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.     

Reynolds' New Masterpiece

ABSTRACT

Joshua Reynolds' 1775 portrait of Mai [Omai], the first Pacific Islander to visit Britain, has attracted much public attention since 2001, when it sold for a near record-breaking £10.3 million. Omai's recent celebrity is based on the view that it is not only an ‘icon’ of British art but also of crucial significance as a reminder of an enlightened world we have lost. The critical heritage of Reynolds' Omai, however, indicates a rather more complex aesthetic and historical assessment. This article analyses the sources of the disjuncture between past judgements and today's soaring esteem. In doing so, it introduces for comparison another much-neglected Reynolds portrait of a New World traveller, entitled Scyacust Ukah.     

Tales of the Unexpected

ABSTRACT

Microhistorians of all persuasions emphasize the importance of placing small units of research within larger contexts. I have refuted this principle and made an attempt to show its inherent contradictoriness. I encourage historians to cut the umbilical cord that ties them to grand historical narratives through the use of a research model which I call the ‘singularization of history’. In this article I show how the use of the traditional microhistorical methods blinded me in a research project. This blind spot in my research caused a major oversight in my findings – a shocking sequence of events was brought to my attention from an unexpected direction and revealed the weakness in my approach. The article deals with the need to rethink the whole concept of historical research and how the methods of microhistory can play a role there with the aid of what I call the ‘textual environment’.     

Museums and the material assets of dignity and memory: Confronting loss without compensation in Expolio and Francofonia

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the connections between memory and human dignity as it intersects with art and art museums. Two recent examples—the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos 2016 exhibit Expolio, and Alexander Sokurov’s 2015 film-essay, Francofonia—highlight the need for a larger conversation regarding the way accumulation and loss of cultural products uphold or denigrate human dignity, a concept that is not often thought of in relation to the assets of art museums. Using the historical frames set out by these examples, which span from the opening of the Louvre to the plundering of cultural artifacts in Syria, I argue that dignity has always been an asset of museums. It is through the merging of dignity and memory, in the context of art and culture, that the emerging field of human rights museology can begin to speak more broadly to art history and memory studies alike.     

Reclaiming America: the quest for home in Shawn Wong’s Homebase

ABSTRACT

With its dynamic narrative, Shawn Wong's Homebase recounts the story of four generations of a Chinese family searching for a homebase on the land of the United States. Personal experiences, family chronicles, and Chinese American history are portrayed through various forms, including short stories, correspondences, student essays, memories, and dreams. A major theme of the novel is geographically and spiritually “reclaiming America,” or attempts by Chinese Americans to make the United States their “real” home. The protagonist's way to reclaim America involves revisiting landmarks and other places in the United States where his father and grandfather had traveled, through which he tries to discover the meaning of his own life in the United States and thereby to find his personal identity and home in this country. In drawing the topography of Chinese American history, Shawn Wong not only inscribed Chinese American presence on those places where the protagonist's forefathers had lived and worked, but also used legends to implant their heritage into those soils. Shawn Wong hopes that through his writing he can build for Chinese Americans a history, a cultural foundation with myths and legends of their own. Only when a people's myths spread over the land they inhabit can the land truly be considered theirs. The Chinese American identity shaped in Homebase is heroism, rooted in the ethnic identity of the male Chinese American in the American West, and this is the “home” that the protagonist as well as many other Chinese Americans ever quest for.     

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.     

The body that can(not) represent us—Tian Chi-Yuan's White Water and modern Taiwanese theatre

