Urban commoning for Jarip (self-standing) and survival: subcultural activism in “Seoul Inferno”*

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the spatial practice of a subcultural activism of the “young radicals” in Seoul, South Korea through the lens of urban commoning. As a cohort of people born after the 1980s, these young musicians, artists, and cultural activists have endeavored to create, produce, and transform urban spaces through involvement in a series of anti-eviction protests. In particular, this study investigates how and why radical musicians, artists, and their associates have negotiated the chasms among their personal lifestyle, collective subculture, and political activism by pursuing their spatial practices for self-standing and survival over the past 10 years. Although not necessarily place specific, several cases are drawn from a group that relocated to the central area of Seoul since the mid-2010s, making its urban activism a subcultural (and transcultural) formation.     

Murakami Haruki and the historical memory of East Asia

Abstract

In this article, I would like to focus on an analysis of internal logic of the ‘Haruki phenomenon’ as a symptom in current East Asian public culture. In particular, I will discuss how Haruki searches for the healing method for the ‘60s complex’ among Japan’s ‘Sixties’ Kids,’ including Haruki himself, through an analysis of his novels Norwegian Wood (2000[1987]) and Kafka on the Shore (2005[2002]). In the process of analysis, we can witness that Haruki abandoned his task of ‘reconciliation with the 1960s’ through faith, rather than facing it directly, and fiznally stripped the 1960s of historicity and reality. He regarded the ‘reconciliation with the 1960s’ as something beyond an individual’s ability. Transforming the 1960s from a history of postwar Japan into an object of abstract and universal nostalgia, which is closed to the present, Haruki effectively met the latent desire of the East Asian people, who were experiencing the dissolution of their ideologies, at the right time. This is the essence of the Haruki phenomenon that emerged in East Asia over the last decade. I use the phrase ‘nostalgia that lost its nationality’ to describe the uncanny cultural phenomenon of East Asian readers longing for the 1960s pictured in Haruki’s novels as if this were their own past, despite their very different national memories. Nostalgia, a cultural symptom of the postmodern society, where remembering the nation’s past totally is impossible, is a blank imitation deprived of its original source. In short, the substance of the Haruki phenomenon is nostalgia that developed from a desire to forget the traumatic memories of the national histories in individual East Asian countries.     

Refugee,returnee, borderland: the accidental activists and Krys Lee’s How I Became a North Korean

ABSTRACT

Working through the entanglements of diaspora, national identification, and minority formation in the protracted aftermath of the Korean War, this article intends to take the dyadic subject of North Korean defector/refugee as an entry point for unpacking the rhetoric of freedom and salvation. Taking a cultural studies approach that regards literature as a terrain of political engagement for reconsidering the narratives of freedom in relation to the hierarchy of nationhood embedded in the protracted Cold War in Asia, I examine Krys Lee’s novel How I Became a North Korean (2016), an Asian American text that weaves together the story of an Asian American returnee with those of North Korean refugees in the North Korean-China borderland. Conflating refugee and returnee, Lee’s novel occasions an exploration of the ethics of co-presence that undergirded Asian American studies, to consider both the predicaments of North Korean refugees and the linkage between Asian America and Asia. Taking literature as a form of activism, this article furthermore seeks to reflect on the promise of activism by asking how the demands for the right for return may complicate the orthodox of humanitarian imagination, and render a moment for relational thinking beyond representation.     

Teenage Kicks: Exploring cultural value from a youth perspective

In contemporary accounts of cultural value, young people's perspectives are often restricted to analyses of their encounters with formal cultural institutions or schools or to debates surrounding the cultural implications of new digital spaces and technologies. Other studies have been dominated by instrumental accounts exploring the potential economic benefit and skills development facilitated by young people's cultural encounters and experiences. In this paper we examine the findings of a nine month project, which set out to explore what cultural value means to young people in Bristol. Between October 2013 and March 2014, the Arts and Humanities Research Council “Teenage Kicks” project organised 14 workshops at 7 different locations across the city, with young people aged 11–20. Working in collaboration with a network of cultural and arts organisations, the study gathered a range of empirical data investigating the complex ecologies of young people's everyday/“lived” cultures and values. Young people's own accounts of their cultural practices challenge normative definitions of culture and cultural value but also demonstrate how these definitions act to reproduce social inequalities in relation to cultural participation and social and cultural capital. The paper concludes that cultural policy-makers should listen and take young people's voices seriously in re-imaging the city's cultural offer for all young people.     

