100 Voices after 100 years: Remembering the Armenian Genocide in diaspora

ABSTRACT

Relying on Marianne Hirsch’s work on postmemory, as well as theories about new media and memory, this study explores how a group of Armenian young adults in Toronto remember the Armenian Genocide from afar, 100 years after it happened. The data come from 100 Voices: Survival, Memory, Justice. Through a thematic and visual analysis of a sample of video clips posted on YouTube, this study argues that 100 Voices is a work of postmemory that stands at the intersection of prevailing ethno-nationalist constructions of Armenian identity on the one hand, and universal discourses of human rights and historical justice, on the other. Participants are positioned as the Armenian youth, performing a particular duty of memory to remember the genocide and transmit genocide memories to future generations. At the same time, 100 Voices enables these youths to emerge as activists who express their group-based claims through universal parameters of claim-making.     

Cold War and the contested identity formation of Korean filmmakers: on Boxes of Death and Kim Ki-yo˘ng's USIS films

The definition of the Korean national cinema in the course of modern and contemporary history of South Korea has provoked controversy. This article examines the negotiations in the identity formation of Korean filmmakers examining specific objects from years of reconstruction following the Korean War. It pays attention to the time when state-building and nation-building became combined enduring heterogeneity of this process. Kim Ki-yo?ng's films depict such characters. His public information short films reflect the legacy of American war films. However, they also contain self-conscious moments when the director refuses to be identified as a mere successor of American documentary filmmakers. Kim's first commercial film, Boxes of Death (1955), an anti-communist thriller, shows great influence from Hollywood, but also with a strong auteurist impulse, theatrical tradition, and the Japanese colonial legacy. However, the most important aspect is the standing presence of America and the USIS-Korea in the identity of Kim Ki-yo?ng and his film. American agencies intervened in the work of Korean filmmakers in the interest of “Free World” bloc-building, and those filmmakers used such agencies to obtain resources. The heterogeneity in the process of the subject formation in Korean national cinema was one common characteristic of many filmmakers of the post-Korean War era.     

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.     

Reading the mass violence in Indonesia 1965–1966 as a form of primitive accumulation

Abstract

A human rights perspective is compromised in its ability to understand and respond to the mass violence that took place in Indonesia, largely against members and supporters of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) from 1965–1966. In “Indonesia's Original Sin: Mass Killings and Capitalist Expansion, 1965–66,” Hilmar Farid makes the point that a human rights standpoint is limited when capital or its various actors, are involved in propagating and/or perpetrating mass violence. In starting to fashion an alternative reading, Farid proposes Marx's notion of primitive accumulation. While Farid's position is suggestive, I contend that his analysis is marred by a number of theoretical weaknesses, which I attempt to sublate in this article. As such, I will offer an alternative reading of primitive accumulation perceived through a multi-dimensional local/global dialectic.     

Some Reflections on Hagiology with Reference to the Early Mawlawī-Christian Relations in the Light of the Manāqib al-cārifīn

Abstract

Hagiographic sources are of particular value for the study of social life in historical societies. They reflect contemporary social discourses such as how to deal with members of different religious or ethnic groups or social classes. A prime Muslim example of this genre is the Persian Manāqib al-?ārifīn (Feats of the Knowers of God) of the Mawlawī-Dervish A?mad-i Aflākī written in Konya in the eighth/fourteenth century. It is dedicated to the life and deeds of the masters of the emerging brotherhood of the Mawlawiyya. This community was of outstanding importance in urban central and western Asia Minor in the eighth/fourteenth century, both as an institution of the urban middle classes and as an effective missionary, and was thus an important protagonist in the process of Islamisation. After some methodological considerations on the genre of hagiography, the article will address the issue of missionary strategies of the early Mawlawiyya on the basis of the Manāqib al-?ārifīn.     

