Journal of Transnational American Studies

Aeriality has emerged as one of the most defining perceptual and cognitive practices of the 20th century. This shift in perspective has changed the way one looks at the Earth, races, and species and their relationships to one another and to the environment. In this essay, I discuss the use of what I have heuristically termed “aerial archives” in teaching about American-occupied Japan (1945–1952). The operational definition of this term refers to texts, literary or otherwise, that operate as archiving systems, representing and relating a shift in the aerial imagination, and the corollary shifting ground it caused in the global imagination.