East Asia informal networks beyond the borders: sharing of ideas,skills, and experiences against capitalization of the commons

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the practices of networking by cultural collectives relating to art/activism in Asia. In recent years, independent, grassroots cultural and social spaces based on equal membership and multi-level networks have been created in this area. These spaces also function as experimental places to create models of alternative societies featuring sustainable lifestyles by connecting people beyond separate genres, such as art, music, agriculture, and craft. Thus, the practice of creating such places leads to an attempt to form new social relationships for common life, creation, and labor through the networking of individuals’ lives, which have become withdrawn, isolated, and forcefully separated by repressive social structures. Moreover, gathering at these places creates a collective subjectivity and shared emotions among their members. In many areas, collective political and artistic practices have been created, which transcend borders, cultures, and languages. The sharing processes of such practices have been steadily advancing.     

Mundi: articulating a post-Umbrella common(s)

ABSTRACT

This paper shares the experiences of an emergent collective of young intellectuals in Hong Kong and its recent project, Mundi, which consists of publication, activist research and communal transmission of knowledge. The project negotiates the notion and practice of “common” at the limit, from within the historical experience of Hong Kong, between academia and public intellectuals, global universalism and local particularism, and colonial knowledge and everyday urban practice. Affected by an intense desire to analyse and theorise the reality of Hong Kong, Mundi engages in a long process of decolonising knowledge production. The paper also explores how Mundi responds to the demand of the present post-Umbrella Hong Kong situation by problematising and re-articulating the common.     

Transpacific precarities: responding to Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Found and Rita Wong’s forage in East Asia

ABSTRACT

This essay investigates the stakes involved in responding to transpacific texts in East Asia, specifically in universities in Macau and Taiwan. It focuses on responses to two texts that represent in distinct ways precariatized lives in a transpacific frame: Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Found, a text that uncovers a path from Laos to a refugee camp in Thailand to Canada, a path made legible through a scrapbook kept by Thammavongsa’s father; and Rita Wong’s forage, a text that cuts across and between South China and North America to track the movements of peoples and goods and waste, including the movement of electronic waste (or “e-waste”). By discussing selected responses to these texts, this essay investigates how such responses can be considered as part of a long-term pedagogical process of cultivating imaginations and striving to develop forms of responsibility to what this essay calls transpacific precarities. It suggests that carefully attending to such responses, always partial and in progress, can help us to better understand Asian American studies in East Asia as it continues to evolve through acts of teaching and learning in different sites.     

Facing history,resolving disputes,working towards peace in East Asia: a statement by the Minjian East Asia Forum

