Modernising gender,civilising sex: perverse imaginary in the state feminist politics of Liu Yu‐hsiu

Abstract

The gender sexual politics of Liu Yu‐hsiu has been pivotal in the hegemonic ascendancy of Taiwan state feminism in recent years. Through an examination of Liu’s psychoanalytically mediated essays of cultural criticism, this article traces the contour of Liu’s sexual imaginary within the context of 1990s feminist and queer politics. Liu’s modernising project of gender equality, I argue, upholds heterosexual monogamy as a feminist ideal that seeks to purge all the masculine ills, including perversion and promiscuity. Meanwhile, queers and prostitutes come to be figured as the very negativity that must be repressed. Yet, like the Lacanian Real, they impinge on the symbolic order that Liu ordains as they thwart her desire to civilise sex.     

Under the gaze of the state: policing literature and the case of Taslima Nasrin

Abstract

This article situates Taslima Nasrin, the controversial writer from Bangladesh, in a particular political and religious moment in the history of Bangladesh, to analyse the difficult relationship the postcolonial state shares with a writer whose work deliberately unsettles the issues of minority and of women and/in religion. The complex mosaic of Nasrin’s work, comprising as varied genres as newspaper columns, poetry and popular novels, has engendered, in the last ten years, unprecedented responses both for and against her writing. This has brought the issue of literature and its uneasy negotiation with state politics to the forefront of national debate. Despised by Islamists and fundamentalists, equally loved and loathed by the reading public, considered with caution by secular intelligentsia and fellow feminists, and ultimately banned by the state, Nasrin is a unique case in point. Her work, written under the gaze of the state defying the fundamentalist fatwa demanding her death, hence invites discussions on state censorship invoked using religious sensibility as a marker of literary judgement and the associated perils of women writing on women in a postcolony like Bangladesh.     

A national culture for Pakistan: the political economy of a debate

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between (national) culture and state formation, arguing that the former is effectively a field of contestation where struggles over hegemony between various classes and social blocs are played out. Cultural nationalism has been the pre‐eminent form of nationalism in the twentieth century, particularly within the anti‐colonial and postcolonial contexts. Since this form of nationalism lends itself to moral regulation by ruling classes in a way that civic or political nationalisms do not (given its ability to produce and manipulate emotional affect) it becomes imperative to understand its relationship to power and to the project/process of state formation. This paper uses the case of postcolonial Pakistan as a lens through which to explore and analyse the complexities of this relationship during the early years of the Pakistani nation‐state. Using primary material – Constituent Assembly Debates and the texts of important intellectual debates on culture during this period – I show the different ways in which Pakistani culture was defined at this time, the politics and interests behind these various articulations, and their ultimate impact on state formation.     

Discourse on guomin (‘the citizen’) in late Qing China, 1895∼1911 1

Abstract

The term guomin is found in Chinese texts from an early period. However, as commonly used today – as a modern political concept of special value and significance – guomin belongs to a political vocabulary adopted by Chinese intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from Japan’s new usages. The goal of this essay is to explain how this important concept was formed and what it signified. The term guomin has basically conveyed two levels of meaning since the late Qing. In essence, the term is similar to the English word ‘citizenship’, and it reveals a kind of awakening of a new political consciousness on the part of Chinese intellectuals since the late Qing. Through the discourse of guomin, they began to emphasize the subjectivity of each individual in the national political process, along with all of their rights and duties. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the criticisms and reflections of Chinese intellectuals about traditional politics, society and culture, and thought have basically developed along the lines of the logic of ‘turning subjects into citizens’. However, the pursuit of a strong nation‐state under a civil crisis sparked by foreign pressure marked the historical conditions that generated the modern Chinese guomin discourse. Limited by this kind of ‘national identity,’ the discourse and construction of guomin since the late Qing have never been able to escape the shadow of the state. Under these ideological conditions, guomin could only become a means of the nationalist project for survival; it could never become an autonomous and universal category. Guomin, as it turns out, has been, and still remains, ‘the people of the state’.     

