Finding a voice,fighting for rights: the emergence of the transgender movement in Hong Kong 1

Abstract

This paper is intended to provide a space for reflection on Hong Kong’s transgender movement at its current stage, with particular reference to the objectives and activities of the Hong Kong Transgender Equality and Acceptance Movement (‘TEAM’). Established in 2002, TEAM was the first organized group of transgender people and supporters in Hong Kong. First, the paper examines the emergence of the transgender movement in Hong Kong, situating the stated objectives of TEAM in the broader social, legal and political context in Hong Kong. It then considers the successes and limitations of TEAM’s activities to date, measured against its objectives. Finally, it examines why Hong Kong’s transgender community has not yet fought for the right to legal recognition of their gender identity, as have transgender individuals and transgender movements in many other countries around the world. In the Asia‐Pacific region these include Australia, Japan, the People’s Republic of China, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and New Zealand. Through interviews with members of TEAM, the paper questions whether legal recognition is indeed a concern and/or priority for Hong Kong’s transgender community, and, if so, what prevents Hong Kong transgender people from claiming their right to legal recognition in the courts or through the political process.     

Collective memory and research-led filmmaking: Spatial legacies of dictatorship in the Dominican Republic

ABSTRACT

This article explores theoretical-methodological challenges in researching the formation of collective memory in the wake of dictatorship. The worldwide growth of memory sites suggests space crystallizes memory into stable formations. However, rather than monolithic discourses, environments attest to complex processes of memorialization and willful amnesia. I propose that research-led filmmaking can draw out spaces’ heterogeneous “stories in waiting.” Through the documentary After Trujillo, which revisits memory sites and ruins of Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship from 1930 to 1961 in the Dominican Republic, I assess how working at the interface between research and film can (a) probe space’s testimonial capacity; (b) engage audiences in public debates about violent pasts; and (c) stimulate sustainable discussions through online platforms. Given that films still lack recognition as academic outputs, at stake here is the claim that creative methodologies constitute “a form of research” and “detectable research outputs.”     

China’s popular nationalism on the internet. Report on the 2005 anti‐Japan network struggles 1

Abstract

In April 2005, waves of anti‐Japan protest swept China and South Korea. In China, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in more than 40 cities to protest against Japan over its irresponsible attitude toward the history of colonial rule and war crimes of 60 years ago. Despite the protest having a strong ground and its action being generally non‐violent and peaceful, it was then severely condemned by many Western critics and media as chauvinistic and irrational, and as being manipulated by the Chinese government to legitimize its rule. Against such a notion, this essay attempts to work with China’s ‘popular nationalism’ (renmin minzu zhuyi), and considers its space as an autonomous political domain that is independent of the state nationalism. The ‘cyber‐nationalism’ (wanglu minzu zhuyi), this paper argues, not only challenges the state monopoly over domestic nationalist discursive production, but also opens up new possibilities for performing common people’s ‘public discursive right’ (gonggong huayu quanli). Far from being a homogeneous unity, the online campaign is characterized by free exchange of information and lively debate over the boycott strategy.     

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.     

Pacarayasara : a perturbing voice in Thai journalism

Abstract

This study documents the growth of the discourse of ‘god‐king’ (devaraja) around Thailand's King Bhumibol and explores how Brahmanical symbolisms of royal absolutism have acquired renewed potency alongside Buddhism as a basis of political legitimation in 21st century Thailand. Previous studies have interpreted the growing trend for Thailand's constitutional monarch to be represented as a ‘demi‐divine’ ‘virtual god‐king’ to reflect an ideological strategy set in train by mid‐20th century authoritarian military rule. However, political processes alone do not account fully for the persistence and intensification of this phenomenon since the end of military dictatorship. The pre‐modern discourse of ‘god‐king’ has also been given new life by visual media and the spectralisation of life under neoliberalism, which together produce a regime of representation that auraticises King Bhumibol. These technologies of enchantment have permitted emerging prosperity religions to be harnessed to a conservative nationalist agenda and, together with Thailand's strictly policed lese‐majesty law, have institutionalised a commodified and mass‐mediatised ideology of magico‐divine royal power that works to legitimate King Bhumibol's acquisition of political influence.     

