Rethinking the coming home alternative: hybridization and coming out politics in Hong Kong’s anti‐homophobia parades

Abstract

In calling for the need to think about sexuality globally, scholars have given increasing attention to the historical specificities of local contexts. The return to the local, however, may not always be fruitful when the local and the global or the Western and the non‐Western are seen as binary opposites rather than permeable constructs. This paper examines the coming home/coming out controversy and calls into question the understanding of coming home as local resistance against global queering. It instead suggests the possibilities of cultural hybridity and blending of coming out and coming home. Using the First and the Second International Day Against Homophobia Hong Kong Parades as an example, this paper elucidates the complexity of cultural production in the interactions of the West and Non‐West, with attention on the effect of transnational mobility of political rhetoric and tactics.     

‘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.     

Insulting Jean Massieu: Debating Representational Control of Deaf People in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain

In 1876, an educator of the deaf and a ‘deaf-mute’ publicly clashed over topics ranging from the nature of deafness and the identity of those who are ‘deaf-mute’ to the best methods to be used in deaf education and what deaf children following those methods might be expected to achieve. The debate occurred at a point in the nineteenth century when expert authority ‘about’ deaf people was beginning to sweep away deaf people’s own right to self-representation. Although richly nuanced and highly personal, the debate’s occurrence at a period that studies of the history of the deaf community have identified as pivotal to deaf people’s categorisation as ‘disabled’ means that much of its complexity has been lost in subsequent historical over-writing. This article explores the debate in depth. It provides a valuable glimpse into the mechanisms of expertise, and the ways that both non-deaf and deaf experts understood who deaf people were, what they could do, and what their place within society should be at that pivotal time. It also highlights the rich complexity of a much more complex history available to those prepared to dig beneath the surface to expose historical texture.     

A Complaint with the Cadi,ca. 1896: an East/West Cultural Encounter

This article presents a case study of A Complaint with the Cadi (Algeria), ca. 1896 – a painting by the French Orientalist artist Marie Lucas-Robiquet (1858–1959). Using cultural and social history as prisms, it explores what Lucas-Robiquet’s visual record communicates to the cultural ‘outsider’ about Muslim social life in French colonial Algeria. Attention is given to this artwork because it depicts the Islamic judiciary system as practised in late nineteenth-century Algeria. This article argues that this painting and its subject matter are rare in the Orientalist canon; that the artist was female, is, I posit, crucial to the ways in which this work can be read. Lucas-Robiquet, a decorated Orientalist, used a Naturalist style of painting which was both nuanced and sensitive to Islamic cultural traditions. I contend that A Complaint with the Cadi (or qā?ī meaning judge) is an important work because it represents a locus of historicised forms of Otherness: the French female artist and the Algerian cultural attribute.     

French-Muslims and the Hijab: An Analysis of Identity and the Islamic Veil in France

This article examines how Muslims living in France construct, and negotiate their identities in the wake of Law 2004–228, a French law banning the wearing of the Islamic veil in French public schools. This research finds that Muslims deem the Islamic veil or hijab to be a fundamental part of their identity. Muslims describe the hijab as being an important and salient symbol of Islam that runs counter to France's concept of secularism or laïcité. Moreover, French-Muslims assert regulations like Law 2004–228 represent France attempting to control Muslim identity and forcefully integrate this population.     

Fear and Rumour in the People's Republic of China in the 1950s

ABSTRACT

The article explores the nature of popular fears during the early years of the People's Republic of China by examining two types of rumour: those of a ‘secular’ type that told of China's defeat in the Korean War, a third world war or an imminent nuclear attack; and those of a ‘supernatural’ type that told of demons out to snatch vital organs or the end of the world. These rumours testified both to the resilience of ancient cosmological beliefs and values and to their capacity to fuse with elements of ‘modern’ politics. The article asks what they tell us about the relationship of the party-state to the populace.     

