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.     

Hou Hsiao‐Hsien reviewed

Abstract

Press reviews of Hou Hsiao‐Hsien’s films appeared in a range of European magazines at a time when Hou’s films were hardly, if at all, available for watching in European cinemas. This essay asks what, in this context, may have been the reviews’ function. By way of an examination of a representative sample of these texts, I argue that, far from negotiating a relationship between, on the one hand, the producers, distributors and exhibitors of Hou’s films and, on the other hand, Hou’s European public, reviews of Hou’s films served to mediate the gradual and capillary instillation of new modes of viewing films. Reaching Europe very sparingly at a time when European cinemas had finally capitulated to the increasingly aggressive marketing strategies of distributors of Hollywood produce, the construction of Hou Hsiao‐Hsien as an auteur became available for the ‘educational’ realignment needed in order to sell Hollywood cinema better, not in spite of, but because of, the negligible European circulation of Hou Hsiao‐Hsien’s films.     

Peasant cultures of the twenty‐first century 1

Abstract

In the last quarter of a century there has been a fundamental change in the historical situation of post‐coloniality. The new conditions under which global flows of capital, commodities, information and people are now regulated have created both new opportunities and new obstacles for post‐colonial countries. The old idea of a Third World, sharing a common history of colonial oppression and backwardness, is no longer as persuasive as it was in the 1960s. The phenomenal growth of China and India in recent years has set in motion a process of social change that, in its scale and speed, is unprecedented in human history. I will argue that the forms of capitalist industrial growth in the twenty‐first century may, in large agrarian countries like China, India and the countries of South‐east Asia, make room for the preservation of peasant production and peasant cultures, but under completely altered conditions. The analysis of these emergent forms of postcolonial capitalism requires new conceptual work.     

Micro: global music made in J‐pop?

Abstract

This article tackles J‐pop as a result of diverse influences from Western music. Its strength stems from its capacity to ‘tame the exotic’, i.e. assimilate and recreate from styles that were uncommon for Asian cultures by integrating elements of rock, reggae, hip hop, etc and labelling these J‐rock, J‐reggae, J‐rap. This assimilation and indigenization process in J‐pop creation could be seen as a way to resist against competitors from other places of music production. The article also attempts to identify the specificities and assets of J‐pop in the music scene in general. It elaborates on J‐pop's coolness, and the reason why it could expand throughout East‐Asia. Pop music and pop culture flows in East‐Asia could be regarded then as a means to trigger a sense of community and togetherness through the consumption of pop culture products. Throughout the analysis on J‐pop, the article will rely on one musical example, Def Tech and Micro, as this artist tends to explore various musical genre and intermingles them, so as to create a specific style, coined ‘Jawaian reggae’.     

Hou Hsiao‐Hsien’s films: pursuing and escaping history

Abstract

This article situates Hou Hsiao‐Hsien’s films in the post Cold‐War global setting. It discusses two common interpretive approaches to Hou Hsiao‐Hsien’s films – French auteurism and ‘national allegory’ – and puts these two approaches within their historical context of Cold‐War and post Cold‐War global politics. The article places the rise of Hou Hsiao‐Hsien’s films parallel to the rise of the mainland fifth generation of film directors, pointing out that their apparently opposite directions – Hou Hsiao‐Hsien going political in his Taiwan trilogy and the fifth generation film directors going apolitical – are part and parcel of the same phenomenon of alternative politics in its particular contexts and the reconstruction of a new identity politics. Particular attention is given to Hou’s Taiwan trilogy, Flowers of Shanghai, and Coffee Jikou.     

Japanese neo‐nationalism and an idea of an East Asian community

Abstract

The paper explains the relationship between Japan and its neighboring countries, and the influence of Japanese neo‐nationalism on the idea of an East Asian community.     

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.     

Hou Hsiao‐Hsien’s two dreams of light and shadows

Abstract

In traditional Chinese culture, dreams are often more than a narrative ploy or an extension of the authors’ imagination, but instruments for musings on life. This essay is an attempt to study Hou Hsiao‐Hsien’s aesthetics in The Puppetmaster and Flowers of Shanghai from the perspective of dreams. The former is like a lucid dream where the ageing puppet master is the person in the dream, while Hou the filmmaker is the passer‐by who saunters into the dream and puts it down on record. The latter, on the other hand, is an inebriated dream where the plan‐sequences are weaved together by black‐ins and black‐outs as in a dream from which no one wants to wake.     

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.     