Preface ?Concerned with the escalation of territorial disputes in East Asia since July, we proposed setting up the Minjian East Asia Forum (the Forum hereafter) on October 6, 2012, serving as a platform for East Asian people to face regional disputes and exchange opinions together. Minjian is a Chinese term that has counterparts in Japanese, as minkan, and in Korean as mingan, based on the same Chinese characters. Although used differently with different meanings in each context, minjian, as used here, refers to the non-governmental, popular voices and organizations, initiated by the people. Although the Forum was started to respond to and engage in the recent territorial disputes, it was not created out of thin air, but on the foundation of East Asian solidarities built by many predecessors over the last 30 years.1 “In the last two decades, we have participated in the minjian, read here as people-based and hence non-governmental, solidarity movement of various kinds—including Asia Regional Network for Alternatives (ARENA, 1980s), the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Movements (2000–), the East Asia Critical Journals Conference (2006–), and West Heavens: India China Summit on Social Thought (2010–). We also established the Inter-Asia School (2011–) and organized the first Asian Circle of Thought in Shanghai (2012) as well as the Modern Asian Thought project (2012–). In doing this work, we follow the footsteps of Ashis Nandy, Muto Ichiyo, Chen Yingzhen, Paik Nak-Chung, and the late Mizoguchi Yuzo. In moving around Asia, we created a linkage between circles of critical intellectuals and movement, and by talking to friends in the circle of thought, we came to realize that within the entire expanse of Asia, East Asia is the region that experiences the greatest difficulty in stepping outside of the Cold War division and in reimagining the region as a collectivity. Especially when China and India are fast developing their economies, we must be more aware of the social contradictions and inequalities that are deepening in the region, as well as the role each state plays in the global inter-state system. In this complex and volatile context, we must try to find a better road to development—for public good, justice, equality, and world peace. Unfortunately, the party politics in each state has blocked the proactive interaction within the region for its own interest. Even when East Asian states are imagining an East Asian community, a common platform for civil societies to communicate and address issues that are of regional significance is achingly absent. In this sense, our imagination of ‘minjian East Asia’ is a people-based, non-governmental platform for regional dialogue that attempts to check and balance the exchange of interest based on party politics, and monitor the governments, preventing them from making arbitrary decisions that will escalate tension and threaten peace in the region” (Chen et al. 2013 Chen, Kuan-Hsing, Chih-Ming Wang and Qingya Hu. 2013. Minjian East Asia Forum: feelings and imaginations. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 14(2) ,, this issue[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]). We expect the Forum (with the secretariat to be based in Seoul) to become a people-to-people network that will continue to extend beyond borders and express people's voices, fostering the steady development of peace in Asia and the world through communication, conversation, and collaboration.     

Pi Village,with occasional music: notes on the New Workers Art Troupe

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on music practice of the New Workers Art Troupe (NWAT, xingongrenyishutuan) that is based in Pi Village (picun), Beijing. During last 3–4 years, the troupe has gradually attracted the attention of young scholars and college students due to their public advocacy for the rights and benefits of migrant workers in Mainland China. Given structural marginalization of workers and peasants that ironically contradicts with the officially claimed principles of socialism, the NWAT should not be ignored as far as cultural activism in nowadays Mainland China is concerned. Many researchers have investigated NWAT’s practices according to approaches of various discipline, however, the cultural meanings and social-historical condition of its core art form, music, have been largely neglected. Whereas this neglect acts both as cause and consequence, discourses about the NWAT have gradually been overwhelmed by moral commitment or sympathy to “disadvantaged groups,” which eventually proves nothing more than the coming-being of a moral order dominated by the new-born Chinese middle-class. In order to comprehend the affects the NWAT’s music articulated, what need to be illuminated are not only what they are singing, but also where and how they sing, as well as the cultural mechanism behind their practice.     

The history of the unspeakable: Shimokawa Masaharu’s The forgotten history of evacuation

ABSTRACT

Histories of wartime Japan often focus on the Japanese home islands after Japan’s surrender to Allied forces on 15 August 1945. Japanese citizens living in Korea, Manchuria, and elsewhere in the far-flung Japanese Empire are usually left out of the historiographical record. In a new book about the evacuees—hikiagesha—from the defunct Empire, Shimokawa Masaharu presents a vivid, harrowing portrait of the suffering of those who had to make their way back to Japan after the end of the Greater East Asia War. In particular, Shimokawa focuses on Izumi Sei’ichi, who established a sanatorium and abortuary in Fukuoka for women who had been raped by enemy soldiers.     

Populist cosmopolitanism: the predicament of subjectivity and the Japanese fascination with overseas

