Cyborg Nation, Global War: Machine and Body in Records of the Japanese Army’s Atrocities (1938)

This article focuses on the paradoxical nature of the nexus of humans and machines in the photobook Records of the Japanese Army’s Atrocities, published by the Republican Chinese Nationalist government’s Political Department of the Military Commission in WWII. Though published without any artist credit, this book was edited by a group of displaced artists and writers spearheaded by modern Chinese painter and designer Ye Qianyu (1907-1995). My research critically intervenes in existing debates on atrocity photography by shifting focus to the photobook’s affective materiality, transnational readership, and the overlooked artist-editor’s hand. It examines the ways in which antifascism war propaganda visualizes the binary between fascist war machines and the victimized body while embracing the machine-aesthetic book design and technological augmentation of Chinese people as affective means of prophesying a cyborg nation modernized by the global war. Based on original archival research, this paper sheds light on the historical, epistemological, and
affective situatedness of the transcultural entanglement in the understudied Asian-Pacific WWII experience.