International History,the Cultural Turn and the Diplomatic Twitch

To many cultural and social historians, international history (an updated version of diplomatic history) may seem old hat. This essay looks at how the field has developed under pressure from changes in the historical discipline and examines the impact of the ‘cultural turn’ through recent work on gender, memory and ‘otherness'. But the essay also raises questions about this new ‘culturalist’ international history, especially what to do with the now problematic concepts of agency and causality. And it ends by reaffirming the importance of the traditional agenda of international history – life-and-death governmental decisions for peace or war.     

“Doing” cultural studies: Chua Beng Huat on popular culture

Focusing on the relationship between Chua Beng Huat’s sociological thinking before the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies project and his more recent famous works on consumption and popular culture, this essay seeks to understand how he has produced a methodology and a mode of authority that is effective for the context he inhabits in Singapore as well as resonant for scholars working elsewhere. After discussing his interest in large rather than ‘cult’ popular cultures, his emphasis on the detail of government processes as well as popular practices, his economically-grounded concept of consumption and his materialist approach to texts, I read his work on ‘nostalgia for the kampung’ as modelling an Inter-Asian way of doing Cultural Studies that helps us ask questions and develop concepts for our own local contexts.     

‘Envisioning the Past: Art,Historiography and Public History’*

Abstract

This essay considers the role that art and history might play together in public history projects. It discusses public history not in terms of ‘learning lessons’, ‘public debate’ and ‘transferable skills’ but instead in terms of creative thinking in the public sphere. The essay draws upon the author’s experiences of working with artists on a series of exhibitions themed around the history of an arts centre’s late Georgian and Victorian buildings and their inhabitants in Sheffield. It explores the synergies between artistic and historical ways of knowing and argues that collaborations with artists provide an opportunity for academic historians to reengage the imaginative aspects of professional academic history. It also explores the value of art’s expressive power and its potential to pose new questions and suggest new answers for both public and historians’ understanding of the past.     

Fake logos,fake theory,fake globalization

This essay attempts to map out the global networking of counter‐feit production and consumption by considering the historical and economic complications of fake superlogograms in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mainland China as a point of departure. It traces not only the ‘capital logic’ of the counter‐feiting industry, which duplicates the international division of labour, but also its ‘cultural logic’, which creates the Euro‐American superlogograms under the spell of Western imperialist ideology. The essay is divided into three main parts to foreground the ‘glocal’ circulation of fake superlogos. The first part considers the famous French Louis Vuitton as a case study to explore the economic, historic and cultural formation of the logomania in East Asia piloted by Japan in the 1980s. The second part discusses the double cultural reproduction of fake logos in Taiwan as both an imitation of Japan and an imitation of Japanese imitation of Europe. The third part seeks to theorize the fake under the context of Asian consumption of the superlogo and to foreground further the historical change of how the ‘fake’ becomes ubiquitous, how the ‘fake’ could be produced out of no originals, and how the ‘fake’ turns out to be perfectly indistinguishable and doubly authentic, which could rewrite the whole theory of mimesis. A new theorization of ‘fake dissemination’ is attempted in this essay to map out the co‐dependent ongoing (de)construction between ‘fake globalization’ and ‘globalization.’ What we mean by ‘fake’ here is no longer the mere difference between real/fake; the ‘fake’ in ‘fake globalization’ means ‘counter‐feiting’ as well as ‘appropriating’. (In Chinese, ‘Jia’ means both ‘fake’ and ‘by a particular means’.) That is, counter‐feit products appropriate the power of globalization to disseminate themselves. ‘Fake globalization’ is the ‘dark flow’ within globalization; it counter‐feits and appropriates globalization, repetitively reduplicating and deconstructing it. ‘Fake globalization’ and ‘globalization’ are not a pair in binary opposition. ‘Fake globalization’ is the ‘subversion’ of global capitalism; it is subject to global superlogo fashion consciousness and simultaneously resistant to the manipulation of ‘glogocentrism’. This subversive fake globalization is different from the traditional anti‐globalization movement, which tends to highlight the protection of international worker's rights, anti‐monopoly and anti‐sweatshops, for the latter focuses chiefly on the ‘oppositional’ stance while the former stresses more the ‘reverse’ side of it. Fake globalization helps to turn globalization itself inside out and outside in. Fake globalization is not an external attack on globalization from without, but an internal exposure of how the historical and psychic formulations of the logics of global capitalism are subject to the cultural imagination under (western) imperialist ideology, and how they are influenced by the political‐economic deployment of international divisions of labour. What fake dissemination does is to expose from within the possibility and impossibility of ‘glogocentrism.’     

