I am a Westerner teaching a stage 2 course on East Asia IR to Westerners – at first one assumes no positionality problems. It is interesting to see the students feeling they are being positively educated on some of the key historical controversies, by taking a critical approach (usually the default position is “Japanese people don’t learn about WWII” at worst, or at best “Japanese have not admitted war responsibility”.) All well and good – until they find out I have a Japanese spouse – at which point I become in their eyes a Japan “maniac”.

On the one hand it seems to give me more ‘authority’ on “Japan” in isolation- “you lived there, speak the language and have lived like the Japanese do(sic)” but on the other it seems to pull into question my objectivity on some of the cross-cultural and historical issues. Which is funny because I was more a “China” maniac until I actually went to Japan

If you do it right, though, you lay the foundation for a real shift in historical consciousness: just getting students to stop thinking in terms of eternal essences, timeless traditions, half-baked stereotypes, is a moral and intellectual victory.

I’m about to do my WWII War Crimes/Crimes Against Humanity lecture in the World Survey — nobody comes out all that well, obviously — and I’ve often wondered how I would handle a serious epistemological/positional challenge. These kids (showing my age, I know!) have been brought up on a kind of lumpen-postmodernism in which scholarly works are “novels” and there’s always “two sides” to a debate; the only way I know to combat that is to distinguish between facts and interpretations, to explain how one interpretation gets chosen over others. I still don’t know how I would deal with a hard-core challenge: I had a moon-landing “skeptic” in a class a few years ago, and we actually talked about why I don’t find that position credible, why “beyond a reasonable doubt” isn’t a valid historical epistemology. That was relatively harmless: there’s a fair population around here, I’m told by people who teach in the public schools, that has doubts about the Holocaust, but I’ve got a spiel for that, if I need it. But being Jewish makes my positionality on that question suspect, so there are always going to be some who won’t take it seriously no matter how right it is.