The Russian Revolution of 1917 raised a profound question: was socialism a means to promote national unity and wealth, or was its goal to achieve global human liberation from both capitalism and imperialism? In imperial Japan, as elsewhere in the non-Western world, the answer was neither obvious nor uni-form. This question, however, was even more complicated…
A poorly designed bottle sits atop a mantelpiece, contents slowly leaking into the surrounding environment. Not toxic, but affective, this bottle contains air collected from the Irish countryside—captured, commodified, and trans-ported across the globe to lonely “expats” separated from families amid the shuttering of global borders in response to the COVID-19 pandem…