Positions-Asia Critique最新文献

{"title":"Forgotten Refugees and Erased \"Multicultural\" Subjects: The Vietnam War and South Korea's Subimperial Nation-Building","authors":"N. Kim","doi":"10.1215/10679847-10441273","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10441273","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article revisits South Korea's mostly forgotten involvement in the Vietnam War and examines lingering effects of the war on South Korea's subimperial nation-building in general and on its contemporary multicultural policies in particular. The Vietnam War served as a stepping stone for South Korea to transform itself from a war-torn country to an economic subempire in Asia. Encounters with Vietnamese refugees in the aftermath of the war helped form South Korea's subimperial gaze, solidifying the racial inferiority of South Koreans to the United States but establishing their superiority over the Vietnamese. Further, the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees laid the foundation for the practices of contemporary South Korean multiculturalism. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, South Korea presented itself as a benevolent protector of Vietnamese refugees. The brutal acts committed on the battlefields and the neglect of the Vietnamese refugees living at the margins of South Korean society have been effaced from public memory. Through the work of selective memory, the \"multicultural\" South Korea presents itself yet again as a caring supporter of Vietnamese migrant wives. It is through this cultural amnesia that the myth of ethnic homogeneity was maintained, allowing the contemporary multiculturalism discourse and practice to be advertised as a novel cultural globalization project that is free of historical guilt or responsibility.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"26 1","pages":"597 - 622"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90298951","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":"Editor's Introduction: Aesthetics of the Uncanny","authors":"Suzy Kim","doi":"10.1215/10679847-10441234","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10441234","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43199119","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 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":"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":"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":"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":"Archaeology of the Eyeball: Lu Xun, Eye-Gouging Myth, and Ocular Anatomy","authors":"Tim Shao-Hung Teng","doi":"10.1215/10679847-10441247","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10441247","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article situates Lu Xun at the intersection of late-Qing folkloric discourse and medical science by studying his 1925 essay \"Lun zhaoxiang zhilei\" (\"On Photography\"). \"On Photography\" is a rich yet enigmatic piece of writing that has yet to receive critical attention on its own terms in the scholarship of either Lu Xun or Chinese visual culture. Lu Xun's essay includes a folklore account of \"foreign devils\" plucking out locals' eyes and pickling them in a jar. Bracketing the magic lantern incident held by many as the primal scene of modern Chinese literature, this article suggests that Lu Xun's account of the eyeball offers a no less significant example of how an alternate optical device can be employed to reflect China's encounter with colonial modernity. Adopting the method of media archaeology, this article argues that Lu Xun's essay holds the key to tracing a genealogy of the eyeball from its embedment in feudal superstition to its embodiment of anti-missionary sentiments, from figurative representation in Chinese medical classics to physiological simulation in anatomical treatises, and from anatomical visualization to optical abstraction and modulation. This genealogy constructs the eye as a historically valid subject that morphs from the eye to the eyeball and then to the eye again, a genealogy that is revealing of how China grappled through a crucial period of political, cultural, and scientific sea changes.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"2 1","pages":"541 - 570"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85395584","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":"Ruo Li, Jiarui Sun","doi":"10.1176/ajp.4.3.217","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.4.3.217","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"18 1","pages":"473 - 484"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86006906","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}