Gardens in Diplomacy, War, and Peace

Chapter 10 continues the exploration of how visual artifacts can be sensory spaces and infrastructures of feeling that provoke unexpected affective communities of sense. It examines gardens as social constructions of social-ordering and world-ordering that both shape and participate in international politics. It questions how we use peace/war to understand international politics and argues that the “civility/martiality” dynamic is better for grasping such social-ordering and world-ordering performances. It develops civility/martiality to explore the sensible politics of how two key national war memorial sites—China’s Nanjing Massacre Memorial and Japan’s Yasukuni Shrine—work as gardens to perform international politics in unexpected ways. The conclusion considers how civility/martiality is useful for understanding (and feeling) the sensible politics of other key national memorial spaces, such as the National September 11 Museum and Memorial in New York. As with film-making, here garden-building is theory-building: by producing new sites and sensibilities, it creatively shapes our understanding of international politics.