The ‘truth politics’ of anti‐North Koreanism: the post‐ideological cultural representation of North Korea and the cultural criticisms of Korean nationalism

Abstract

This essay questions the ‘truth politics’ of anti‐North Koreanism in which a ‘genuine’ figuration of North Korea is presumed to be achievable at the popular level. I define the truth politics of anti‐North Koreanism as the political‐cultural discursive formation obscuring the ideological powerfulness of anti‐North Koreanism that hinges on ‘the normality of nationalism’. The truth politics reinscribes and reinforces the populist and functionalist belief in national unification that justifies developmentalist agendas for North Korea. As an alternative, I discuss the post‐colonial cultural criticism that calls into question the identity politics of popular nationalism, which implicitly performs along the lines of the Sunshine Policy guidelines to naturalize the normality of nationalism under economic developmentalism. The questionable formation of nationalism prevents South Koreans from gaining self‐reflexive access to the way in which heterogeneous tropes of the nation rupturing in the discursive practice of popular nationalism are exploited. But I also critically interrogate the analytical framework presumed within the criticism, because it constrains its own scope and abilities of questioning the truth politics of anti‐North Koreanism the criticism ostensibly targets.     

My Wild Lily: a self‐criticism from a participant in the March 1990 student movement 1

Abstract

The ‘Wild Lily’ student sit‐in in March 1990 was often praised in the later political transformation process as a crucial moment when the ‘pure and innocent’ students facilitated democratization in Taiwan. From the perspective of a participant in the protest, the author argues that the sit‐in was actually a failure of the ‘popular democratic’ wing of Taiwan's student movement in the 1980s, which championed a more radical vision of democracy. The idea of ‘popular democracy’ was an anti‐elitist ideology arising from critiques on the elite‐led political reform movement. However, due to its historical constraint, practices along this line were unable to alter the bourgeois democratic character of 1980s' democratization process in Taiwan.     

Rethinking the Rural Idyll

ABSTRACT

This article traces the profound social repercussions that resulted from the mass enlistment of British office workers into the armed forces during the First World War. Drawing heavily upon fictionalized autobiographies of the period, my study examines the various stages of the clerk's experience of the conflict and argues that the confidence gained during warfare by surviving office workers fundamentally shaped a more democratic postwar society. This change is evidenced, I argue, in the profile of the fictional clerk that emerges in British literature after 1918.     

Doing a literary journal in a divided country: Changbi,its history and projects

Abstract

This paper tells a story about miscegenation between US military personnel and Okinawan women from 1945–1952, which includes sexual violence, the establishment of ‘entertainment districts,’ and the emergence of international marriage. Whereas this history has been mobilized by leftists as a truth‐weapon in the struggle for political sovereignty from the US military, this paper takes an explicitly genealogical approach. Drawing on Foucault's work on biopower, this paper shows how Okinawans were transformed into ‘petitioning subject’ – subjects that negotiated the sexual exploitation of their bodies in tandem with the radically changing relationship between their bodies and the territory.     

In the ruins of truth: the work of melancholia and acts of memory

Abstract

This paper seeks to problematize and render inadequate the ‘truth’ of Truth Commissions, which have proliferated globally. It does so by questioning the relationship of ‘truth’ to ‘testimony’ by offering a critical account of their relationship to ‘trauma,’ on the one hand and by questioning the location of ‘testimony’ in relation to ‘resistance,’ on the other hand. Moving away from this ‘psycologistic register,’ the paper rehearses a re‐reading of Freud, which attempts to question the sharp distinction between mourning and melancholia, in his 1917 essay. Given this, a complex, psychoanalytic subject is constructed, whose psychic and social ‘work of melancholia,’ and ‘acts of memory,’ cannot be straightforwardly rendered in testimony or recollection, and is unavailable for nationalist appropriation. Empirical material is drawn from field work in Eastern Sri Lanka, on the after life multiple massacres that took place in the early 1990s, and is juxtaposed with Commissions of Inquiry into these events in the late 1990s.     

Knots in the Fourth Dimension

ABSTRACT

The article analyses a debate that preoccupied the Russian press in the winter of 1878/9. Writers, journalists and scientists discussed whether mathematics could explain spiritualist séance phenomena. At its core, this was an assessment of social change and a debate about the ambiguity of modern life. While spiritualists hoped to bridge the divide between science and religion, subjectivity and objectivity, their opponents feared that séance phenomena and modern mathematics undermined a rationalist world-view that was endowed with reliability and universal truth. That no agreement could be reached indicates that the post-reform public sphere had become truly pluralist and modern.     