The eloquence of the taciturn: an essay on Hou Hsiao‐Hsien

Abstract

Dust in the Wind, a color film set in the verdant mountains of Taiwan, includes two scenes almost identical to the black‐and‐white and silent films by the Lumières, shot at the end of the nineteenth century: Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat and Passage Through a Railway Tunnel. As Hou’s mise‐en‐scène consists of the fixed camera angle with its long takes, it is the means of transportation that brings motion to the film, controlling dramatic elements of each work. The luxury cars, which appear in his first three romantic comedies, symbolize the rich and the motorbike the common people. The drivers are all young women, but an automobile cannot be a setting for love. In Daughter of the Nile and Goodbye South, Goodbye, the cars offer no protection to men trying to escape. Compared with the thematic negativity that the automobile possess in Hou’s universe, the motion of the passing trains, taken from many angles, offers rich and profound significations. When the camera is inside the train, the protagonists are taciturn, such as the two adolescents in Dust in the Wind who show their intimacy with each other without saying words. When the camera is next to the tracks or on the platform, the situation changes. In A Time to Live, A Time to Die, Hou depicts the grandmother sitting next to her grandson at a shop by the train and sipping sweet ice while behind them passes a freight train that emphasizes the anxious solitude of the old woman exiled from her homeland. A sublime depiction of the sense of powerlessness of both the deaf‐mute photographer and his family before a passing train is the scene on the deserted platform in A City of Sadness. In Café Lumière, the young woman and her friend in the passing train recognize how valuable they are to each other without saying words. This taciturnity suggests a certain kind of love that needs no sexual language.     

Scandalous equivocation: a note on the politics of queer self‐naming

Abstract

This paper discusses the political and theoretical implications of the various performances of queer self‐naming (or the refusal of which) in the face of the ongoing backlash against unconventional or non‐normative genders and sexualities. It argues that, instead of a hasty call for the discarding of identity terms or naïve recourse to them, we could keep (re)using the signs without endorsing their normative meanings and line of demarcation. Through analysing some of the feminist counter‐discourses against the backlash, arguments for indigenous Japanese queerness, and a performance by a Japanese lesbian artist, Ito Tari, it shows that the queer gesture of equivocally assuming the scandalous ‘name’ may be one of the few effective survival strategies for those who have already been scandalously (mis)named.     

The ‘Non‐dit’ in the Zenana: representations of Muslim women in Islamic canonical texts,the neo‐colonial imagination and a feminist response from Bangladesh

Abstract

This essay recognizes that representations of the ‘Muslim woman’ as the Othered ‘object’ of the ‘Western’ gaze and the domesticated ‘object’ which the Islamic apologists strive hard to defend, are both constructions and false antitheses of each other. It seeks not the ‘truth’ regarding the Muslim women in the world of social reality but to examine how various representations of the women are constructed and to what effects and consequences these representations are mobilized. The essay proceeds in three stages. The first stage shows how the patriarchy mobilizes the Qur’an and the Hadith in order to construct the woman as the negative, the inessential and the abnormal of the man so as to exert complete subordination over her. However, the very act of attempting to mute the woman in Islam is the most strident proof that she is engaged in resistance against patriarchal control and the degree of resistance must be judged by the degree of patriarchal control. The second stage demonstrates how patriarchy operates in colonial and neo‐imperial landscape: it legitimizes the appropriation of Muslim woman ‘possessed’ by the Other (as exemplified by the orientalist seduction fantasy in William Dalrymple’s The White Mughals), but, haunted by the fear of rape and anxieties regarding the sexuality of the White woman possessed by the Self, it attempts to maintain strict control over her (as in the cases of Miss Wheeler in the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857 and Private Jessica Lynch in the Iraq War). This struggle over the feminine body is perfectly in line with Islam’s hyper‐anxiousness to hide the female body and rigorously ensure monopolic possession over her. The third stage shows how Taslima Nasreen, a late‐20th century feminist from Bangladesh, speaks the unspoken and thereby attempts to subvert the normative representation of the muted women in her autobiographical novella, entitled āmār Meyebelā. In thus examining the representations of the Muslim women, this essay seeks an alternative ‘third space of enunciation’ and takes a distinct political stand located outside of the axis of the dichotomy of the ‘Western’ gaze and the construction of the Islamic theologians.     

Spectral city: San Francisco as Pacific Rim city and counter‐cultural contado

Abstract

San Francisco, since its global takeoff in the Gold Rush Days and long‐standing trafficking in Bohemian, socialist, queer, and left‐leaning energies in and beyond the Beat era of the 1960s, has a complicated global/local history of trying to disentangle its city‐space and urban imaginary from the Greco‐Roman will‐to‐supremacy that would turn California into a frontier settlement of Asian/Pacific domination and US‐framed empire. Forces of social becoming like the Beats and post‐Beat hippies as well as more experimental authors like Jack Spicer, Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, and Bob Kaufman helped to forge a different literary‐social vision of San Francisco and the Pacific Rim city as a porous community of transnational innovation and outer‐national becoming. This paper will invoke some literary and film texts from Howl and Tripmaster Monkey to Vertigo to Margaret Cho stand‐up performances as well as some geopolitical studies, such as Gray Brechin’s Imperial San Francisco and City Light Press’s Reclaiming San Francisco to substantiate this double vision of San Francisco as global/local US site of (a) imperial ratification and (b) counter‐orientalist deformation.     