Sitting on the dock of the bay: 1 partial views of change – Singapore,Tokyo and Hong Kong

Abstract

Cities embody the political projects of elites; the spaces that are made frame the lives of their inhabitants; it is within these spaces that ordinary people make their lives. Cities seem dense, resistant and hard but they are always in flux; their transience marks their elites’ responses to the shifting demands/opportunities of changing circumstances; change has its benefits and its costs; these are not borne equally; all these matters can be accessed in many ways, here the route is though the accumulation of ethnographic detail; partial recollection; cities illuminated through the small scale; it is the way in which we all grasp the cities in which we live.     

Authors' Biographies

ABSTRACT

This article critically engages with a contemporary play, Aur Kitne Tukde, staged in the Hindi language in various cities and towns in India and Pakistan, about gendered violence during Partition. It unsettles the master narrative of ‘honour’, ‘martyrdom’, ‘choice’ and women's ‘agency’ on Partition. The article also highlights the significance of the play in breaking the silences around Partition in the theatre, which, as compared with other cultural and literary mediums, reaches out to a larger section of people in unique ways. It underlines how the whole production of the play was a process of traversing and sharing the journey and trauma of Partition not only for the actors but also for the audiences. The article also tries to problematize the whole question of violence and its representation.     

Culture as commons: theoretical challenges and empirical evidence from occupied cultural spaces in Italy

ABSTRACT

What happens when we try to understand art as a commons? Elinor Ostrom [(1990/2012). Governing the commons. Cambridge University Press] challenged Hardin’s “The tragedy of the commons” [(1968). Science, 162(3859), 1243–1248] demonstrating that the governance of common pool resources is not always destined to failure. Ostrom’s analysis was initially applied to the management of shared natural resources; however, over time the term “commons” has also been used to describe non-tangible resources, specifically knowledge. Can Ostrom’s theory of the commons inform artistic practice? This article investigates some challenges presented by these research questions and their implications for cultural policy. In order to provide an empirical ground for the discussion of this topic, this paper will analyse the case studies of two cultural spaces in Italy, Teatro Valle (Rome) and Asilo Filangieri (Naples), which were occupied by groups of cultural professionals and managed as commons between 2011 and 2016; the outcomes of these occupations indicate possible ways to develop a commons-oriented approach to culture.     

Narrativizing trauma,activating awareness: Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking and its afterlives

ABSTRACT

When Iris Chang published The Rape of Nanking in 1997, exactly sixty years after the Nanjing Massacre, the subtitle The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, called attention to one of the greatest human tragedies in the twentieth century. As a powerful historic reminder, The Rape of Nanking aims “to understand the event so that lessons can be learned and warnings sounded.” This paper focuses on Chang’s role as a writer/fighter who uses words to fight forgetfulness with a forceful narrative concerning one of the most dreadful traumas in the collective psyche of the Chinese people. It produces quite a number of “afterlives,” including different Chinese translations in Taiwan and mainland China, a nanking winter (2008), a play by the second-generation Chinese Canadian playwright Marjorie Chan, Nanjing Requiem (2011), a novel by the first-generation Chinese American novelist Ha Jin, and The Nanjing Massacre: Poems (2013), a collection of poems by the third-generation Chinese Hawaiian poet Wing Tek Lum. Furthermore, the docudrama Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking (2007), directed by Bill Spahic and Anne Pick, presents a filmic representation of the short fascinating life of this passionate writer. This paper discusses how Chang, role as a writer and activist, fights against amnesia with remembrance as well as her rich legacy to the world across linguistic, generic, and semiotic boundaries. Chang’s text and its afterlives strive to give voice to those nameless war victims as a step towards truth, justice, reconciliation, and peace.     

