Asian internationalism: Bandung’s echo in a colonial metropolis

Abstract

This paper argues that two conflicting discourses of internationalism stood in uneasy counterpoint and contention in the Asian arena of the 1950s, reflected in the legacies of the Bandung conference. The first drew on a language of global citizenship and rights. The second saw the international system as a source of strength and support for state sovereignty, and state‐directed programmes of national development. The remainder of the paper uses the case of late‐colonial Singapore to examine the intersection of these two discourses of internationalism. An Asian internationalism, which spanned to include Africa over the course of the 1950s, became one of a stock of narratives that made Singapore’s ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’ possible, in the worlds of the hawkers, the dockworkers and the agriculturalists. The political aspirations of these groups were sacrificed, ultimately, to the goal of disciplined national development, supported by an international order that had closed in to defend the interests of state power.     

E.E. Fournier d’Albe’s Fin de siècle: Science,Nationalism and Monistic Philosophy in Britain and Ireland

The fin de siècle witnessed radical shifts in the intellectual and cultural landscapes of the British Isles in the context of a general revolt against Victorian values. E. E. Fournier d’Albe – physicist, spiritualist, inventor and Pan-Celticist – personified the ability of intellectuals to latch onto and advance new trends, made available by the emergent intellectual pluralism. Like many contemporaries he rejected traditional religion, but he also disdained scientific materialism, and sought a deeper metaphysical meaning to life, pursued through his various interests. Influenced by the totalising theories of figures like Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel, Fournier concocted his own brand of scientific monism, rejecting materialism, embracing spiritualism, and ever optimistic in the notion of scientific progress, even in the wake of the carnage of the Great War. The article aims to give Fournier a fuller historical treatment, allowing his story to add to understanding of the milieus in which he lived and operated, and revealing how his monistic philosophy incorporated some of the disparate cultural strands explored by intellectuals in the fin de siècle reaction against conventional Victorian ideals.     

“Thank You for Calling:” Accents and Authenticity on NBC’s Outsourced

India’s turbulent and dynamic relationship with the English language stems from its colonial past. This project integrates linguistic hegemony, mimicry, and brown voice to examine discourses surrounding the creation and reception of fake Indian accents on the short-lived NBC series Outsourced. The first primetime sitcom to showcase a primarily South Asian cast, Outsourced featured British and American actors of Indian descent using fake Indian accents to portray call center workers. Critical Discourse Analysis reveals the influence of linguistic hegemony to delegitimize Indian English and thereby hinder linguistic cosmopolitanism.     

The Left and Indonesia’s 1960s: the politics of remembering and forgetting

Abstract

This article examines a pivotal decade in the recent history of Indonesian society: the 1960s. It examines the context within which the Left came to be decisively, and violently, defeated as a social and political force. It then studies the consequences of this defeat for Indonesia’s subsequent historical trajectory. The article also suggests that history‐writing anywhere is nothing less than the politics of remembering (and forgetting). What is at stake in these exercises is ultimately tied up with the legitimacy of entire social orders and systems of power. Thus, in Indonesia, the trauma of 1965 and its aftermath banished, from the collective memory of Indonesians, the political role of the Left – except in the form that runs through New Order‐era discourse on Indonesian communism. For Indonesians born or raised after 1965, the ‘communist treason’ became, arguably, the most critical element of the grand narrative of post‐colonial Indonesian history, which was so important in legitimising New Order authoritarianism. The current inability of Indonesian society and its elites to acknowledge and confront the reality of the horrors of the 1960s might prove to be a major impediment to a more genuine and substantive democratisation process.     

The undulating contours of sōgō geijutsu (total work of art), or Hanada Kiyoteru's thoughts on transmedia in postwar Japan

This article provides an insight into the theorization of sōgō geijutsu or the work of total art during the postwar decades in Japan, primarily through the language of Hanada Kiyoteru, a notable communist critic during the 1950s, as a way to present a discursive precursor to what would be explored as intermedia in the 1960s. It is an attempt to trace the debates that were seen in journal Sōgō Bunka, which was established immediately after the war, and how the question of collectivity and collective production of art was discussed among the contributing critics, artists, and intellectuals. Totality as some may know already, is a problematic term that comes close to the wartime notion of ‘totality’, as it was employed for Japanese government's ideological deployment for its war efforts. Although the term has accrued a sinister ring, the critics mentioned in the article, especially Hanada, were determined to reclaim the term as a way of devising a postwar aesthetic-political platform. One important component of sōgō geijutsu was popular art and its relationship to the masses, as it was designed to relocate avant-garde art practices to the juncture of popular space and political praxis, while critiquing the modernist avant-garde art associated with high art. In addition to providing a fuller historiography of intermedia (or transmedia) in Japan, interrogating sōgō geijutsu also serves to shed some light on the complex and multivalent discourse of locating a ‘people’ and their communicative action. Through this history, the term totality gains a greater texture, no longer dismissible as a mere vestige of fascism in the minds of the Japanese artists and critics.     

