Positions-Asia Critique最新文献

{"title":"Village Songs and the Building of Community Culture: A Talk","authors":"Tu Lü, Siting Jiang","doi":"10.1215/10679847-10300321","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10300321","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"89 1","pages":"485 - 506"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81467648","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The \"Unlikely Writers\" from Picun: Reinventing Literature and Politics at the Migrant Workers Home","authors":"C. Ting","doi":"10.1215/10679847-10300227","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10300227","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In response to Sun Wanning's (2014) critique that individual desire for recognition has limited the political potential of migrant worker literature, this article looks to the Picun Literature Group at the Migrant Workers Home to examine the dynamic between the collective, activist setting and the individual authors' struggle with literary and political practice. Combining the literary technique of close reading with anthropological fieldwork, the article describes how the Group encourages and influences its members' literary production. The works of Xiao Hai, Fan Yusu, Li Ruo, and Wan Huashan are examined to determine whether they view literature as elite or subaltern, individual or collective, art or activism. This article identifies in their writing concrete examples of a change in consciousness and the formation of identity. It argues that literary writing gives the working-class writing subject and fellow workers a sense of dignity and collective identity. Both the Picun writers and the migrant worker writers in general can be considered \"unlikely writers.\" The term captures their marginality in the cultural field, as well as the struggle to negotiate their subalternity and the elitist formulation of literary value. Thus, the \"unlikely writer\" embodies the promise of migrant worker literature in the attempt to redefine the meanings of \"politics\" and \"literature\" and bring the two together.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"22 2 1","pages":"333 - 355"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83941565","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Body Art in China: Yang Zhichao's Diary from a Psychiatric Ward","authors":"G. Strafella, D. Berg","doi":"10.1215/10679847-10441260","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10441260","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This study aims to trace how artists in postsocialist China have adopted the discourse of body art and reshaped its import of sociopolitical criticality. In this article, \"body art\" implies the use of the human body as the primary material of artistic creation and the performance of actions of cruelty, modification, and endangerment on the artist's body. Through an engagement with theories of embodiment, biopolitics, and postsocialism, this article argues that body art represents one way in which the corporeal assumes a new centrality in China's post-1978 avant-garde and popular culture, as both a reappropriated territory of self-expression and an alienated object of consumption and surveillance. To do so, it discusses body art by Yang Zhichao 杨志超 (b. 1962), focusing in particular on a performance artwork titled Jiayuguan 嘉峪关 (Jiayu Pass, 1999–2000) and its documentation by the artist. As a result, this article shows how body art encapsulates the tension between dystopian negativity and regenerative potential at the heart of the postsocialist condition.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"27 1","pages":"571 - 596"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84088757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Guest Editor's Introduction: Cultures of Labor and the Labor of Culture","authors":"P. Iovene","doi":"10.1215/10679847-10300188","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10300188","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue originates from the workshop “Cultures of Labor, Inequalities, and Eviction: Migrant Worker Literature and Media Practices in Contemporary China” held at the University of Chicago Center in Beijing in June 2019. The workshop brought together scholars and activists to discuss the ways in which migrant workers cope with dislocation and precarity through cultural practices such as writing, music, theater, and use of the internet and social media. By “cultures of labor” we meant the expressive forms and meaningmaking practices by and about those who are referred to or identify as “rural migrants” (nongmingong 农民工), “precarious laborers” (dagongzhe 打工者), or “new workers” (xin gongren 新工人): fluid, overlapping, and internally diverse categories characterized by conditions of subalternity largely due to exploitative labor relations and unfair distribution of rights rooted in the Chinese household registration system (hukou 户口) and","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"185 1","pages":"257 - 279"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80567047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Made in Others' Wor(l)ds: Personhood and the Angloscene in Afro-Chinese Beijing","authors":"Jay Ke‐Schutte","doi":"10.1215/10679847-10441299","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10441299","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon noted in Black Skin, White Masks that the postcolonial subject's nightmares have a time and a place—a socius of the colonial encounter that haunts and recontextualizes the future of the colonized eternally within that shape-shifting nightmare. This article—exploring the English-language-mediated cosmopolitan aspirations of African students in contemporary Beijing—recasts Fanon's observation and explores how dreams of efficacious personhood, like nightmares of compromised subjectivity, imbricate the same spatiotemporal tension between aspirational horizons and their compromised conditions of mediation. In doing so, this article maps a relationship between language, personhood, and space-time: in particular, the persistence of English in Sino-South encounters where signs of Anglocentrism and Englishness become the only available forms of cultural capital for postcolonial actors.