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The Sino‐Japanese relationship is a paradox. This healthy economic relationship forms one of the most dynamic partnerships in the global political economy today. Yet, their political relations are cool at best. The chapter considers how these troubles are more symbolic than geopolitical, and argues that they are part of the securitization of Chinese identity where memories of historical trauma are used to generate national community. It analyzes the visual narratives of the “Nanjing massacre” (also known as the Rape of Nanking) in Chinese texts to explore two key issues: (1) the dynamic of Chinese nationalism in Sino‐Japanese relations, and (2) how official history and its visual narratives have reproduced problematic links between women, war, and patriarchal nationalism. While it is necessary to recognize the horror of Japanese atrocities in World War II, this chapter explores the pivotal role that the Nanjing massacre plays in Chinese identity and politics. Rather than just frame the problem as Japanese militarism, the chapter argues that a critical examination of this trauma can help us understand the militarization of Chinese society.

Interracial eating and interracial sex: what joins this provocative pair? If drinking fountains and restrooms might be considered the pillars of the social body, sites of collective eating could be thought of as its metaphoric stomach, an even more fundamental and therefore more highly regulated site of social incorporation. Buttressed against the threat perceived in new waves of immigration during the 1920s, the restaurant wall became a figure of a national frontier, redrawn down the center of the counter when the economic pressures of the 1930s forced the racial barrier to the interior. This structure required photographers to align themselves with one side of the racially marked division or the other. This was an especially vexing dilemma during the Depression, whose widening social rifts bolstered a national faith in photography's inclusive and reparative power. The visual politics of the nation dovetailed with and found an emblematic scenario in the visual politics of segregated eating. The threads of race, gender, and visuality converge—with ironic consequences—in Dorothea Lange's photograph of a Mississippi lunch counter.

Chapter 7 considers how cine users recorded days out, holidays and work-related overseas travel for home and wider audiences. Unprecedented patterns of peacetime recreational travel and personal mobility coincide with the rise and development of amateur cinema. Family picnics, seaside visits and hiking in the 1930s, overseas touring and cruising holidays, package holidays and long-haul travel provided changing contexts for amateur filmmakers. The films are a rich evidential source on tourism and leisure history at home and abroad in their capturing of personal responses to being somewhere else. Places and peoples framed as part of individual travel and holiday narratives disclose attitudes, assumptions, prejudices and preferences, gender roles, relationships and patterns of authority. Some people filmed for family reasons while others undertook journeys and filmed with educational and fund-raising purposes in mind. Ethnographic approaches and careful editing contrast with the unedited spontaneous snapshot visual diary approaches of other camera users. Undoubtedly impressionistic, eclectic and fragmented, much imagery found in travel-related and holiday footage raises issues of modernity and speed, privilege, visual politics, voyeurism, aesthetics and pictorialism and may be set against wider socio-economic, technological, cultural and ideological processes operating from local to global level.

This chapter examines the relation between Cold War metropolitan and peripheral developmentalisms. The peripheral free-world state, the Park Chung Hee regime of the 1960s, asserted a nation/state coincidence that ended up placing it in a continuing state of crisis. The relation between Park's early formulation of South Korean ethnodevelopmentalism and the opposition to the state and the Cold War division system came to the fore during and in the aftermath of one of the most important events in post-1945 South Korean history, the April 19 movement of 1960. In this context, the works of Nam Chŏng-hyŏn (b. 1933) offered a sustained critique not only of the U.S. presence in South Korea but also of domestic authoritarianism and the broader Cold War order. It is in Nam's works, more than those of any other writer in the 1960s, that one can encounter the visual politics of statist development and its contestations.