The city as extracurricular space: re‐instituting urban pedagogy in South Asia

Abstract

This paper addresses the pedagogic and disciplinary challenges posed by the effort to understand urban spatial practices and institutional histories in Bombay/Mumbai, and other postcolonial South Asian cities. Many cities in the region, such as Chandigarh and Dhaka were designed as iconic of the abstract space of the nation‐state. The dominance of the nationalist spatial imagination in the understandings of public space, citizenship, and the metropolitan environment – combined with the functionalist perception of architecture and spatial practice – have resulted in an urban pedagogy that regards the city only as a technological or physical artefact. Architectural education and urban pedagogy is therefore unable to address the diversity of social‐spatial formations in the city, and its political regime of predatory development, tactical negotiation, and blurry urbanism. To better understand this new regime, we require a collaborative urbanism that treats the city as an extra‐curricular space by which we can reconstruct existing institutional frameworks. Drawing on the work of CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives Trust), Mumbai, this papers explores the post‐industrial landscapes of the Mumbai Mill and Port Lands as a case study in two extracurricular research projects, which grew into urban design and community planning interventions in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, where urban spaces became the arena for re‐imagining the relations between knowledge production, institutional boundaries, and civic activism on which nationalism has imposed a long estrangement.     

When is a foreign‐language film not a foreign‐language film? When it has too much English in it: The case of a Singapore film and the Oscars 1

Abstract

In December 2005, a film called Be With Me, by Singapore director, Eric Khoo, was disqualified from entering the Best Foreign Language Film category at the following year’s Academy Awards on the grounds that it contained ‘too much English’. An Academy spokesperson attempted to explain this decision with what was apparently obvious, that ‘English is not a foreign language’. In an age where issues of cultural migration, hybridity, diaspora and globalisation are de rigueur, this intractable declaration seems almost comic. However, it indicates a continued ambivalence in the role of the English language in the making of a cultural identity: the perennial post‐colonial conundrum that shows no sign of going away. Singapore’s post‐independence decision to keep English as the first language of the country means that the use of English, albeit with local variations, is a quotidian reality. I would like to use this incident to reflect, not so much on the politics of Oscar selection, as perhaps more importantly, on the implications it presents for the internationalisation, and thus the ownership, of English, as well as its role as a marker for both local and global subjectivities – especially when the irony of the situation is compounded by the fact that Khoo’s film is, in effect, mostly silent.     

The idea of South Asia: a personal note on post‐Bandung blues 1

Abstract

This paper mainly discusses the transformation of the idea of South Asia in Post‐Cold War era.     

Bandung plus 50: a call for a tri‐continental dialogue on global hegemony

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to present a few arguments about the importance of holding a second Bandung Conference, broadened to include the Tri‐Continental regions, including Latin America and the Caribbean region, in the conference.     

Les études hispano‐musulmanes en France à l'aube du troisième millénaire

Les études hispano‐musulmanes connurent leur essor en France dès la première partie du XX^e siècle graâce à l'?uvre magistrale d'Evariste Lévi‐Provençal. L'histoire de l'Espagne musulmane de 710 à 1031, fondée sur une profonde connaissance des sources arabes et de l'Islam d'Espagne, fut suivie par de brillantes études sur la civilisation d'al‐Andalus et par de précieuses éditions de textes arabes médiévaux. L'archéologie et l'histoire de l'art hispano‐musulman doivent beaucoup aux remarquables érudits que furent Georges Marçais, Elie Lambert et Henri Terrasse dont le fils, Michel Terrasse, poursuit les travaux à l'heure actuelle. Dès 1959, Rachel Arié s'est consacrée à l'Espagne musulmane au temps des Narides (1232–1492) ; elle a publié à Barcelone en 1982 une étude d'ensemble sur l'Espagne musulmane du VIII^e siècle au XV^e siècle. En outre, cinq ouvrages sur al‐Andalus, de nombreux articles, plusieurs communications de congrès ont illustré son activité d'arabisante et d'historienne. L'arabe hispanique a suscité des recherches lexicographiques au sein d'une équipe du CNRS depuis 1979. L'intérêt pour la pensée spéculative andalouse a été mis en lumière depuis 1956 par Roger Arnaldez et à partir de 1972 par Dominique Urvoy. Marie‐Thérèse Urvoy s'est penchée sur la question des Mozarabes. La poésie andalouse en arabe classique au XI^e siècle qui avait retenu l'attention d'Henri Pérès dès 1937 a fait l'objet de plusieurs articles dans la seconde édition de l'Islam depuis 1954. La participation française dans le domaine de l'Espagne musulmane s'est avérée notable dans ce monument d'érudition.