Royalty,Romance and Recreation

ABSTRACT

This article examines the growth of ‘heritage tourism’ by looking at three royal palaces: the Tower of London, Windsor Castle and Hampton Court, each of which underwent a process of textual and architectural reconstruction during the nineteenth century which repositioned them both historically and culturally. It is argued that visitor responses to these sites were rarely, if ever, inspired by nationalism or royalism; more to the fore were Gothic and romantic sensibilities, popular conceptions of the past which were often democratic and self-improving, and the time-honoured practices of popular pleasure.     

Responding to Hong Kong’s political crisis: moralist activism amongst youth

ABSTRACT

Discourses of morality are prevalent in contemporary Hong Kong youth activism. This paper suggests that this moralist disposition is the product of youth frustrations towards Hong Kong’s political crisis, whereby the power gap between civil society and the government renders the former incapable of exerting substantial influence over the governance of the city. Rather than ascribe the cause of this power imbalance solely to government policies, this paper reveals that civil society also contributed towards the making of this political crisis. By reviewing the citizen-led pro-democracy movement throughout the decades, it is shown that civil society has been ineffective in implementing political reforms because its actors and organisations harbour a political subjectivity that prioritises economic considerations over democratic aspirations, and are thus inclined to compromise with the government to preserve economic stability than to demand for political reforms. As a result, contemporary youth activists describe Hong Kong civil society as “uncaring” and lacking in moral commitment towards realising democratic reforms that will facilitate the development of a just society. Seeking to reconfigure such political attitudes that currently prevail in civil society, youth activists refashion themselves into political actors embodying a form of moral personhood that embraces notions of responsibility and of wanting to do good for the city, to show that another way of being politically engaged in Hong Kong is possible.     

J.B. Priestley,the ‘Modern’ and America

ABSTRACT

J.B. Priestley has often been seen as representative of a nostalgic Englishness which rejected the modern world and, in the process, embraced anti-Americanism. However, as this article suggests, Priestley had a more complicated relationship with both America and modernity than has been accepted. Focusing on the 1930s, it shows how Priestley travelled widely in the United States and came to admire the democratic and collective aspects of American culture, whilst also developing a critique of what he saw as the lack of individuality and creativity in other elements of the ‘mass' society, anticipating arguments he would develop after 1945.     

‘Second death’, or revival of the ‘third world’ in the context of neo‐liberal globalization

Abstract

This paper tries to analyze the historical change in the Third World in its emergent stage, in the authoritarian stage and in the current democratic stage and, thereafter, find a way to revive the Bandung spirit in the current globalization context. I define the Bandung spirit as one of a ‘non‐aligned self‐helped “organization against” the dominant powerful countries’; that is, spirit of ‘anti‐predominance’. This spirit has emerged on the base of such domestic orientation and realities as economic self‐reliance, nationally integrated political regime, convergence of the state and civil society around anti‐colonialism. However, according to intensification of the Cold War confrontation on the international level and its centrifugal influence, the early Third World changed to a ‘new’ authoritarian Third World. The Third World in this stage could be characterized by an exclusive authoritarian political regime, dependent‐developmentalist economic orientation and coercively repressed and mobilized, in the top‐down way, civil society. This authoritarian Third World began to be confronted with a strong struggle from the bottom for democratization. In order for democratization of the Third World to become its true revival in the context of globalization, the following tasks should be considered. First, the democratic Third World should be a great driving force for the institutionalization of the transnational public regulatory mechanism. Second, the democratic Third World countries try to go over a kind of ‘transformed’ dependent development strategy. Third, democratization should go along with recovery of political inclusiveness and openness of the state to civil society’s demands. Thereafter, I tried to construct globalist re‐interpretation of the Bandung, by way of conceptualizing the current globalization as imperial globalization, unlike the imperialist globalization which the historical Bandung wanted to confront. I argue that the Bandung spirit of collective self‐help organizations against the newly emerging dominant order should be revived in this worse imperial globalization context. In addition, I argue that a nationalist resistance is also one component of the multiple resistances in the current imperial globalization.     

‘Let the People Sing’: J.B. Priestley and the Significance of Music

Abstract

In a writing life that spanned the 1910 to 1970s, J.B. Priestley engaged with a variety of subjects, across various literary forms, ranging from politics, popular culture and Englishness through to theories of time. However it has rarely been noted that he also wrote passionately and knowledgeably about music, with the latter playing an important role in key novels, plays and nonfiction. Priestley also promoted chamber festivals, wrote the libretto for an opera ‘The Olympians’, and even occasionally performed himself. Priestley’s writings on music fitted into his concerns about the rise of an Americanized mass order, and his mistrust of commericalized musical forms was shared by other critics of the time. However, Priestley’s work is more significant than a binary high/low low cultural validation of classical music/dismissal of more popular musical forms. He was often critical of jazz and ragtime, but more positive about popular music that was produced in, reflected, and empowered the individual and community. Priestley’s writings on music marked a genuine attempt at understanding the role of music in culture, and contributed to his democratic critique of the mass society.     

