction of contested memories after the Chinese Civil War in 1949. Sheena Harris’s thematic analysis examines how the violence of the 1974 Timorese civil war and 1975-1999 Indonesian occupation is represented in current educational materials and how these representations create particular images of Timor-Leste as a nation. Her analysis of these textbooks demonstrates the tension between two common historical narratives–one of a heroic independence movement and the other of victims’ suffering. Taken together, these three papers grapple with the difficulties of educational and textbook reform in Japan, China, Taiwan, and Timor-Leste providing new perspectives on teaching and learning contested national histories during the postwar periods.
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