ABSTRACT

The denial of Taiwan's status as a nation by international communities has long-served as a catalyst for Taiwanese theatre practitioners’ pursuit of an expressive body that responds to complex national identities. Taking Taiwanese society as the basis for considering the irreducible complexity of postcolonial struggles vis-à-vis the power relations of neoliberal cultural production, in the theoretical framework of this paper, I propose a biopolitical reading of modern Taiwanese theatre. In particular, to reveal the constructedness of the idea of the body, I foreground the embeddedness of theatre in local society and scrutinize the interplay between an imagined body and the theatre through Taiwanese practitioner Tian Chi-Yuan's (1964–1996) White Water (or Baishui, 1993). Using this work as a case study, I focus on his experiment of intercultural bodily gestures through which the fabrication of national identity is both revealed and questioned. I consider Tian's practice of integrating cultural traditions expressive of the dynamics of decolonization with the experiment in reconfiguring the local body—a practice that positions the theatre in Taiwan as an experimental and cathartic site for pursuing an epistemological change in identity formation. Thus, the theatre constitutes a performance of a necessary identity-burdened space between history and memory, struggling to renew itself in distinctive contexts.     

Inter-referencing Asian Canadian Studies: imagining diasporic possibility outside the (Canadian) nation

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes to use inter-Asian methodologies to reread Asian Canadian Studies. As an intellectual and political project, Asian Canadian Studies has largely been constituted through its responses to the Canadian nation-state and anti-racism alliances but has failed to seriously engage with Asia as a critical problematic. Informed by theories and practices of inter-referencing developed through Inter-Asia critique, we reconsider the specific pressures, local debates, and historical moments that have produced the field's central arguments and reframe the field as a series of localized reference points in dialogue with each other as well as with Asia. We conclude by turning to Madeleine Thien's novel Dogs at the Perimeter in order to ask what it might mean to localize Asian Canadian Studies and reposition it as part of a transpacific rather than nation-based formation.     

Johnnie To's “northern expedition:” from Milkyway Image to Drug War

Abstract

After the Regulations on the Administration of Movies came into force in 2002, Johnnie To became famous for sticking with the Hong Kong market while Hong Kong filmmakers rushed north. In Drug War, his 50th film, he decided to bring his unique genre to the Mainland for the first time. Drug War was the first Johnnie To gangster film to be shot entirely in the Mainland. Despite its outstanding box office record in the Mainland, some Johnnie To fans would lament that his typical style is missing in Drug War, a film that has become “realistic.” This paper argues that Johnnie To's “northern expedition.” backed up by a tradition of translations between business and pleasure, has to be interpreted against the backdrop of his production company Milkyway Image (HK) Ltd. Johnnie To, as a migrant crossing the border, brought with him the long tradition of cultural translations from Milkyway Image, which acted as a “seed of the untranslatable” in Homi Bhabha's term. It was this untranslatability of Milkyway-cum-Hong Kong flavour that distinguished To from other Hong Kong directors who were assimilated into the Mainland market as a simple mélange. To capture the rich inter-textual allusions to not only Milkyway Image but also to Hong Kong in Drug War helps one to understand how Hong Kong cinema can move on in the age of Chinese cinema.     

Photography and Chineseness: reflections on Chinese Muslims in Indonesia

This paper takes my previous photobook, Chinese Muslims in Indonesia (2007–09) as starting point. The paper firstly details the motivations, methodology and findings of the work. It then advances some of my thoughts on photography, with its attentive focus on the particular. Photography, or documenting (as method), frames a performative and experiential space for the sitter and the photographer to project their desires in this collaborative encounter. Here, I discuss the performative in relation both to the issue of reactivity in sociological fieldwork and the cultural turn in dakwah amongst some Chinese Muslim leaders in the post-Suharto era. The subjectivity of each encounter helps to visualise and complicate the notion of Chineseness amongst the Chinese Muslim communities in Indonesia.     

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.     

Looking for other stories: women's writing,Self-Respect movement and the politics of feminist translations

ABSTRACT

The primary purpose of this essay is to survey the recent zombie craze in Northeast Asian films from Japan and South Korea. While the concept of the zombie may have originated in colonial Haiti, with its ghoulish images and supernatural lore, zombies were later imported to North America and reformulated as popular cultural entertainment by Hollywood. They are now flourishing in an East Asian cinematic context preserved in a globalized form. The films under investigation – I Am a Hero and Train to Busan – share similar cultural subtexts despite their incommensurable experiences of global capitalism in Asia and its latest ideological phase, neoliberalism. Both films critique the current neoliberal order and were nurtured by historical traumas experienced by both countries as well as the pandemic spread of viruses, both real and imaginary, that have ravaged the region. Nevertheless, the most prominent issue explored by Japanese and Korean zombie films is the continuity of society and its reproduction: as cultural artifacts of the neoliberal world, these films offer dystopian visions in which exploitation accelerates to such an extent that states cannot protect themselves against the viral and capitalist onslaught.     