Malaysia as an “Other” in Indonesian popular discourse

This article reads contemporary popular publications in Indonesia on the topic of Indonesian–Malaysian relations. It looks at how Indonesia perceives Malaysia and the function of that perception in relation to Indonesian national identity. The article also looks at how Indonesian perceptions of Malaysia were discussed during the revolutionary period by reading the speeches held at the constitutional meeting (BPUPKI) and the Konfrontasi period, reading the speeches written by Sukarno and the letter of Pan-Malay leader exiled in Indonesia, Ibrahim Yaacob. The article then compares the ideas espoused by Sukarno, Yaacob and others in the past and the arguments presented in the present day concerning Malaysia. A preliminary conclusion is reached that geopolitical anxiety and not kinship is a more important factor in how contemporary Indonesia sees Malaysia.     

A Critical Perspective on British Social Surveys and Community Studies and Their Accounts of Married Life c.1945–70

ABSTRACT

The family was a subject of prime importance to sociologists in the post-war period. Married life was one of the principal themes of British social surveys and community studies undertaken at this time. This article investigates the limitations associated with these contemporary analyses and how they can be explained. It will examine the relationship between the studies' findings and contemporary social developments, the variations in married life, and how the researchers' accounts related to their wider aims. It will conclude that such studies were more a product of the optimism of the post-war period than prompted by patriarchal beliefs.     

Johnnie To's “northern expedition:” from Milkyway Image to Drug War

Abstract

After the Regulations on the Administration of Movies came into force in 2002, Johnnie To became famous for sticking with the Hong Kong market while Hong Kong filmmakers rushed north. In Drug War, his 50th film, he decided to bring his unique genre to the Mainland for the first time. Drug War was the first Johnnie To gangster film to be shot entirely in the Mainland. Despite its outstanding box office record in the Mainland, some Johnnie To fans would lament that his typical style is missing in Drug War, a film that has become “realistic.” This paper argues that Johnnie To's “northern expedition.” backed up by a tradition of translations between business and pleasure, has to be interpreted against the backdrop of his production company Milkyway Image (HK) Ltd. Johnnie To, as a migrant crossing the border, brought with him the long tradition of cultural translations from Milkyway Image, which acted as a “seed of the untranslatable” in Homi Bhabha's term. It was this untranslatability of Milkyway-cum-Hong Kong flavour that distinguished To from other Hong Kong directors who were assimilated into the Mainland market as a simple mélange. To capture the rich inter-textual allusions to not only Milkyway Image but also to Hong Kong in Drug War helps one to understand how Hong Kong cinema can move on in the age of Chinese cinema.     

Museums and the material assets of dignity and memory: Confronting loss without compensation in Expolio and Francofonia

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the connections between memory and human dignity as it intersects with art and art museums. Two recent examples—the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos 2016 exhibit Expolio, and Alexander Sokurov’s 2015 film-essay, Francofonia—highlight the need for a larger conversation regarding the way accumulation and loss of cultural products uphold or denigrate human dignity, a concept that is not often thought of in relation to the assets of art museums. Using the historical frames set out by these examples, which span from the opening of the Louvre to the plundering of cultural artifacts in Syria, I argue that dignity has always been an asset of museums. It is through the merging of dignity and memory, in the context of art and culture, that the emerging field of human rights museology can begin to speak more broadly to art history and memory studies alike.     

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.     

‘An Era of Domesticity’? Histories of Women and Gender in Interwar Britain

ABSTRACT

This article considers one specific strand of discussion around HIV/AIDS, in order to think about the uses and limitations of human rights discourse in late twentieth century Britain. HIV/AIDS presented particular problems for prisons, which were initially presented as breeding grounds of infection. This shifted with the rise of human rights language and laws in the 1990s, but talk of rights for prisoners was not as comfortable a fit as talk of equivalence of care. This story is situated in the broader context of attitudes towards crime, HIV/AIDS, and rights in late twentieth century Britain.     

Bad feelings,feeling bad: the affects of Asian-Indigenous coalition

ABSTRACT

This article theorizes the affective forms that Asian-Indigenous alliances might take, using examples from contemporary Canadian film and literature as a cultural testing ground. Building on the efforts of scholars like Rita Wong, Larissa Lai, and Malissa Phung to trace a literary genealogy of Asian-Indigenous relations in Canada, the article first considers the structures of feeling which bolster efforts towards coalition-building between Asian settlers and First Nations. Rather than extending an optimistic or redemptive model, the article suggests that negative affect (or, what Sianne Ngai calls “ugly feelings”) ought to be taken seriously as both an unavoidable presence and a potential catalyst in and for active solidarity. The article then analyzes Sto:lo author Lee Maracle’s short story “Yin Chin” and Peter Blow’s documentary film A Village of Widows with an eye towards how bad feelings underpin the narrative calls to action in both texts. The article concludes by considering the role that bad feeling can and does play in terms of inter-referencing practices among cultural and historical scholars.     