Abstract

This article examines the way in which seemingly contradictory positions of populism and cosmopolitanism are articulated in the development of the Japanese post‐Second World War fascination with overseas. Specifically, I analyze the writings of Ohashi Kyosen, a popular television entertainer, and investigate how a particular mode of subjectivity is expressed through his ideas of overseas leisure and retirement in his best‐selling book Kyosen: Choose Your Own Life (Kyosen: Jinsei no Sentaku) and related essays published around 2000. While the issue of subjectivity has been the central concern throughout modern Japanese history, earlier analyses have been focused on the critical writings of intellectuals. I argue that in order to understand the larger social impacts of the translation of subjectivity, we also need to examine how the issue is articulated in popular discourses. Ohashi’s popular writings suggest that the issue of subjectivity still haunts the contemporary everyday lives of many Japanese, and continues to be the key predicament for articulating a culturally meaningful model of ‘citizen’ in Japan. Ohashi’s writings raise questions about what it means to be an active agent of one’s life, and how to situate the self in the larger society. Through an analysis of Ohashi’s narratives, I first illustrate how subjectivity is negotiated through people’s demands for leisure and their concerns about retirement, both of which are entangled with their fascination with overseas. Second, I examine Ohashi’s narratives as an expression of the paradoxical position of the Japanese citizenry conditioned by the US–Japan political, economic, and military coalition. I discuss how the predicament of articulating Japanese subjectivity reflects this paradoxical position under the legacy of Cold War geopolitics in Asia.     

Problems and problematics of teaching cultural studies in Taiwan

Abstract

The essay was written in the context of a Teaching Cultural Studies (in Asia) Workshop. In dialogues with practitioners and young faculty in Taiwan and Asia, it utilizes the author's own past and present experiences to articulate the difficulties and problematic of teaching Cultural Studies. The main argument proposes that teaching Cultural Studies needs to be grounded in local intellectual traditions and histories upon which critical works out of Asia and the Third World will have to be actively engaged to overcome the dominant condition of knowledge which singularizes the West as the only source for intellectual interventions.     

Intermarriage and imperial subject formation in colonial Taiwan: Shōji Sōichi's Chin-fujin

Abstract

In this article, I analyze the political significance of Shōji Sōichi's Chin-fujin (The wife of Mr. Chen), an intricate story of an interracial family in colonial Taiwan struggling to come to terms with their cultural identifications against the backdrop of political upheavals in the late 1910s to the mid-1930s. The novel was well received in wartime Japan and received a 1943 Greater East Asia Literary Prize. Contemporary critics praised it for depicting the perseverance of a Japanese woman married into a Taiwanese family and for representing a Han-Taiwanese intellectual realistically. Yet it was the political effect of the novel that was appreciated by those who selected it for the prize. Shōji demonstrated how the policy and political discourse of the Japanese empire could be acted out in a site of family life, the site that was regarded as critically important for colonial control. He depicted a Taiwanese elite man, his Japanese wife, and their mixed-blood daughter as trying to transcend the old categorical distinction between metropolitan Japanese and natives of Taiwan and seeking a new unified identity position based on colonial Taiwan. I want to show the repressive nature of the national subject formation outlined in this colonial fantasy.     

Soeng Joeng Toi: opening fissures towards a platform and a bridge

ABSTRACT

In May of 2017, a space called Soeng Joeng Toi was established, gathering a variety of people to share and co-organise a space together. While it may be considered a relative newcomer, Soeng Joeng Toi’s appearance can be seen as an inevitable breakaway from the mainstream political, economic and cultural climate of a city like Guangzhou. From its initial planning stages to its official operation, much of Soeng Joeng Toi’s inspiration and methods have come from extensive exchange with independent spaces both in China and abroad, where mutual recognition of similar conditions and thinking of the commons have led these different spaces to continue developing in a sustained dialogue. This text, written from the perspective of two of Soeng Joeng Toi’s “co-proprietors,” introduces the beginnings of Soeng Joeng Toi, its current operations and experiences of connecting with others as well as explores the possibilities of a shared activism involving people from different fields and geographic regions.     

The way our generation imagined the world

Abstract

This paper tells the worldview of a generation that grew up in the Communist revolutionary ideology. For the people of this generation, the world was always divided into two worlds, the East and the West. Throughout China’s modern national history, the West, led by the United States, has been the imperialist aggressor and invader; on a global scale, it has been the hegemonic power that rejected and blockaded China; in social structure and ideology, it was capitalist, countering socialist China, and ever ready to subvert the New China. According to Mao Zedong’s three‐pronged theory of ‘enemy, friends and us,’ the West belonged to the ‘enemy’ side. The Bandung Conference in 1955, and prior to it, the Peace Conference for Asia and the Pacific Region held in Beijing, had a great impact on high‐school students in Mainland China. We viewed these conferences as promising signs that the New China would rid itself of isolation, and felt very close to those countries of ‘neighbors and friends.’     

