{"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}
{"title":"Brown Theory: A Storied Manifest of Our World","authors":"Christopher B. Patterson","doi":"10.1215/10679847-10122138","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10122138","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article conceives of a transpacific brownness in relation to other forms of brown to produce a storied manifest for brown theory. By activating \"the brown transpacific\" as an epistemological paradigm that navigates the disciplinary logics of colonial encounters, this article attempts to untangle a story of how some people in Asia went from resembling a wild and uncontainable threat to a form of brownness that became necessary for the reproduction of the Global North. As the last \"color\" term to be used by racial scientists, \"brownness\" has delineated racial hierarchies between blackness and whiteness that, to colonial powers, have emphasized the possible degradation of whiteness, or, to the colonized, have promised future induction into whiteness. The varied formations of transpacific brownness explored showcase the impossibility of its own capture—rather than reveal a bounded history, brownness arrives as a concept that cannot be grasped or produced into knowledge. This article thus shifts in its second half from its focus on the \"brown transpacific\" to a theoretical triptych that reflects on brownness as (1) a site for the ungovernable \"brown mass,\" (2) peoples marked for domestication through strategies of colonial containment, and (3) the complex \"shades\" that reveal troubling histories and shameful intimacies.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"36 1","pages":"116 - 91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87119738","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":"Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1215/10679847-10122216","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10122216","url":null,"abstract":"Other| February 01 2023 Contributors positions (2023) 31 (1): 255–256. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10122216 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Contributors. positions 1 February 2023; 31 (1): 255–256. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10122216 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalspositions Search Advanced Search Michael Berman is a postdoctoral fellow in international humanities in the Department of Anthropology and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University. His research focuses on the relationship between compassion and alienation as constitutive of modern governance. He is currently polishing up his book manuscript Heart of a Heartless World: Alienation, Compassion, and Listening in the Making of Secularist Japan and is conducting new research on listening and the nation-state.Youngmin Choe is associate professor of Korean cinema and visual culture at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Tourist Distractions: Traveling and Feeling in Transnational Hallyu Cinema (2016) and coeditor of The Korean Popular Culture Reader (2014).Brett Hack is assistant professor in the Program for Applied Global Education at Aichi Prefectural University. His research examines Japanese media culture and globalization through intersections of moving image studies, political philosophy, and interdisciplinary theories of mind.... You do not currently have access to this content.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"91 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136172421","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":"From Immigrants to Refugees: Relocating Strangers in Two Plays about North Korean Defectors","authors":"Hyunshik Ju","doi":"10.1215/10679847-10122125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10122125","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Two stage plays written after 2010 about North Korean defectors in South Korea are dealt with in this article, Mokran Eonni (Sister Mokran) and Toillit Pipeul (Toilet People). This article employs an analytical framework that weaves the terms of the immigrant and of the refugee and the sociology of the stranger together. The scenes from Mokran Eonni and Toillit Pipeul analyzed in this article acutely illustrate the pain and suffering experienced by North Korean defectors, especially socially powerless groups such as women and adolescents. Their position as refugees is constructed through exploitative capitalism and the division hysteria in South Korea. This representation leads audiences to examine how the latter two phenomena expose South Korean people as potential refugees. In other words, both plays do not just tell particular stories about North Korean defectors, they also offer a universal reflection regarding the structural ills in South Korean society. Moreover, this reflection is not limited to South Korean society. It can be repositioned as the speculation that all venues of transnational and global capitalist phenomena in which otherness is excluded and repressed have a migratory uprooted identity.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"3 1","pages":"67 - 89"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86363379","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":"Crazy English: Nation Strengthening and the Changing Politics of Neoliberal Selfhood in Reform-Era China","authors":"A. Iskra","doi":"10.1215/10679847-10122164","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10122164","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Since the late 1990s, China has experienced an explosion of popular interest in English language study. This nationwide \"English fever\" reflects how, with the global spread of neoliberal doctrines that were gradually adopted by Chinese governments, English was naturalized as the language of competitiveness and entrepreneurialism. While there is a growing body of literature examining the English-learning craze as a facet of the transnational neoliberalization processes, this anthropological study focuses on the frictions generated in the encounter of English, conceived as a neoliberal technology of the self, with the Chinese nation-state. It examines the understudied phenomenon of Crazy English, a language-teaching enterprise that received unprecedented state patronage among such edu-businesses in the decade of 1998–2008. Conceptualizing Crazy English as a self-cultivation method provides insights into how English study in turn-of-the-century China embodied tensions between key values that characterized the state's project of desirable citizenship: entrepreneurialism and patriotism. Through the idealization and promotion of the new exemplary model of the \"wolf entrepreneur,\" Chinese state agents, edu-entrepreneurs, and citizen-learners sought to reconcile their desires to simultaneously participate in neoliberal globalization and protect their cultural identities and national interests.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"10 1","pages":"143 - 169"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74326277","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":"Working Worlds in Neoliberal Japan: Precarity, Imagination, and the \"Other-World\" Trope","authors":"Brett Hack","doi":"10.1215/10679847-10122177","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10122177","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article analyzes depictions of work in postmillennial Japanese media, particularly anime and manga, in order to theorize the function of imaginative responses to the social dislocations of neoliberalism. Critical studies of precarity in Japanese popular culture have tended to treat depictions of work as direct representations of actual socioeconomic conditions, overlooking the affective, experiential dimensions of mediated work images and their potential for imagining social relations beyond imposed precarity. The article explores this neglected potential by focusing on the anime and manga trope of isekai (other-world), which depicts life and work in a fantastic environment. These depictions are compared with analogues in live-action films and television during the period of Japan's neoliberalization. Invoking philosophical concepts of social imagination and drawing on autonomist theory for inspiration regarding the visualization of postcapitalist sociality, analysis will demonstrate how their imaginative responses can produce visions of collectivity amenable to postcapitalist projects without explicitly political content. The article hopes to draw out latent capacities within superficially escapist media forms and offer a possible counternarrative to pessimistic discourses about popular culture.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"29 1","pages":"171 - 202"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85988752","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}