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.     

The Affair of the Plan De L'Olivier

ABSTRACT

In France, the Revolution of 1848 reshaped politics as it drew heretofore excluded groups into politics. In Montpellier, these changes provoked contests over the place of new citizens in the body politic and urban space. In August 1848 tensions reached their zenith as royalist residents of a lower-class neighbourhood clashed with the forces of order. Moreover, they defended their neighbourhood from intrusions on the part of their political opponents. Not only did these struggles concern the issue of command over space, but they also showed that the purportedly uncouth men intended to take part in the formulation of politics too.     

Dancing from Past to Present: Nation,Culture, Identities. Edited by Theresa Jill Buckland

ABSTRACT

The rise of smuggling in eastern Ghana is directly related to the establishment of the colonial state. Elderly Ghanaians discuss gin smuggling in the context of a colonial state which tried to curb it, but also emphasize the authority of chiefs and elders who encouraged it. Based on a combination of interviews and archival research, this article first examines the uses of imported gin and suggests why it became one of the most important smuggled goods. There follows an in-depth look at the organization of the smuggling enterprises, and an exploration of how smugglers managed their dealings with the colonial state as well as local society. The complex and changing relations between African smugglers, traditional chiefs, local communities and the colonial state illustrate the irrelevance of the colonial state in the moral picture, and also how the gin smugglers' engagement with the wider world was shaped by an utterly local perspective.     

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.     

Distinctive Citizenship

ABSTRACT

The refugee, in India's Partition history, appears as an enigmatic construct – part pitiful, part heroic, though mostly shorn of agency – representing the surface of the human tragedy of Partition. Yet this archetype masks the undercurrent of social distinctions that produced hierarchies of post-colonial citizenship within the mass of refugees. The core principle of the official resettlement policy was self-rehabilitation, that is, the ability to become a productive citizen of the new nation state without state intervention. Thus, the onus of performing a successful transition – from refugee to citizen – lay on the resourcefulness of the refugees rather than the state. This article traces the differing historical trajectories followed by ‘state-dependent’ and ‘self-reliant’ refugees in the making of modern citizenry in post-colonial India.     

Political aesthetics: activism,everyday life,and art’s object in 1960s’ Japan

Abstract

Around 1960, revolutionary forms of activism and critique emerged to challenge administrative forms of politics and daily life. In Japan, despite massive strikes and widespread protest, the ruling party used a Diet majority and riot police to renew the USA–Japan Security Treaty. After this display of force, this party’s new administration sought a new legitimacy, and a means to assuage and co‐opt the defeated opposition, through promoting a depoliticized everyday world of high growth and consumption, and a dehistoricized national image in preparation for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Among those activists who emerged to contest this new cultural politics, a diverse group of young artists worked to repoliticize daily life through an interventionist art practice. Their practices arose out of a particular local, playful art practice, whose focus on the material debris and spaces of the economic expansion led to an engagement with the transformations of daily life. Focusing on the art practices connected with the yearly exhibition, the Yomiuri Indépendant, I examine the advent of a critical art examining the everyday world of Japan in the late 1950s and early 1960s, reflecting on its complex relation with an internationalized art world and domestic art scene, mass culture, and domestic protest movements. Examining the history of this art illuminates the state’s investments in a normative cultural order, and a particular configuration of the politics of culture in the early 1960s.     

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.     

How to translate ‘Cultural Revolution’