Queer will: hikikomori as willful subjects

This article considers hikikomori as willful subjects. The hikikomori are a portion of the Japanese population who withdraw into their homes. These are mostly young people (between the ages of 15 and 35) and mostly young men. The focus of this article is how hikikomori constitute a challenge to dominant national imaginaries of Japan as a “corporate-family system.” This article analyses popular media and psychiatric representations of hikikomori, particularly from Saitô’s work as exemplifying Ahmed’s notion of “willful subjects.” It is argued that the hikikomori’s apparent willfulness produces them as Queer subjects who are out of place and pace with the dominant heteronormative, masculinist culture of contemporary Japan.     

Women,torture, & spectacle on Chilean television

ABSTRACT

In the years since the fall of the civil–military dictatorships in the Southern Cone, considerable attention has been paid to first-person testimonies of human rights victims. A great number of these have been by women who narrated sexual political violence. However, while there has been work done on the relation between terror, trauma, and spectacle in postdictatorial television shows, rarely has this also included a gendered perspective. In this article we seek to open this area of discussion by evaluating the manner in which women’s televised testimonies of political sexual violence have been constructed on late night talk shows in Chile, using recent history and memory theory, as well as feminist theory on the representation of sexual violence in mass media.     

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.     

Hollywood domination of the Chinese kung fu market

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the cultural significance of three emerging Chinese kung fu films in their recent box office success in global film market. The paper aims to provide an integrative framework that shows how Hollywood’s global dominance in both film consumption and production contributes to the success of the newly Chinese Kung Fu films. Focusing on marketing strategies of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero and House of Flying Daggers, this study argues that the economic success of the three films represent further regulation of Hollywood. In production, the NICL thesis is at work with a particular collaboration pattern among the transnational Chinese film talent communities. In distribution and exhibition, this paper contends that global box office achievement fails to contribute directly to any Chinese film industry. Autonomy is seen between Hollywood film majors and Chinese filmmakers when consumption of these films becomes a global phenomenon.     

Networking Asia Pacific: queer film festivals and the spatiotemporal politics of inter-referencing

ABSTRACT

Expanding on the critique of Euro-America-centrism in knowledge production, this article examines three spatiotemporal hierarchies through the inter-referencing practices of Asia Pacific Queer Film Festival Alliance. First, through the analysis of the documentary short Lady Eva and its circulation, I look at how the network opens up the issue of Pacific indigeneity in the transpacific context, which has the potential to unsettle the existing epistemic structures that rest upon the binary of West/non-West or white/Indigenous. Second, I investigate how the queer film festival alliance serves as sites for the articulation of queer rights, which sometimes cast a progressivist temporal narrative based on a hierarchical arrangement of geographical places. Third, through the case of ShanghaiPRIDE Film Festival, I examine how anti-institutionalism in film festival organizing offers a critique of gay-male dominated queer film festivals and the capitalist developmental logic that emphasizes profit and financial viability. By doing so, I scrutinize how the spatiotemporal hierarchies embedded in the film festival network complicate the understanding of inter-referencing as citation, collaboration, and competition. At the same time, I use inter-referencing to further the discussion of spatial politics in film festival studies by highlighting the spatiotemporal hierarchies.     

Postnational family/postfamilial nation: family,small town and nation talk in Marcos and Brocka

Abstract

This article explores the concept of authenticity, and its articulation with longstanding Japanese discourses of modernity, among contemporary Japanese lifestyle migrants in New York City. Considering the cases of artists in particular, it examines how migrants narrate the ideals and goals of life in New York City, thereby elaborating on concepts of the self, authenticity, meaning, and national cultural identity.     

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.