Is the postwar state melting down?: an East Asian perspective on post-Fukushima Japan

Prime Minister Abe’s return to power in Japan dealt a blow to the anti-nuclear movement and returned the country to broadly pro-nuclear policies. Meanwhile, eight years on, although the effects of the Fukushima disaster are still being felt, Japan’s anti-nuclear movement has struggled to move forward or effect changes in policy. This article argues that prospects for change will not emerge until Japan’s anti-nuclear movement is able to look beyond its national borders and articulate a perspective on nuclear power that takes into account other countries within East Asia. The 3.11 Great East Japan Earthquake revealed heretofore hidden aspects of the Japanese state and society. The truth is that Japan’s postwar state (Sengo-kokka) is actually a nuclear power state (Genpatsu-kokka), a byproduct of the US-Japan alliance under the East Asian Cold War system, which insulated nuclear policy from the standard operation of democratic politics. As a product of the Cold War, the issue of nuclear power and development extends beyond Japan’s national borders and relates to the questions of US superpower sponsorship and the armistice system in East Asia that pertain broadly to the politics of East Asia. It is important to understand that Japan’s nuclear energy is a product of the Cold War in East Asia, and the armistice system that constitutes the international system in East Asia must be discarded if Japan is to become a post-nuclear energy state.     

Almost under the same sky: reclaiming urbanity beyond an epidemic

Abstract

This essay deals with the social and political after‐shock introduced by SARS, which is considered here as both a public health outbreak and an urban cultural crisis. In Hong Kong, several years after the epidemic episode, the people’s voice regarding urban spatial politics, governance, and the media has not only grown louder, but has also been profoundly transformed into collective effervescence. This essay is based on over 50 interviews of ordinary Hong Kong residents from a wide spectrum of demographics. A particular focal point of the interviews was, inevitably, the participants’ reformulation of their identity as a function of urban crisis. Chiefly a documentation of the vernaculars of public criticism offered by the citizens of Hong Kong, this essay relates post‐SARS public sentiments to the (somewhat fiddly) development of democratic ideals that is animating our urban imagination today.     

Confronting dictatorship,democratization, and post‐democratization – personal reflection on intellectual and social practices in the context of dictatorship,democratization and post‐democratization

Abstract

This essay tries to trace the life trajectory of an intellectual, in terms of his intellectual and social practices, who wants to live through modern Korean history via progressive activism. The trajectory can be divided into three different stages: the first comes with the military developmental dictatorship in 1961, ending in 1987. The next is during the democratic transition since the Democratic Uprising in June 1987, which put the Korean society onto the road of democratization. The last one should be the so‐called ‘post‐democratization’ period in which we now find ourselves. This is more a story than an analysis of the progressive intellectual movement in the form of the personal recollections. The story is, however, not just about an individual but it is a window giving a glimpse into the larger trajectory that many progressive intellectuals have gone through, and that directly reflects the huge changes in contemporary history of South Korea, such as the interaction between the domination and social movements.     

An interview with Marie-José Mondzain: what is an image?

ABSTRACT

Marie-Jose Mondzain is one of the major philosophers writing about image, iconography, and representation today. In this interview, she discusses a few of the central ideas in her approach to and thinking about the nature of image and image-making as they bear upon the emergence of subjectivity and visibility in general. According to Mondzain, images are not visual objects we may or may not see; rather they are the site where the visible and its invisibility crisscross each other in opening the field of presence. Images, as Mondzain says in the interview, are cracks or leaks in being. They are where lights first come in and where man and beings are born to each other in their being-in-the world, that is, in their truth. Moving beyond historical and theoretical reflections, Mondzain turns to discuss things and scenes of mass media of late, addressing issues of pleasure, anxiety, desire, and the like, wherein ideologies, power, and the lure of images can be seen to intersect with our everyday life that has become irrevocably one of passive mobility. To the point at every turn, her answers to questions in this interview provide a glimpse to her forceful thinking and insights.     

Narrativizing trauma,activating awareness: Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking and its afterlives

ABSTRACT

When Iris Chang published The Rape of Nanking in 1997, exactly sixty years after the Nanjing Massacre, the subtitle The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, called attention to one of the greatest human tragedies in the twentieth century. As a powerful historic reminder, The Rape of Nanking aims “to understand the event so that lessons can be learned and warnings sounded.” This paper focuses on Chang’s role as a writer/fighter who uses words to fight forgetfulness with a forceful narrative concerning one of the most dreadful traumas in the collective psyche of the Chinese people. It produces quite a number of “afterlives,” including different Chinese translations in Taiwan and mainland China, a nanking winter (2008), a play by the second-generation Chinese Canadian playwright Marjorie Chan, Nanjing Requiem (2011), a novel by the first-generation Chinese American novelist Ha Jin, and The Nanjing Massacre: Poems (2013), a collection of poems by the third-generation Chinese Hawaiian poet Wing Tek Lum. Furthermore, the docudrama Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking (2007), directed by Bill Spahic and Anne Pick, presents a filmic representation of the short fascinating life of this passionate writer. This paper discusses how Chang, role as a writer and activist, fights against amnesia with remembrance as well as her rich legacy to the world across linguistic, generic, and semiotic boundaries. Chang’s text and its afterlives strive to give voice to those nameless war victims as a step towards truth, justice, reconciliation, and peace.     

