Frontier in the Far East: George H. Kerr’s historical narrative of the Ryukyu Islands

Abstract

George H. Kerr (1911–1992) is an American historian who authored Ryukyu: Kingdom and Province before 1945 (Kerr 1953a), the sole general history of theislands in English; he was also a Taiwan specialist in the military and government whose book won him the reputation as the ‘father of Taiwanese independence’ (Lu 2006). He rearranged fragmented memory and recorded it in such a way as to justify a separate people, the Ryukyuans or the Taiwanese, from the nation-state to which they may belong—Japan or China—so that the United States could strategically exploit their home islands. While mainly focusing on Kerr in the Ryukyus and unveiling the process of his writing, this paper offers a bridge to Kerr in Taiwan and addresses the question of a common interpretive framework underneath his historical narratives.   Keywords: Cold War, historiography, politics of collective memory, Ryukyu (Okinawa), Taiwan (Formosa)