Culture and Composure: Creating Narratives of the Gendered Self in Oral History Interviews

ABSTRACT

This article tracks the development of French social history from its Labroussian origins through to the uncertainties that beset the subject in the 1970s and 1980s, and the call for a tournant critique (‘critical turning point’) in response to the conceptual challenges to its traditional methodological approaches. It then describes the responses that emerged in the wake of the tournant critique, as social historians attempted to renew their field. Instead of pursuing the debate about whether ‘class' or ‘order’ was a more useful category of analysis for early modern historians, French social historians have attempted, like their colleagues in the social sciences, to make the individual rather than collectivities the central focus of their research. The article outlines three approaches which try to capture the agency of individuals: prosopography, micro-history, and network analysis. Finally, the article makes the case that longitudinal studies can provide a means through which social history's traditional concerns with explaining the ‘social’ can be met whilst not losing sight of the exciting questions posed by cultural history in the last two decades.     

A possible teleology of cultural sector data in England

ABSTRACT

In March 2019, Arts Council England (ACE), an official statistics producer, started collecting a new set of data from its National Portfolio Organisations intended to reveal whether those organizations’ intentions correlate with the perceptions of their peers and audiences. In a world dominated by quantitative data, the Impact and Insight Toolkit addresses a perceived lacuna and marks a substantial investment in qualitative metrics. ACE also expects it to address a number of other concerns – help organizations self-evaluate, measure their short-term outcomes and advocate more effectively. Indeed, it envisages that an aggregation of the data collected will support the case for sustained public support of the sector. The Toolkit’s launch comes at a time when changes to the UK’s official statistics are encouraged, and policymakers are looking elsewhere to inform their thinking. The campaigning aspect of ACE’s aspirations suggests a model of data collection and analysis distinct from that of official statistics production, valued for its impartiality. This article considers what might happen if the Toolkit, which relates to ACE’s role as a development agency, encourages data to be collected and analysed in order to deliver specific outcomes. It reflects on three visions of cultural sector data from the past 50 years: Toffler’s The Art of Measuring the Arts, DCMS’s Taking Part and ACE’s Impact and Insight Toolkit. These suggest a trajectory of cultural sector data determined by increasing importance being attached to institutional interests, and implies that the future of cultural sector data in England may be determined by how ACE addresses its potentially conflicting interests as an official data provider and development agency. Greater investment in the former would more accurately reveal the arts’ contribution to economic and social development; greater investment in the latter would encourage the teleological development of cultural sector data designed for sectorial advocacy.     

Rebuilding the homeland in poetry and song: Simin Behbahani,Dariush Eghbali,and the making of a transnational national anthem

ABSTRACT

This article traces the transformation of an Iranian nationalist poem by Simin Behbahani entitled “I Will Rebuild You, Homeland” (1981) into an expatriate national anthem, and the poem-song’s subsequent incorporation into protests and political speeches by individuals and groups in and outside of Iran. Employing musical and textual analysis, interviews, and a transnational perspective on cultural circulation and reception, I show how exile pop singer Dariush Eghbali’s adaptation of the original poem mobilized the text and opened it to audience participation. The article argues that the poem and its musical–textual permutations exemplify contemporary Iranian practices of national identification in which conflicting parties attempt to motivate “the Iranian people” to political ends. As actors from around the world and across the political spectrum repeatedly turn to nationalist poetry, song, anthem, and political speech, we observe how mass-mediated popular culture reveals ongoing recourse to nationalist forms even in transnational space.     

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.     

Remembering the atrocities of their ancestral lands: reading Korean American “comfort women” novels in Japan

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the significance of reading two Korean American novels which address the issue of Japanese military sexual slavery (known as the “comfort women” system) in the context of Japan: Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman and Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life. I will explore how this act can facilitate the understanding of the militarized sexual violence in the present social and discursive context of Japan, where the issue suffers from a strong backlash. Lee’s A Gesture Life with its critique of multiple militarized imperialisms challenges the Japanese revisionists’ effort to deny the egregious wrongs of Japan’s military sexual slavery; it also responds to popular criticism in Japan that Korean/Americans disregard the practices of Western imperial and military violence and only condemn Japanese war crimes. The paper in turn also reads Keller’s Comfort Woman through the frame of Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, a Japanese Canadian novel which remembers the internment and U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki. My aim here is to examine both the risks and possibilities which this reading can generate. While it can help us see the comparable acts of remembering war sufferings from the standpoint of diasporas, it can also erase the non-equivalence between the two histories.     