Afro-Asian solidarity and the “capital” question: looking beyond the last frontier

The argument in this paper is a continuation of an argument that I have been making for some time, which questions the universal history of capital, crucial to which are assumptions regarding its historical necessity. Capital is not only understood to be a historically unavoidable condition but one that has already colonized the world such that there is no outside to it. In developing my argument regarding the “outside” to capital, where I find Kalyan Sanyal's work very useful and significant, I claim that much of the problem with theorizing capital today has to do not with the beast itself but with the inherited paraphernalia of western theory and philosophy. After a survey of the passive revolution debate in India, which I read as a sign of the actual impossibility of “capitalist” development across different parts of the world, I move on to argue that both “capital/ism” and the “logic of capital” (accumulation) are misleading concepts concealing an essential “emptiness,” which I work out through the idea of “dependent arising” taken from Buddhist philosophy.     

‘We want everybody’s salvage!’: Recycling,Voluntarism, and the People’s War

ABSTRACT

This article reveals the role of volunteers in the British government’s campaign to increase recycling during the Second World War. It uses their experience to deconstuct the idea of a 'people's war', showing how this concept was invoked in several different ways. The article demonstrates that voluntary recycling schemes were led from the bottom-up, shifted the balance of power between private citizens and local authorities, and highlighted difference based on age, socio-economic status, gender, and geographical location. It concludes that official appeals may have invoked the ‘people’s war’, but the way that these messages were received was of most importance.     

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.     

Malayanized Chinese-language cinema: on Yi Shui’s Lion City,Black Gold,and film writings

This article discusses how the Singaporean Chinese director, Yi Shui, created a Malayanized Chinese-language cinema during the 1950s and 1960s, and offers a retrospective of the way people in Malaya and Singapore framed their nation-building discourse in terms of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism after the Bandung Conference in 1955. This article holds that the term huayu dianying (Chinese-language cinema) was not first used in the 1990s by scholars in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but that its origins can be traced to Singapore and Malaya in the 1950s where Yi Shui promoted Malayanized Chinese-language cinema in the Nanyang Siang Pau. This earlier use of the term “Chinese-language cinema” overlaps with its current academic usage, including films in Mandarin and Chinese dialects. In 1959, Yi Shui’s essays were collected in On Issues of the Malayanization of Chinese-Language Cinema. Yi Shui also directed several Malayanized Chinese-language films. This article analyzes his “Chinese language cinema” film practice by examining the discourses surrounding the “Malayanization of Chinese-language cinema” in order to show that his semi-documentary Lion City and the melodrama Black Gold attempted to mediate the misunderstandings rooted in the national boundaries and politics of various dialect groups through a “multi-lingual symbiosis” of Chinese languages.     

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.     

Exploring Media’s Impact on African American Women’s Healthy Food Habits in Kentucky

This qualitative study employs the uses and gratifications framework to explore the perspective of African American women in Kentucky, specifically urban Louisville and rural Hopkinsville, to understand their use of media as potential sources for gathering information about healthy food habits. Key findings include how the participants used media for instrumental purposes to educate themselves about healthy food habits, and that the specific media personalities were very important to the participants as they decided to make healthier food selections.     

Seniors’ organizations in China’s new rural reconstruction: experiments in Hubei and Henan

This article tracks the shifting cultural meanings that the East/West distinction has produced in the history of nationalism in colonial and post-colonial India. It does so by focusing on the word “civilization” and the role it played in promoting a rich sense of inter-cultural dialogue in the writings of nationalist leaders such as Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, and Jawaharlal Nehru. The article documents how the word figures with much reduced significance in contemporary cultural debates about globalization in India and concludes by asking if the rise of China and India to global prominence holds the potential today to initiate a conversation across cultures similar to the one that accompanied the rise of the West in the age of modern imperial rule.