What the ‘Third World’ means to me

Abstract

This essay offers an experience of how the author comes to understand the terms ‘Third World’ in a specific social, historical, and political context in Taiwan. For the author, his deepest understandings of the ‘Third World’ did not come from theoretical readings, but from several concrete personal experiences.     

The construction of national identity in South Korea and the tradition of masculinity in Korean Abstract Painting

ABSTRACT

Korean Modern Art History began to be produced in the 1970s, when Western Modernist Art History, based on Formalism, was introduced as a matrix to map the ‘evolution’ of 20th century Korean Art. Korean modern art history is based in the same paradigm as the West, beginning with Impressionism and ‘ending’ with Abstract Expressionism. First introduced to the country from the West immediately after the Korean War, Korean Abstract Expressionism is now deemed as South Korea’s ultimate ‘progressive’ and ‘modern’ art form, a ‘Korean’ painting style combining the Western art form with traditional artistic concepts of ‘Scholarly Painting’ (muninhwa). Japanese‐influenced painting styles originating in the colonial period (1910–45) are rejected as ‘non‐authentic.’ The problem is that Scholarly Painting was a gender and class specific art born from the rigid Confucian culture of pre‐modern Korea, and thus its revival as an ‘ultimate modern’ and ‘Korean’ form has the consequence of locating traditionally‐gendered notions of art and artist at the core of the South’s modern art. This essay uses a Semiotic approach to deconstruct this gendered modernist rhetoric by tracing the emergence of the sign ‘Koreaness’ in South Korean modern art, showing how it is defined within Korean Abstract Painting as an ‘ultimate Korean sign’ and how its use of anti‐Japanese rhetoric covers up the traumatic history of the Korean War.     

Revel,Riot and Rebellion Revisited

Abstract

This essay revisits the fourth of David Underdown’s seven books and places it into its historical and historiographical context. It seeks to demonstrate how the book represents a major turning point in his intellectual development and offers, with the wisdom of hindsight, a highly positive account of its ambition and achievement. It then seeks to explain why the books received a much less enthusiastic set of reviews than earlier and later books. It is, the essay concludes, a book that was either published too early or too late.     

Munna Guru – portrait of a eunuch

Abstract

In this essay, Ho Tzu Nyen attempts to unearth a subterranean narrative that threads through three films produced by three male Singaporean directors – namely Mee Pok Man (1995) by Eric Khoo, 15 (2003) by Royston Tan, and Zombie Dogs (2004) by Toh Hai Leong. This narrative of unconsciously repeated motifs that migrate from film to film is in turn analyzed as a recurrent symptom that haunts a number of Singaporean cinematic productions from the 1990s onwards. This symptom, which can be summarily described as a paranoid relationship to ‘otherness’, makes manifest a variety of psychic tendencies such as morbid fear of impotence, misogyny, and fetishization of the social other. For Ho, such impulses are in turn intricately linked to what he, following the literary critic Harold Bloom, calls ‘The Anxiety of Influence’. For Bloom, every poet embarks upon his career after a prior encounter with another poet, or poem. As a result, the ‘late‐coming’ poet inevitably suffers from a sense of threatened autonomy, because his profoundest insights and deepest desires are always already elucidated by another. For the Singaporean filmmaker, Ho argues that this ‘anxiety’ in relation to the cinematic tradition takes on a peculiar nature and a doubled pressure, for the canon that inspires them is perceived as being something essentially foreign. Hence the Singaporean filmmaker makes cinema as though he is stuttering in a foreign tongue. Therefore, the concept of ‘the anxiety of influence’ is modulated and compounded with a ‘postcolonial anxiety’. In addition, Ho also draws upon the concepts of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze in an attempt to sketch out an ontology of cinema that at once functions in a deconstructive relationship to ‘auteur‐driven’ modes of analyses, while avoiding what he perceives as the overly ‘sociological’ bent that characterizes much of the existing corpus of writings on Singaporean cinema.     

Xu Beihong and the New China: thoughts centered on the painting At the World Peace Congress

This essay analyses a politically tinged painting by Xu Beihong (1895–1953), a representative modern Chinese painter. He composed the work in 1949, just before the founding of the People’s Republic of China, or the New China. In this article’s discussion of the perplexing work, the author attempts to unveil Xu’s understanding of revolution and of the relationship between art and politics, in relation to his difficulties in exploring and practicing art in the early Republic period (1912–1949). Based on this, the author discusses the painter’s mindset in the social and political context of the New China. She also tries to reveal that Xu’s art practices were restrained by the realities he was in – a crucial point to understanding his achievements and predicaments. As an artist who resisted the western modernism in the course of modernization, and who idealistically pursued the highest good and beauty through “realist” approaches and historical expressions, Xu’s predicaments interestingly reflect the complicated relationship between art and revolution in China’s road to modernization, and provide a foundation for further explorations into the core issues and the particularity of modern Chinese paintings.     