Abstract

In the Chinese Cultural Revolution – the epicenter of the last great political sequence at worldwide level in the 1960s and 1970s – the flashing of unprecedented possibilities of post‐party politics was entangled with the epochal closure of a network of political culture. The Cultural Revolution proves to be extremely refractory to historical investigation because it undoes the established conceptual bridges between history and politics, bridges that all other social sciences crossed for studying politics. Therefore, new theoretical perspectives and new protocols of investigation are required, and not only for those events, but in the last analysis for the study of all political situations. The author discusses three main points for finding a new perspective. First, a basic distinction should be stressed between the intermittent nature of politics – one of the rarest modes of subjectivity, which exist only in singular intellectually inventive sequences – and the structural invariance of the state, despite the incessant historical mutations of its particular forms. Moreover, the relationships between the present state of depoliticization and the previous political situations deserve close analysis. The hypothesis is that the concrete form of the state in a given moment is the hollow imprint of the last great political sequence, or that it is shaped by a reactive de‐politicization. Finally, the declarations and the related behaviors of the actors during the events are the major analytical elements in the study of politics. However, the Cultural Revolution was marked to an unprecedented degree by increasing dissonances and, finally, irremediable ruptures between the processes created by the subjective declarations and the same network of political culture within which they were formulated.     

Just‐Do‐It‐(Yourself): independent filmmaking in Malaysia

Abstract

This paper pursues the genealogies of mi-yi (secret doctors) as a threshold figure to attend to the questions of state-mediated governance and knowledge power concerning medical modernity in postwar Taiwan. To consider the mi-yi figure as symptomatic of Taiwan's medical modernity, I inquire into the question of how the scientific discourse of modernity as purported by the class of medical professionals converges with state power to discipline and regulate medical subjects and practices vis-à-vis the discourse of mi-yi. To this end, I analyze the anti-mi-yi discourse that emerged since the 1950s to discuss how the modern medical profession employed a language of science, rationality, and security that initiated an extended state surveillance of unregulated medical subjects and practices. The second part of the essay reads Chen Yingzhen's novella, Zhao Nandong as part of Taiwan's medical “archives” to explore the politics of embodied medical labor as a situated instance of the contradictions of medical modernity. I situate the literary imagination of Zhao Nandong in the social context of mi-yi discourse to frame the erased labor and violence, the ways in which the histories of these labors have been doubly obscured by the conflation of nationalistic historiography and positivist knowledge production of sociological categorizations of Taiwan's modernity.     

Gender and everyday evasions: moving with Cantopop 1

Abstract

In this paper, gender negotiations in the production, musical forms, and consumption of Cantopop are taken as a cultural exemplar for a social and political imagination of ambivalence, which seems to be shaping popular life in Hong Kong. It has three focal points – musical forms and expressions of Cantopop (style, lyrics, iconography, affect), gender politics, and ‘everyday‐ness’ – which converge to mark a notable cultural logic performing an enlarging sense of ambivalence about a city that has seen a shift from high moments of economic prosperity to the current postcolonial uncertainties. In other words, Cantopop signals a shift in our sensibilities, a redrawing of our affective map of everyday life after an important historical and politico‐administrative shift. In a sense then, this paper explores Hong Kong's changing identity within the sight and sound of popular culture, by specifically tracing some of the ways in which gender politics is inscribed, coded, negotiated, performed, or simply flirtingly posed on the surface of popular culture.     

A true original

Abstract

This study analyzes Japanese and Korean ethno-national (minzoku-kokumin) education in postwar Japan. During a period of political unrest in Japan (1945–1955), some of the Korean residents and Japanese worked together to overcome the culture of Imperial Japan and its assimilative education. They also regarded themselves as people colonized by the United States, and pursued a political-cultural movement for their liberation and independence from American imperialism. The Koreans in Japan rejected compulsory education in the Japanese language. As a result, since 1956, Korean schools (Chōsengakkō), funded and supported by North Korea, were founded all across Japan. Their ethno-national education was in fact incorporated into North Korean politics, and has been considered in many studies as having overcome Japanese assimilation and ethnic inequalities. Such a view was a result of many academic Zainichi Korean studies that come from an “insider's perspective” to criticize Japanese colonialism and discrimination. In order to go beyond this insider's view, I focus on the political alliance between Zainichi Koreans and the Japanese people in their pursuit of ethno-national education. Since 2010, the Japanese state funding for Korean schools has become a major controversy in Japan. By tracing the historical background, this article intends to explain why this political issue has arisen. The ultimate purpose of this article is to suggest an ethical perspective to resolve the current political conflict regarding Korean schools in Japan.     