Working Within the Crisis

ABSTRACT

This article examines microhistories and the histories of the everyday both in the context of developments in social and cultural history since the 1960s, and in the light of political and social change in post-war European society. Moving beyond debates about historical narrative, it emphasizes issues of perspective, space, size and historical distance in shaping historical interpretation. This historiographical trend, it argues, emanates from two major debates within the social sciences and politics. One concerns the nature of everyday life under modern capitalism and ‘consumer society’, the other the vexed issue of human agency. Focusing particularly on Italian microstoria, it argues that such writing is best understood as the commitment to a humanist agenda which places agency and historical meaning in the realm of day-to-day transactions, and which sees their recuperation as the proper task of the historian.     

Screen violence and partition

ABSTRACT

Recent film and television treatment of South Asia from UK producers have introduced new angles on the violent politics of colonial past, whether this be the activities of the East India Company in the early days of Empire, or about Partition, at the ostensible Raj’s end. The controversy over Gurinder Chadha’s 2017 film Viceroy’s House is taken as an opportunity to consider the new South Asian film and television studies and the emergent scholars that are challenging conventional media studies models. The co-constitution of here and there is given as an analytic lens through which to comprehend representation and stereotyping in films “about” politics in South Asia, and the view taken is that a debilitating divide and rule, via mechanisms of representation, remains strongly in place, despite the fighting efforts of the new South Asian media scholarship.     

Is the postwar state melting down?: an East Asian perspective on post-Fukushima Japan

Prime Minister Abe’s return to power in Japan dealt a blow to the anti-nuclear movement and returned the country to broadly pro-nuclear policies. Meanwhile, eight years on, although the effects of the Fukushima disaster are still being felt, Japan’s anti-nuclear movement has struggled to move forward or effect changes in policy. This article argues that prospects for change will not emerge until Japan’s anti-nuclear movement is able to look beyond its national borders and articulate a perspective on nuclear power that takes into account other countries within East Asia. The 3.11 Great East Japan Earthquake revealed heretofore hidden aspects of the Japanese state and society. The truth is that Japan’s postwar state (Sengo-kokka) is actually a nuclear power state (Genpatsu-kokka), a byproduct of the US-Japan alliance under the East Asian Cold War system, which insulated nuclear policy from the standard operation of democratic politics. As a product of the Cold War, the issue of nuclear power and development extends beyond Japan’s national borders and relates to the questions of US superpower sponsorship and the armistice system in East Asia that pertain broadly to the politics of East Asia. It is important to understand that Japan’s nuclear energy is a product of the Cold War in East Asia, and the armistice system that constitutes the international system in East Asia must be discarded if Japan is to become a post-nuclear energy state.     

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.     

Depoliticized politics,multiple components of hegemony,and the eclipse of the Sixties

Abstract

Following the recent trends of globalization and regionalization, the idea of Asia has been revived in political, economic, and cultural fields. This essay examines some of the various uses of this idea in modern East Asian and especially Chinese history. The essay consists of four parts. Part One discusses the derivativeness of the idea of Asia, that is, how this idea developed from modern European history, especially the nineteenth century European narrative of “World History,” and it points out how the early modern Japanese “theory of shedding Asia” derived from this narrative. Part Two studies the relationship between the idea of Asia and two forms of Narodism against the background of the Chinese and Russian revolutions – one, exemplified by Russian Narodism, attempted to use Asian particularity to challenge modern capitalism; the other, represented by Sun Yat‐sen, attempted to construct a nation‐state according to a socialist revolutionary program, and to develop agricultural capitalism under the particular social conditions of Asia. Part Three considers the differences and tensions between the “Great Asia‐ism” of Chinese revolutionaries such as Sun and the Japanese idea of Toyo (East Asia), and it discusses the need to overcome the categories of nation‐state and international relations in order to understand the question of Asia. Part Four discusses the need to go beyond early modern maritime‐centered accounts, nationalist frameworks, and Eurocentrism in re‐examining the question of Asia through historical research by focusing on the particular legacies of Asia (such as the tributary system) and the problems of “early modernity.”