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"11 1","pages":"649 - 676"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81183059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Village Lunatics","authors":"Jiarui Sun","doi":"10.1215/10679847-10300308","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10300308","url":null,"abstract":"One day at noon, on our way back from the town market, my mother and I spotted a woman walking down the street. It was a scorching hot day, and there were no trees nearby to provide shade. The woman, in her sixties, wore a thick jacket but no sun hat. My mother said she was a mentally ill woman from the neighboring village. Although she had mothered a few children, she had always been a little “off.” Nobody in her family cared anymore—they just let her be. A few days ago, my mother added, this woman suffered from sunstroke on the street. Thanks to a passerby, she was saved by a bottle of water. See, now that she's recovered, she's come back out. Several days later, I heard the woman fell at a crosswalk on her way home. By the time the villagers found her, she had already stopped breathing. Her dead hand held a piece of watermelon with a few bites taken. Nobody knew who gave it to her. After hearing these stories, I had the idea to write about these people around me—the ones who are forgotten, who live like wild grass. Facing the weight of these lives, I feel powerless, but I cannot turn a blind eye to them. Because I am unable to help them, I feel as though I owe them something. As a way of repaying them, I've jotted down the marks they've made on this world.One day Auntie Liu told me that Zhiyin's wife, Madwoman Yang, had entered a mental hospital.I asked, she's been crazy for half of her life—how come she's only now been sent for treatment?Auntie Liu explained that ever since Madwoman Yang had come to our village, everyone knew she had problems, so nobody cared to argue with her over trivial things such as sneaking home her neighbors’ outdoor brooms and mops or pilfering other people's doormats. But recently she started to stay up all night and keep swearing loudly, driving her neighbors up the wall. One after another, they all went and complained to her husband. Seeing no other way, her husband called her older sister. After discussing things over, they agreed that it was the safest to send her to a mental hospital.A moment from twenty years ago came to mind—it was Zhiyin's wedding day, and I'd gone to drink at his wedding feast. I asked my mother, where did the bride come from? Mother replied, she came from a village ten miles away. She was married before and even had a daughter. Her man divorced her when he made a fortune. Zhiyin had a cousin in the same village, who introduced this girl to him. When he first heard that the girl's mind was a little “disturbed,” Zhiyin immediately said no. But everyone around him clamored to get a word in, urging him to say yes. Some said, you're pushing thirty and still single—do you really think you have a choice? Others said, you don't have any special skill or family fortune—how can you be so picky? Be careful, or you'll never get a wife.Zhiyin was a quiet person. After hearing all this, he dropped his head all the way down to his crotch, waiting a long while before he lifted it back up. And the marriage ","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135145929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"I and We in Picun: The Making of Chinese Poet Xiao Hai","authors":"Maghiel van Crevel","doi":"10.1215/10679847-10300214","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10300214","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Xiao Hai left home at age fifteen as one of roughly three hundred million domestic migrant workers whose labor has contributed to China's rise since the 1980s. He was a factory worker in a string of cities for a good dozen years: think assembly line, overtime, exploitation, alienation. To counter the pressures of this life, he wrote poetry. In 2016 he settled in Picun, a village on the outskirts of Beijing made famous by an NGO called the Migrant Workers Home. The Home aims to advance migrant workers' social identification through cultural education. To this end, the migrant worker community works with academic and cultural professionals, media professionals, and members of the state's cultural apparatus. This interaction takes shape in a \"shared space\" (in Dai Jinhua's words) of cultural production and experience that blurs distinctions of official and unofficial culture and their easy association with political power and resistance, respectively. As a member of the Picun Literature Group who expertly navigates this space, Xiao Hai has become a representative of the Picun \"brand,\" building a mediagenic public persona in the process. Who is Xiao Hai? What does his writing say? What other actors and factors shape his persona? What can we learn from all this about the nexus of precarious labor and cultural production? The stories of Picun, Xiao Hai, and migrant worker literature subvert simple oppositions of grassroots versus state discourse and unofficial versus official culture. Instead, they foreground the complexity of relations between the individual, community, and the state in China today.