Wittgenstein,Organic Form,and an Orientation to Intercultural Language Games

This essay revisits Wittgenstein’s work in relation to intercultural communication. Specifically, it considers how Wittgenstein’s philosophy relates to the analysis of cultural discourses as intercultural language games. The paper proposes a move beyond anti-essentialist interpretations of language games and towards the idea of cultures as family resemblance concepts in the context of Wittgenstein’s naturalism. The idea of organic form is proposed to distinguish this naturalism from that of the sciences. The possibility that Wittgenstein viewed languages and cultures as organic forms is a way to draw connections between his philosophy and more enigmatic, pessimistic views regarding culture and civilization. Together with the familiar philosophical concepts, it is argued that these views offer insights for intercultural communication research today.     

“The Horror” of Structural Racism: Helping Students Take a Critical Stance Using Classic Literature

The goal of this piece is to provide educators with the knowledge and practical application needed to build critical literacy within their students using a traditional text that might not be considered multicultural. This essay challenges the idea that “outdated” literary works have no place in today's multicultural classroom, as it connects critical literacy concepts to classic works and explores how such concepts are inherent in our society based on the ideas presented in the literature. Using Heart of Darkness, this work connects structural racism to Conrad's novella and explores how students can examine how structural racism is inherent in our society.     

Marxism and commune‐ism: how do commune‐ists think?

Abstract

This paper will describe the insights we gained from the political, organizational or theoretical questions that were raised within Korea’s history of movements after the Kwangju Uprising in 1980. I will begin with the gains from the so‐called ‘debate on Social Formation’ in the 1980s and briefly introduce the fundamental questions on ‘modernity’ and some scholarships on the related issues through the dilemma and paradoxes Marxism was faced with after the collapse of socialism in 1990 and 1991. This paper will discuss the problems that members of the intellectual commune, Research Machine ‘Suyu+Trans’, dealt with in an attempt to practice new ways of life regarding the points at which Marxism and modernity were intertwined. I will then present the questions and concepts of Commune‐ism that replaced Communism, along with the theoretical resources that are called in to deal with them; and through this, a project that could reconfigure Marxism.     

Facing history with a sense of awe: an interview with Professor Mizoguchi Yūzō

In this wide-ranging interview and discussion with Kuan-Hsing Chen and Sun Ge, Mizoguchi Yūzō describes the origins of his interest in China studies and the process through which he developed his perspective on China, Japan, and the world. Mizoguchi details his break with both old-style Japanese Sinology and Western-influenced scholarship, which assumes Japanese superiority over China and takes Euro-American society and concepts as its standard. Mizoguchi suggests that historians can and should cultivate a new subjectivity for themselves and understanding of the history of the world as a whole through an approach to China that attempts to understand China’s own internal historical processes rather than assuming the universality of Western processes. He discusses his efforts to help reform the institutional structure of China studies in Japan, and further touches on the part played by Japan in China’s modern history as well as its historical relations with Taiwan and Korea.     

Collaboration in,Collaboration Out: The Eighties in the Age of Digital Reproduction

In this article I bring together the practical, pedagogical and theoretical implications of a relatively small digitization project, ‘Observing the 80s’, in order to explore the ways in which ‘the digital’ might transform historical practice. Borrowing from Benjamin’s work on production and reproduction I argue that not only are historians currently using digital tools in interesting ways, we are also well equipped to understand what the implications of these tools are. By thinking about digitalization, we can draw together the processes of production, analysis and reception of our historical evidence. Digital technology may only have become the subject of historical research, funding and teaching relatively recently, but the frameworks of cultural and social history provide us with the skills to evaluate its potential meanings. Not least, Benjamin helps us to analyze and evaluate what it really means to be a historian researcher and teacher in a British University today. In so doing, Benjamin’s work can help us uncover and celebrate the unknown through a process of collaboration, juxtaposition and engagement despite the increasingly quantified and goals orientated context in which most academic historical work takes place.     