Cultural studies through education: moments of pedagogy and pragmatics

Abstract

Our main concern is to see if cultural studies can intervene more productively in the dominant educational processes, in ways that align with the sustainable interests of its critical project. As cynicism becomes the commonplace ‘distinction’ of our young graduates, we raise two questions: why should cultural studies be concerned with the spread of cynicism within our own institutional and pedagogic space? And what would be the implications of such critical reflection on our current practices, as scholar and teacher of this critical project? The paper draws on our continual engagement with the curriculum reform of secondary school subjects (Integrated Humanities and Liberal Studies) in Hong Kong, in an attempt to explore the limits and opportunities of education as social practice, as well as the effectivity of cultural studies within the contemporary contexts and crises of education. First we describe how taking part in the specific school reform projects has begun to change the critical and pedagogic orientation of cultural studies we do at the university. Then we discuss the implications of our recent experiments in doing cultural studies in and with the local schools. In all, we want to examine what brings us to our own search for a certain ‘politics of hope’, by re‐thinking and re‐mapping cultural studies as a collective, pragmatic programme in the local educational set‐up. For, without a constructive pragmatics, the students of cultural studies cannot be expected to work effectively across diverse institutional settings. Thus, criticism and the production of critical knowledge in the contemporary academy would go on to foster a state of cynicism among its graduates and the ‘stakeholders’ concerned. Cultural studies, we believe, can make itself more useful through concrete ways of mediating its expertise in the complex processes of education. As such, we emphasize the contemporary relevance and uses of cultural studies for educational transformation.     

Emotional energy and sub-cultural politics: alternative bands in post-1997 Hong Kong

The paper attempts to work out the link between the structuring of the public domain and hegemonic masculinities in contemporary Kerala, South India. Using the debates around an incident of sexual harassment that happened in 1999, it argues for a conjunctural understanding of the contemporary where various events and moments in history are replayed through narrativization and popular memory. The paper goes on to analyse the debates around the incident that produce a ‘narrative public domain’, to foreground the various notions of masculinity that construct and structure it in relation to notions of female sexuality and changing structures of family. These notions of masculinity could be, the paper argues, a starting point for a historical inquiry into Kerala's modernity – an inquiry that would throw light on the past and the ways in which the contemporary is produced through its historical legacies.     

Reading Irish Women's Lives in Photograph Albums

ABSTRACT

This article aims to provide a new approach to photography in Ireland by shifting focus from ‘art’ photography to the processes and practices of snapshot photography. In employing a new methodological approach to photography, it also provides a new way to examine women's history, exploring photography as part of the tactics women used in order to resist or assimilate state- and Church-led discourses of womanhood, which have often been characterized as both oppressive and hegemonic. In order to explore these themes in detail, this article examines the photography collection of Dorothy Stokes, the largest twentieth century amateur collection held by the National Library of Ireland. I situate Stokes's photographs between two traditions – ethnographic photographs of Ireland and ‘snapshot’ images of holidays and family. Stokes self-consciously made use of these two genres, but also disrupted them. Taking photographs and the making of photograph albums became ways for her to comment on Irish society and her place in the nation and to represent and constitute an oppositional private life.     

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’.     

‘Of lost fathers and broken sons’: Farish Noor on the politics of love and the new thought in Malaysia

Abstract

This paper addresses the polemical and intimate writings of one of Malaysia’s leading public intellectuals, Farish Noor. Straddling secularism and Islamism, Noor’s ideas are informed by a compassion that seeks to bypass monotheism and an ethnically informed nationalism. An advocate of a multiethnic and plural society, Noor does not merely reject Islamism; rather, his thinking seeks to reconcile and transcend what he perceives as a false dichotomy between a system of reason and a system of belief. The achievement of this transcendence is a fraught one for it sometimes seems that Noor involuntarily contradicts himself. To resolve this contradiction I turn to Gille Deleuze’s work, Pure Immanence, which, I argue, provides a key in‐road into understanding the complexivity of Noor’s thought, in particular his valorization of love and his canny and novel attempts to interpret what he calls an ‘other Malaysia.’     