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"2009 1","pages":"303 - 331"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86248142","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Literature as Medium: The Development and Cultural Space of New Worker Literature","authors":"Huiyu Zhang, Federico Picerni","doi":"10.1215/10679847-10300294","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10300294","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Over the past few years, China's cultural landscape has seen the emergence of several authors from among its migrant laborers, or \"new workers.\" Fan Yusu and Xu Lizhi are the most representative. Their literary production, which draws on their personal experiences and tells their workplace stories, is an artistic configuration entirely different from both mass culture and high literature. This article analyzes the significance of this new worker literature from three perspectives. First, since the 1990s, new workers have been using the traditional medium of literature to speak with their own voices, which is particularly remarkable in the age of the internet. Second, workers' culture spaces like the Picun Literature Group, from which Fan Yusu emerged, not only support ordinary laborers' active interest in writing but also represent a specific cultural practice that has come into being in the post-Mao era. Third, the fact that a large number of new worker writers are \"borrowing\" from the language and style of 1980s literature generates a productive relation between the critical spirit of that literature and the alienating conditions under which the new workers labor. Although seen as marginal by many, new worker literature is of great cultural value for contemporary China.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"52 1","pages":"451 - 471"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79152096","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cosmopolitanism from Below: Union Film's Adaptation of World Classics","authors":"K. K. Ng","doi":"10.1215/10679847-10441286","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10441286","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Cosmopolitanism promises to go beyond national thinking and tradition-bound parochialism by reemphasizing the interconnectedness of individuals, communities, and cultures. This article probes the politics of adaptation of the left-leaning Cantonese Union Film Enterprise (Zhonglian 中聯, 1952–1967) in colonial Hong Kong, and scrutinizes how it embraced world literary classics to enhance the prestige of Cantonese films. It focuses on three 1955 adaptations: An Orphan's Tragedy (Guxing xuelei 孤星血淚; from Great Expectations), Anna (Chuncan mengduan 春殘夢斷; from Anna Karenina), and Eternal Love (Tianchang dijiu 天長地久; from Sister Carrie). The founding of Union was a conscientious response of Cantonese film workers to the call of the Cantonese Film Clean-up Campaign (Yueyu dianying qingjie yundong 粵語電影清潔運動) in the 1940s, launched by leftist filmmakers from Shanghai (Cai Chusheng 蔡楚生, Situ Huimin司徒慧敏) and supported by Cantonese film leaders Ng Cho-fan 吳楚帆 and Lo Duen 盧敦. The study interrogates the predicaments and vicissitudes of Union's cosmopolitan stances as it wrestled with the cultural politics of Chinese cinema during the Cold War. It elucidates the ethnically rooted and culturally cosmopolitan Cantonese progressive cinema. The social realism represented by Union is not local or passé. The Union artists envisioned from below a humane and cosmopolitan community inhabited by workers and intellectuals, locals and diasporic Chinese subjects, which connects people beyond their parochialism and nationhood.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"1 1","pages":"623 - 648"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90172244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Daizō Sakurai's Trans-Asian Tent Theater, Picun, and the Reenchantment of Urban Space","authors":"J. Jaguścik","doi":"10.1215/10679847-10300240","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10300240","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article discusses the 2010 Picun performance of Crow2Topia, the first play by the Beijing division of Daizō Sakurai's tent theater. Sakurai had previously participated in grassroots theater activities in Japan and Asia: in 2007 members of the mainland independent theater scene introduced him to the labor NGO and community cultural center Migrant Workers Home in the urban village Picun in Beijing. Sakurai's collaborators suggested that the suburban village-in-the-city, populated by rural migrant workers, would be a performance venue that fit the Japanese director's vision of theater as being located on the margins of society. The article delineates the trajectory of Sakurai's tent theater, analyzing the play Crow2Topia and pointing to intertextual references to premodern theater traditions and modern texts. Drawing on similarities between the play, which portrays a contemporary Chinese city from the perspective of the inhabitants of a garbage dump, and the precarious position of the actual tenants of Picun, it argues that the tent theater and the Migrant Workers Home can both be described as unstable \"shared spaces\" with permeable borders. In these spaces, social roles and personal identities are in constant flux. The closing part of the article expands the notion of \"shared space,\" first introduced by Dai Jinhua in her discussion of the emerging popular culture in mainland China in the 1990s, beyond the borders of the local cultural scene and embeds it into transregional networks of grassroots cultural activism.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"106 1","pages":"357 - 378"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72815659","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}