Thai democracy and the October (1973–1976) events

Abstract

Thai Democracy: Three Decades After October 14 (in Thai) edited by historian Charnvit Kasetsiri (2003 Charnvit, Kasetsiri, ed. 2003. Thai Democracy: Three Decades After October 14 (Sam Thotsawat 14 Tula kab Prachatipatai), Bangkok: Foundation for the Promotion of Social Science and Humanities Textbooks Project. (In Thai.). Public Lectures Open University Series, [Google Scholar]) offers an entrée into understanding how Thailand’s 1970s social movements and state violence register in current politics and Thai historiography. The anthology was put together to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the October 14, 1973 uprising, which led to the temporary exile of the past military regime. The contributors are varied across the academic disciplines, with speeches and newspaper articles by public intellectuals, politicians, and poet/writers. Those in Thai and Southeast Asian Studies will find this an invaluable resource. For those who do not read Thai, the VCD provides two English subtitled documentaries produced by Charnvit Kasetsiri. One features the historical events and the other is a walking tour of the numerous landmarks of the October 14, 1973 uprising.     

Screen violence and partition

ABSTRACT

Recent film and television treatment of South Asia from UK producers have introduced new angles on the violent politics of colonial past, whether this be the activities of the East India Company in the early days of Empire, or about Partition, at the ostensible Raj’s end. The controversy over Gurinder Chadha’s 2017 film Viceroy’s House is taken as an opportunity to consider the new South Asian film and television studies and the emergent scholars that are challenging conventional media studies models. The co-constitution of here and there is given as an analytic lens through which to comprehend representation and stereotyping in films “about” politics in South Asia, and the view taken is that a debilitating divide and rule, via mechanisms of representation, remains strongly in place, despite the fighting efforts of the new South Asian media scholarship.     

‘The Most Respectable Looking of Revolutionaries’

Abstract

New political histories of late nineteenth-century British political culture have closely analysed the role of language and rhetoric in popular politics. The focus on the content of political messages has meant that the ways such messages were communicated has often been overlooked, as have the varied forms of political communication in the period. This article follows on from recent work that has sought to examine the place of material and visual culture in popular politics in the period. In particular, it focuses on the links between dress, class and politics. It suggests that visual, along with material, forms of political communication remained important and that they illuminate the political culture of the period.     

The Politics of Preference

ABSTRACT

This article explores relationships between masculinity and welfare in post-First World War Britain through an analysis of unemployment relief. While their service to the nation entitled them to government benefits, veterans of the First World War fit into a context of already-existing unemployment relief schemes and already-established assumptions about who was deserving of state assistance, which privileged married men with children. The politics of preference surrounding unemployment relief reveal competing principles of deservedness connected to different models of masculinity, the breadwinner and the soldier, the married man and the single man. There was general agreement that ex-servicemen had a significant call on the state's resources, but manhood above all meant the ability to provide for wives and children, which resulted in the marginalization of the claims of single men and the endangering of the principle of universal entitlement for ex-soldiers.     

Mapping transnationality and flexible citizenship in Ha Jin’s The Boat Rocker

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the issues of identity crises caused by transcultural exchange, the political unconscious of the rise of China, and the cultural politics of transnationality in Ha Jin’s The Boat Rocker. The Boat Rocker is a novel which reveals the betrayal, displacement, and conspiracy lurking behind such concepts as national loyalty, trust in traditional values, and identification with one’s roots. The Boat Rocker is also a timely reflection of the momentous election year of 2016 in which it was written, addressing fears of foreign-sponsored sedition, propaganda and the manipulation of media, the malleability of public opinion, the unholy alliance between the U.S. and Chinese state governance, and the post 9/11 political environment which led the U.S. to that point. The novel takes the form of a self-reflexive dialogue in which China sees itself reflected in America and America in China. In the process of exchanging languages and culture, the Chinese characters adapt to the American way of life, producing a unique form of Americanness with special Chinese characteristics.