Interrogating the Eyewitness

ABSTRACT

Following on from Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing (2001), this article considers again the potential for collaboration between historians and art historians, and presents ‘ten commandments' to be borne in mind by historians who wish to make use of visual materials in their work.     

On memory construction and fictionalization

Abstract

As a response to Ashis Nandy's article about memory work, this article argues that memories are closely linked to recognition, identity and historical construction while closely connected with local discourse based on post-colonial experiences. In some cases, the construction of memory involves mythical images. The article also addresses the tension between history construction and fictionalization, trying to indicate that some forbidden memories, such as those about revolution, can be reconstructed in literary writing.     

Musical discovery,colonialism, and the possibilities of intercultural communication through music

ABSTRACT

Discourses of discovery have been important in a wide range of musical contexts, from early modern ideas about musical composition through to current forms of popular music production and consumption. Across these various contexts there are often inherent connections between discovery and colonialism, connections that become most apparent in non-Western socio-cultural and musical settings. In this article, I situate discourses of discovery within the “coloniality of power,” noting how colonial discovery can be more critically described as invention. From here, I turn to the genre of World Music as an example of how musical discovery is underpinned by inherently colonial perspectives, articulations of power, and relationships of dominance and subordination between Western and non-Western cultures. In contrast, I present the concept of interculturalism as a way of thinking about the possibilities of cultural in-between-ness beyond discovery, drawing on the practices of musicians who articulate intercorporeal and intercultural communication through performance.     

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’.     

Behind the Curve: Bulliet and Conversion to Islam in al-Andalus Revisited

This article seeks primarily to call for a reappraisal of Richard Bulliet's well-known “curve of conversion” and of its interpretation, for it has been largely misinterpreted. It is argued, with particular reference to the Christian experience in al-Andalus, that reading the data as Bulliet intended could have a significant effect on how we view the historical process of conversion in the early Islamic world. Thus, since Bulliet's data do not support the prevailing view regarding Christianity's survival under Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula, it is proposed that the evidence available in the particularly weak historical record for this period and place is enough to warrant reconsideration of the nature and length of that survival.     

Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives of the Gendered Self in Oral History Interviews

ABSTRACT

This article tracks the development of French social history from its Labroussian origins through to the uncertainties that beset the subject in the 1970s and 1980s, and the call for a tournant critique (‘critical turning point’) in response to the conceptual challenges to its traditional methodological approaches. It then describes the responses that emerged in the wake of the tournant critique, as social historians attempted to renew their field. Instead of pursuing the debate about whether ‘class' or ‘order’ was a more useful category of analysis for early modern historians, French social historians have attempted, like their colleagues in the social sciences, to make the individual rather than collectivities the central focus of their research. The article outlines three approaches which try to capture the agency of individuals: prosopography, micro-history, and network analysis. Finally, the article makes the case that longitudinal studies can provide a means through which social history's traditional concerns with explaining the ‘social’ can be met whilst not losing sight of the exciting questions posed by cultural history in the last two decades.     

Chains of Gold: Portuguese Migration to Argentina in Transatlantic Perspective. By Marcelo J. Borges

ABSTRACT

The trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960 and its subsequent publishing success sparked intense debate at the time and have come to exemplify a clash of worlds, one Victorian, repressed, deferential, restricted by class assumptions and hopelessly out of touch, the other progressive, open, liberated and, above all, permissive, that most value-laden and controversial of terms. Yet examining popular responses to Lady Chatterley's Lover reveals complex attitudes and raises questions about the permissiveness of the 1960s.