The watershed of Modernity: translation and the epistemological revolution

Abstract

From Modernity on, there has been continuity for the ‘West’ and interruption for non‐European cultures, histories and languages, for which indeed there is supposed to be only discontinuity with their own antiquity. Their own past counts as ‘premodern’ or ‘traditional’, and thus as belated compared with universalised Modernity. This is so because Modernity itself is normative, and it is normative because it was universalised. The norm of Modernity and the dignity of the modern ‘political’ has been spread through western idioms: through the western normativity of the political, such concepts as democracy, revolution, state, republic and the like will have their patterns in ‘Europe’ and in the ‘West’, while all other political concepts and terms, when contributed to a world dictionary of political terms, will denote merely exceptions. Modernity has been one of the great splits or disjunctions that froze some norms in history, making them become patterns: from that time on, western modernity (first western, then ‘western’ and finally ‘universal’…) has constructed an unbroken genealogical origin for its own concepts and episteme as ‘universal’, and has proposed/imposed them to the planet. The patterns of selection, exception and exclusion of Modernity, which posit the subject as an ‘autonomous’ figure mirrored and complementary of (state) sovereignty – while referring it to the hegemonically dominant model – have not altogether disappeared today. They are merging and mutating into, and coextensive with, configurations of multiple power vectors within non‐transparent networks of blurred and crossed hierarchies with novel, and maybe more volatile, forms of production, of integration and of institution, where again, although in a completely new way, collective action, the sharing and federation of knowledge transcend individual subjectivity while reaching out to both old and new forms of association.     

The politics of national atonement and narrations of war

Abstract

In March 2007, Japan’s ‘national atonement project’ for survivors of military sexual slavery was officially concluded. The atonement project that was implemented by a Japanese government‐established non‐governmental organization – the Asian Women’s Fund – has distributed its fund to a number of survivors in the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and the Netherlands since its inception in 1995. Over the years, intense politicization around the project has made it extremely difficult for most observers to assess whether the project was successful or not. Several prominent scholars in Japan and South Korea have called for a more compassionate and positive assessment of the project’s good intentions, while feminist activists continue to critique the project’s negative interventions in the process of redress and reconciliation in Asia. This essay is an attempt to open up a space to rethink the felicitousness of the atonement project by focusing on the ways in which the project told its own story of war, violence, and gender. By juxtaposing stories told by Filipina survivors of the ‘comfort women’ system with one that has been told by the atonement project implemented by the Asian Women’s Fund, it seeks to find a way to reassess whether the project acknowledged the survivors’ claims for justice and compensation.     

The story of xiao jie ('working' girls)

Abstract

This essay examines a moment of institutionalization in cultural studies, and argues that questions of gender have a significant place in this interdisciplinary domain. The issue is discussed in a pedagogic context that has almost normalized feminism, seeing its political contributions as belonging to the past. The essay argues that the conceptual conjuncture of culture and gender which has been central to feminist theorizing in India needs to be rethought. This conjuncture arose from thinking about culture in the framework of nationalism and the anti‐colonial struggle, and the alignment of women with national culture. I discuss briefly the trajectory of how we have gone about investigating the culture‐gender conjuncture, present a reformulation of what I think we're up against, and introduce some new research projects which are trying to take this on board. The focus in these projects is on the question of translation, and how the issue of ‘regional’ languages poses a challenge to prevalent ideas in the women's movement and in feminist teaching. The larger proposition is that we need to formulate curricula based on new kinds of research if we are to take feminism into the cultural studies classroom of the future.     

‘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.     

Military base culture and Okinawan rock ‘n’ roll

The presence of US military bases has had a strong influence on US popular music in postwar Japan and Okinawa. In 1951, mainland Japan gained independence from the US occupation while Okinawa was occupied until the early 1970s and therefore was outside of the Constitution of Japan. Okinawa has been forced to coexist with many US bases, soldiers and civilian personnel. Postwar western popular music entered Japan via the bases and became a part of Okinawan culture. In this essay, tracing the history of Okinawan rock ‘n’ roll since the 1960s, I will discuss how to get into Okinawan society, the cultural function played by the US military bases in Okinawa, and the significance of the role played by the US bases for the globalization of ‘American Culture’. The golden age of the entertainment sector geared toward US soldiers was the 1960s and early 1970s, before the reversion of Okinawa to Japan. After this, a reduction in the number of troops and the increasing exchange rate of the yen dealt a serious blow to the economy of the entertainment sector. As a result, Okinawan rock ‘n’ roll increasingly entered another social cultural context; first commercialization by the record industry in Tokyo, and then as a tourist resource for local community development.     

‘Dad's Back’: Mapping Masculinities,Moralities and the Law in the Novels of Margery Allingham

Crime fiction was, in its ‘Golden Age’ form, a new product of the interwar middlebrow. It was a particular and very popular way in which conservative-modern problematics about the domestic and about human emotional relationships but also about criminality and the law were talked through. This article examines the novels of Margery Allingham as an exemplar of this genre with reference to her own professional and gender identity as well as the broader cultural context. Crime fiction was one of several kinds of crime (particularly murder) stories, both fictional and ‘real life’, which circulated between the official discourses of the law and middle-class culture. This discussion explores Allingham's treatment of masculinities and of sexuality. It argues that narrative techniques that used the Gothic problematized the interrelationships of morality, modernity and history, and also inflected the pleasures of leisure reading with wider ‘middlebrow’ concerns about the gendered status of the modern citizen and more diffuse cultures of punishment and social responsibility.