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.     

‘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.     

Takamine Go: a possible Okinawan cinema 1

Abstract

Despite little improvement in the socio‐political predicament of Okinawa since its reversion to Japan, culturally there has recently been something of an ‘Okinawa boom’ in mainland Japan. This has involved a huge interest in Okinawa and Okinawan cultures in mainland Japan and an increasing ‘consumption’ of Okinawan goods and cultural artefacts. One of the symptoms of this trend has been the growth in the last five years or so, in the number of films set in Okinawa. Many of these films present conventional stereotypical images of Okinawa and, whether wittingly or not, have contributed to the ‘cosmetic operation’ of Japan’s multiculturalism by providing a utopian vision of Okinawanness and erasing Okinawa’s problems from the screen. However, an Okinawan filmmaker, Takamine Go, critically challenges such stereotypes and Japan’s cosmetic multiculturalism. This paper focuses on Takamine’s Untamagirū (1989 Takamine, Go. 1989. Untamagirū  [Google Scholar]) and Tsuru‐Henry (1999). It examines the cinematic strategies mobilised by these films – the use of different languages, allegorical implications, complex montages of image and sound, and the departure from conventional narrative realism. These strategies, it will be suggested, not only enable the films to explore complex forms of public memory and history but also to challenge the notion of a homogeneous Japan and its ‘quasi‐orientalist’ gaze towards Okinawa. The paper then proceeds to argue that Takamine’s films should not simply be regarded as a ‘regional’ variant of Japanese cinema but as a ‘specifically Okinawan cinema’ that both overlaps with and opposes a ‘national’ Japanese cinema.     

Geolocating popular memory: Recorded images of Hashima Island after Skyfall

ABSTRACT

This article examines efforts to document Japan’s Hashima Island following its appearance in the popular film Skyfall. It describes how the film’s commercial success led to an effort by Google to produce images of the island’s built environment using digital navigation technologies. It further describes how this effort led the Japanese government to include Hashima Island in a bid to gain Unesco heritage status for Meiji-era sites of industrialization. Drawing from visual studies, critical media studies, and from interdisciplinary approaches to collective memory, this article analyzes how the circulation of images depicting Hashima Island in popular culture affects continuing efforts to hold Japan accountable for injustices committed there in the past. By narrowing on the moment “after” Skyfall, the article concludes with an assessment of the island’s Google Street View archive in terms of its broader impact on the uses of navigation, spatial presence, and digital heritage.     

Bursting paradigms: a colour wheel of practice-research

ABSTRACT

In this article, I question practice as a research paradigm by exploring its position in relation to non-positivist qualitative methodologies. Frayling’s [1994. Research in art and design. Royal College of Art Research Papers, 1(1), 1993/4] distinctions between research into, through, and as (for) practice are expanded to explore overlaps between these approaches. I argue for the need to understand the nuances of different epistemologies and ontologies that underpin diverse disciplinary approaches to practice-research. This is done through an analysis of a selection of Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded projects to find out how they are using and/or embedding practice in the research process. The resulting Colour Wheel of Practice-Research illustrates a spectrum of positions of practice in relation to research, suggesting existing research paradigms are bursting at the seams and that the “disciplinary matrix” of practice might offers other ways of knowing. The reason I have chosen to focus primarily on AHRC-funded projects is because it explicitly states its support of “practice-led research” and that it “remains dedicated to this area of research”. This article aims to add to knowledge of how and why practice-research is of continuing interest to research councils, universities, and those identifying as practice-based/led researchers.