Generations of 68Ers

ABSTRACT

The protests of ‘1968’ are a powerful symbol of generational belonging and central to Germany's collective memory. The so-called ‘68ers’ have been transformed into a mythical yardstick of what constitutes a generation. Yet few people thought of themselves in this way in the late 1960s: the idea of the ‘68er’ only emerged from complex and often retrospective processes of generational building, which this article investigates. It is shown that such age-related affinities were not confined to members of the West German Left. Two alternative generational narratives that emerged out of the late 1960s are examined in this piece: those of the West German moderate right-wing ‘counter-generation’ and of the ‘East German 68ers’. The antagonistic character of the West German events and the subsequent public projection of left-wing activists as a ‘generation’ mobilized their political contemporaries and led to a growing desire to collectivize their experiences in their turn. East Germany's ‘1968’, on the other hand, may have been far less iconic than the West German revolt, but former East German activists have also given their memories generational form, particularly since the 1990s. This article addresses these manifold processes of generation building to show that they have much to reveal about how activists—and those who observed them—made sense of the events of 1968 and about how different groups mobilized the idea of a generational experience politically to powerful effect in the years that followed. We are not dealing with a single and monolithic generation of 1968, but with more diverse communities of German ‘68ers’.     

Transnational imagination in action cinema: Hong Kong and the making of a global popular culture

Taking action cinema as an example, this paper outlines a historical approach to the transnational study of globally popular cultural forms. Action cinema has long had a complex economy in which Hollywood not only trades stars, styles and narratives with the hybrid culture of Hong Kong cinema itself, but draws on a vast ‘direct to tape’ industry significantly based in East Asia. The paper outlines a Hong Kong‐based approach to two earlier phases in the history of action: the ‘international co‐production’ as an industrially innovative form (1973–85), and the golden age of the ‘direct to tape’ industry enabled by the rapid spread of video technology (1985–93). Focusing on the latter, it suggests that the global uptake by filmmakers of a ‘contact’ narrative and an ethic of emulation taken from Hong Kong cinema allowed direct‐to‐video action to address issues of social class in emotionally complex ways.     

Marx,and Marxism as method in Stuart Hall’s thinking

The task here is to consider what I would call Stuart Hall’s theoretical “legacy” in the field of social and cultural thoughts. As a materialist of articulation rather than of reductionism, Hall taught us how to profoundly understand and intensely describe the “concrete” in cultural and social fields. The “concrete,” according to Hall, is a result of “non-necessary correspondence” between various forces, relations and situations, that is, the contingent and articulated determination in history. In my view, he was after all a Marxist in this sense. In the earlier stage of his thinking, Hall was very much indulged in reading and learning from Marx. This is characteristic in his “Marx’s Notes on Method: A Reading of the 1857 ‘Introduction.’” His Marxism then showed a unique twist in later stage, which was explicitly expressed in his article “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debate.” Reading these two texts, I aim to comprehend the way Hall has read Marx and the way his thoughts resonated. His lesson helps us to tackle our ongoing agendas in this half-dead Capitalist world, such as the crisis of culture, subjectivity and politics.     

