Eri Kitada

Centering colonized women, this project examines the under-studied history of Japanese settlements in the American Philippines as a crossroads of the US and Japanese empires. It highlights Japanese relationships with Filipino women to analyze the intertwined nature of US and Japanese imperial formations and the intersection of gender, race, and space in the history of settler colonialism. How did the lives, labors, and intimacies of Japanese settlers and Filipinas interlink the two empires? This innovative work combines multilingual archival research and interviews in the Philippines, Japan, and the United States. To break new ground in literature on gender, empire, and diaspora, it explores how Filipinas embodied the intricate dynamics of mobility and history.