Is cultural group representation a fair option? Adolescents’ evaluations of forms of decision-making in multicultural Mauritius

Social psychological research on multiculturalism has mostly looked at recognition of differences and much less at equitable participation. The present study investigated adolescents’ fairness judgements of three democratic decision-making procedures (representative democracy, equal group representation, and proportional group representation) and one nondemocratic procedure (cultural group oligarchy) among Hindu (N = 844), Muslim (N = 630) and Creole (N = 310) adolescents in Mauritius. We examined these judgements in two different contexts (i.e. school and national), and in relation to ethnic group identification, age and gender. Results show that representative democracy was viewed as the fairest decision-making procedure and cultural group oligarchy as the most unfair one. The group representation procedures were judged as relatively unfair although there were significant differences by ethnic group, age and gender. Strength of ethnic identification was linked to higher fairness ratings of democratic group representation procedures. The results are discussed in terms of morality, group positions and ideological representations of the Mauritian nation.     

Procedural democracy,participatory democracy and regional networking: the multi‐terrain struggle for democracy in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Southeast Asia experienced rapid economic growth during the 1980s and early 1990s largely because of the emergence of the developmental state, which successfully adapted itself to the thrust of neo‐liberal globalization by adopting economic liberalization, deregulation and privatization policies. However, the role of the developmental state was attacked and rolled back in the wake of the 1997–1998 regional financial crisis. Meanwhile, as a result of growth prior to the financial meltdown, a considerable political ferment occurred due to the consolidation of the middle‐classes. Consequently, in spite of state curbs and controls, democratic politics had (re)emerged prior to, as well as following, the 1997–1998 crisis. This article traces the rise and evolution of the NGOs and consolidation of civil society in four Southeast Asian countries, namely, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. Central to the discussion is the extent to which the civil society organizations promoted a deepening of democracy and more equitable development. The analysis distinguishes between procedural democracy, perhaps best characterized by electoralism, and participatory democracy, which stresses that the everyday rights, interests, perspectives and involvement of civil society at large must be taken into consideration by the powers‐that‐be, in between elections. Although much progress has occurred in the realm of procedural democracy, that democratization is not meaningful if it is not accompanied by participatory democracy. A final section investigates how NGOs in Southeast Asia and beyond have been networking with one another transnationally, in order to further that democratization. Put simply, the struggle for democratization especially in this era of globalism, also characterized by US unilateralism and Bush’s war against terrorism, must be multi‐terrain and regional in scope.     

An alternative route towards socialization of democracy in Asia: review of Liberalism Disavowed: Communitarianism and State Capitalism in Singapore by Chua Beng Huat

The contribution of Chua’s Liberalism Disavowed is very large in that it shows how the hegemony of the PAP is working and resisting liberalism, especially in the everyday world of Singaporeans. It re-interprets the origin of public support for the PAP by focusing on its embedded social democratic origin. However, we differ with Chua because we think that the PAP interpreted liberalism very narrowly and rejected it. The strong state, which overwhelms civil society, emerged, interpreting democracy centered on outputs such as stability of economy or higher standard of people’s livelihood rather than inputs such as civic participation or interaction of diverse civil society actors, and openness of the state bureaucracy to civil society. Singapore has sacrificed freedom for political unity. We derive our opinion from of the need to integrate democracy and the social and co-evolution of freedom and equality. We believe that alternative democratic models should be based on the socialization, rather than the nationalization of politics.     

British Satire in The Thick of It

This article intervenes in ongoing debates around the democratic potential of new television satire through an analysis of the content and reception of The Thick of It (TTOI). TTOI is popular not only with a notoriously cynical British public, but even more so with the politicians and journalists that are the target of its ridicule. TTOI’s politics are relatively radical, portraying the news media and politicians as forming a social apparatus which is rotten to the core, and thereby offering a challenge to liberal democracy itself. It is deeply ironic, then, that the show has been incorporated by this very apparatus. What does it mean for the show to be adopted so enthusiastically by the system it so aggressively derides, and what can it tell us about satire’s relationship to cynicism, politics, and democracy?