Seeing the Communist past through the lens of a CIA consultant: Guy J. Pauker on the Indonesian Communist Party before and after the ‘1965 Affair’

Abstract

This paper explores Guy J. Pauker’s works on Indonesia in the 1960s, particularly the ones concerning the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) before and after the killing of six top Army officers on 30 September 1965 (called the ‘1965 Affair’ for short). Of Western scholars working on Indonesia in 1960s, Pauker was indeed infamous. Being a consultant for the CIA‐sponsored RAND Corporation has made his academic integrity doubtful. In addition, his active roles in several historical events in Indonesia in the 1960s have given his scholarship a bad reputation. Consequently, it is his name, rather than his works, that has often been mentioned and associated with what happened in Indonesia in the 1960s. However, this paper argues that precisely because of such a position, his pre‐‘1965 Affair’ works were to give a cool report and analysis of the current history, through which one can understand better the PKI before it was exterminated due to being accused of masterminding the killing of six top Army officers. Through these works the narrative of the Communist past can ironically be freed from the demonizing image constructed by the New Order regime. Yet, his post‐‘1965 Affair’ works were not only in parallel with, but also a part – if not the core – of the demonization as such. Through his ways of seeing the PKI in 1960s, one can see the shift from Baconian knowledge/power to Foucaultian power/knowledge relations.     

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.     

Queer Marxism in Taiwan

Abstract

This paper refutes the dominant assumption that Taiwan, unlike Mainland China, has developed a greater degree of tolerance for non‐normative sexual expressions as a result of its democratization. Recent legal and cultural changes indicate that Taiwan’s democratization consists of tendencies and repressive countertendencies. At the same time, this contradictory development has uniquely enabled a body of indigenous Marxist writings that mobilizes different senses of ‘queerness’ to demonstrate that the official celebration of diversity and human rights has actually further alienated and disempowered sex workers, promiscuous homosexuals, gay drug‐users, and other social subjects that are considered to be a threat to the liberal‐democratic order. I offer a reading of the critical writings of Josephine Ho, Yin‐bin Ning, Ding Naifei, and Wang Ping since the 1990s to explain why Queer Marxism in Taiwan is founded on a strong a‐statist discourse. I argue that a Queer Marxist intellectual practice emerged in Taiwan because liberal pluralism, institutionalized in what these critics call ‘state feminism,’ has failed to redress effects of social exclusion that (1) persist not despite of, but precisely because of, post‐martial law liberal reforms, and that (2) diverge in significant ways from individual experiences as members of officially defined minority groups (women, aborigines, migrant workers, or homosexuals). If social structuration is not always synchronic or isomorphic with state‐engineered legal changes, this difference also provides the occasion for Queer Marxists to interrogate the intellectual division of labor between feminism, assumed to be the analysis of gender as a non‐pluralizable category, and queer theory, assumed to be the analysis of sexuality as a non‐singular but personifiable category. Only by distinguishing between social relations and social identity can we comprehend how the rise of the Taiwanese Independence Movement played a key role in the naturalization of homosexuality as a fictive ethnicity, to which Queer Marxism developed as a historical response. As a geopolitically specific analysis of the aporia of substantive personhood, the Queer Marxism in Taiwan I re‐historicize is also a significant contribution to Marxist critique of liberal formalism that is of use to readers across the globe.     

Culture = politics: the emergence of new cultural forms of protest in the age of freeter

This paper examines new cultural and political movements that have developed outside of traditional leftist politics since the early 1990s in Japan. The new movements, including Dame‐ren, the Cardboard House Art movements in Shinjuku and recent anti‐war protests on the Iraqi war, were mainly led by young people, in particular, the freeter generation, who did not experience the leftist politics of the 1960s. These movements are different from traditional Marxist political ones and even from the new social movements in the 1960s and 1970s in the sense that they incorporate more cultural practices such as art, music, dance and performance into their political activities. The paper also explores the historical background against which the new movements were born and have developed since the end of the Bubble economy. It sees freeters, young part‐time workers, as emerging, new political actors that have appeared through the transition of a mode of production from Fordism to post‐Fordism. The transformation of society, economy and politics, known as ‘post‐modernization’ or recently as ‘globalization’, has asked us to re‐consider and re‐define the basic concepts such as class, proletariat, power, labour and work which we once shared. The paper tries to locate, through a critical examination, the new movements within a broader context of anti‐neo‐liberalism and anti‐globalization and find political potentiality within it.