PMJS Publication Announcement: June 2026 (and survey)
Abigail MacBain
Dear colleagues,
As a reminder, I am seeking community feedback on the publications and submission and announcement processes. If you have any thoughts, feelings, or recommendations about the monthly publications announcement, please fill out this simple survey: https://forms.gle/JGrHSXAJA3hbDbug7. It’s just 2 questions (and the option to add in your name/email address if you’re open to being contacted for additional information on your answers). I will keep the survey open until the end of June.
Thank you!
And now, below is our monthly bulletin compiling information on publications by and recommendations from PMJS members. All details below were submitted through the PMJS Publication Announcements online form.
Publication type: Book
Title: A Hardening Hierarchy: The Japanese in the Global Formation of Racial Ideologies, 1735-1854
Author: Rotem Kowner
Affiliation: University of Haifa, Professor
Summary: Between 1735 and 1854, racial perceptions of the Japanese in the West and Japan developed along increasingly divergent trajectories. As Western powers industrialized, expanded overseas, and embraced “scientific” racism, Japan remained populous, militarily formidable, and poorly understood. In A Hardening Hierarchy, Rotem Kowner examines how modern racial theory, visual representation, and emerging Japanese proto-racial discourse shaped views of the Japanese. He shows that Western observers increasingly placed Japan within immutable racial hierarchies, while Japanese voices often asserted their own superiority in response. Through textual and visual analysis, the book traces the formation of these competing ideologies and links early representations of the Japanese to the harsher racial discourses and conflicts of the modern era.
Release Date: July 21, 2026
Website: https://www.mqup.ca/Books/A/A-Hardening-Hierarchy2
Contact: kow...@research.haifa.ac.il
Publication type: Article
Title: Epistolary endurance: The ‘grammar of separation’ in seventeenth-century letters by Japanese-born Christian women in Batavia
Author: Ming Gao
Affiliation: Lund University, Sweden, Researcher
Citation: Ming Gao. “Epistolary Endurance: The ‘Grammar of Separation’ in Seventeenth-Century Letters by Japanese-Born Christian Women in Batavia.” Journal of Global History, 2026, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022826100515.
Summary: This article examines a corpus of seventeenth-century letters written by Japanese-born Christian women exiled to Batavia following Tokugawa Japan’s anti-Christian measures of the late 1630s. Known as jagatara-bumi (Jakarta letters), these texts were produced under conditions of enforced separation, delayed communication, and close surveillance, circulating through Dutch, Chinese, and Nagasaki intermediaries. Situating them within the contexts of Tokugawa persecution, transregional communicative regimes, and early modern epistolary cultures, the article argues that letter-writing functioned as a form of epistolary endurance: a practice of sustaining relational presence across distance and faced with uncertainty. It develops the concept of a ‘grammar of separation’ to describe the historically situated, patterned ways in which rupture was articulated and managed in exile. Rather than reading these letters as transparent records, it treats them as structured practices shaped by convention, constraint, and hybrid religious vocabularies, analysed across emotional, textual, social, and spiritual registers.
Release Date: 21 May 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022826100515
Contact: Ming Gao, drg...@gmail.com
To recommend a title for next month’s announcement, please fill out the online form. Submissions can be submitted by authors themselves or by PMJS members who are eager to share other scholars’ recent publications.
And please take a moment to fill out the survey if you have anything to share on the submission form or announcement email: https://forms.gle/JGrHSXAJA3hbDbug7
For any questions or comments on the submission format, please contact Abigail MacBain (abigail...@ed.ac.uk). Note: Please do not email requesting a publication to be posted; only those submitted through the above form will be listed.