positions Pub Date : 2024-05-01 DOI: 10.1215/10679847-11024366

Chang-Min Yu

引用次数: 0

Pema Tseden's Balloon: Reincarnation of a Semi-transparent Envelope Pema Tseden 的气球：半透明信封的轮回

positions Pub Date : 2024-05-01 DOI: 10.1215/10679847-11024378

Yuqing Yang

{"title":"Pema Tseden's Balloon: Reincarnation of a Semi-transparent Envelope","authors":"Yuqing Yang","doi":"10.1215/10679847-11024378","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-11024378","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Buddhism provides the vocabulary for film auteur Pema Tseden to express a psychological dimension in his Amdo-Tibetan stories. Drawing on the Tibetan Buddhist concept of bardo, the transitional space between sleep and waking, or death and rebirth, his works encapsulate surrealist flow of consciousness of the characters as they are torn between religious principles, modern imperatives, and conscience. Specifically, Balloon exposes an Amdo woman's choice between having an abortion in compliance with China's 1990s birth control policy or enabling the prophesized rebirth of a family forebear. The film extends Pema Tseden's earlier experiment in Jinpa, which enacts an intrapsychic dialogue in a dream, by using a religiously inflected visualization of the state of mind in the threshold between death and the next life. Balloon's passionate reenactment of a luminous afterlife landscape and its reflexive and even questioning attitudes toward the concept of reincarnation create an intriguing tension. Its central imagery, the inflated condom balloon, is a “semi-transparent envelope,” to borrow British novelist Virginia Woolf's phrase, which suggests the inscrutability of the characters’ internal experiences. The balloon is also a “semi-transparent filter” of the director's ambiguous affects, encapsulating cultural intimacy and cultural contemplation within a non-dual framework.","PeriodicalId":513021,"journal":{"name":"positions","volume":"8 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141139274","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Undoing the Nation-State-Capital Trinity: Turning Inagaki's Petition into a Korean Playwright's Taiwan 打破民族-国家-资本三位一体的局面：把稻垣的请愿书变成韩国剧作家的台湾

positions Pub Date : 2024-05-01 DOI: 10.1215/10679847-11024294

Inhye Han

{"title":"Undoing the Nation-State-Capital Trinity: Turning Inagaki's Petition into a Korean Playwright's Taiwan","authors":"Inhye Han","doi":"10.1215/10679847-11024294","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-11024294","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article is the first study that excavates a Korean writer's Chinese-language play based on Taiwanese farmers’ real-life events and that identifies its author as playwright, filmmaker, and novelist Li Kyŏngson. During his Shanghai years (1929–32), Li encountered Japanese journalist Izumi Fūrō’s book, which includes the 1925 petition that Japanese philanthropist Inagaki Tōbei wrote on Taiwanese bamboo farmers’ behalf to support their cause. Li's stage play Taiwan (1930) was born of a densely transnational nexus: a petition by a Japanese philanthropist, a Japanese journalist's monograph, Korean authorship, a Korean-Chinese actor's translation, and the Chinese-language socialist magazine Pioneer. This study analyzes how Li's Taiwan reconfigures the 1925 petition and transcends the seemingly invincible nation-state-capital trinity. Although the petition pleads with the state to condemn Mitsubishi, Taiwan invokes neither the state nor the nation to combat colonial capitalism, drawing instead on anachronism and the leitmotif of kin killing. While tracking the play's counter-nationalist turn, this article's analysis shows that Li revitalizes past events grounded in world religions that bear radical anti-statism at their cores. Briefly yet lucidly, Taiwan also pinpoints the potent moment of anti-capitalism, forcibly buried and hardly resuscitated by Li's contemporaries.","PeriodicalId":513021,"journal":{"name":"positions","volume":"74 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141142995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

The Imperishables: Somatic Remediation, Femininity, and Plasticity in Ōshima Nagisa's Urban Critique 不朽之物：大岛永的《城市批判》中的躯体修复、女性气质和可塑性

positions Pub Date : 2024-05-01 DOI: 10.1215/10679847-11024318

Junnan Chen

{"title":"The Imperishables: Somatic Remediation, Femininity, and Plasticity in Ōshima Nagisa's Urban Critique","authors":"Junnan Chen","doi":"10.1215/10679847-11024318","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-11024318","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay probes the understudied relationship between the hypermediated urban environment and the coding of femininity in the late 1960s and 1970s Japan. Through reading Ōshima Nagisa's Man Who Left His Will on Film (1970), this essay explores the unique gender dynamics remapped in the avant-garde media practice in an era when “urban” and “media” became interconnected and filmic medium was redefined in relation to the vibrant media milieu. This essay is motivated by “the imperishables,” a prevalent trope that can be located in a wide array of literary and filmic works in the 1960s and 1970s: the vanishing men and the “plastic” women. Resilient, enduring, prone to violations but always “failing” to disappear from the screen, women's bodies occupy central roles in reorienting the epistemic structures in many prominent radical works that investigate the opaque urban network during Japan's Cold War restructuring. This essay reads cinema as a contentious site where articulations of sociopolitical sentiments and concerns with film's medium specificity find catalytic convergence with the continuous coding of gender. Rather than simply viewing female bodies as representations of social reality or fetishized objects, this article traces how femininity, constructed as both cultural artifact and techno-aesthetic device, showcases internal dissidence in the leftist urban critique and the emergent somatic politics in the avant-garde imaginaries of alterity.","PeriodicalId":513021,"journal":{"name":"positions","volume":"1 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141143093","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Between Koenji and Brooklyn: Tokyo, New York, and the Circulations of Experimental Musics in a Global World 在高円寺和布鲁克林之间：东京、纽约和实验音乐在全球的传播

positions Pub Date : 2024-05-01 DOI: 10.1215/10679847-11024306

Katherine G. T. Whatley

{"title":"Between Koenji and Brooklyn: Tokyo, New York, and the Circulations of Experimental Musics in a Global World","authors":"Katherine G. T. Whatley","doi":"10.1215/10679847-11024306","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-11024306","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Using a group of Japanese-born experimental musicians who make their lives in Tokyo and New York as a case study, this article examines how new musical genres are created, shared, and mediated through layers of circulations, identities, and locations. The author argues that these musicians’ lives and music have a kind of “noisy” quality, complicating genre boundaries and identity binaries in their wake. Through ethnographic “thick descriptions” and the words of the musicians themselves, the author shows the web of musical genres, languages, geopolitical identities, and gender relations that combine to make up the texture of musical performances.\u0000 This article is also thinking through and with a sea change in the study of Japanese music. In recent years, building on the work of scholars of Japanese cultural studies, ethnomusicologists have critiqued how monocultural and mono-ethnic mythologies have influenced the study and production of Japanese music. Ethnomusicology and area studies are Cold War enterprises, designed to create research that would help maintain that world order, educate Americans as global leaders, and change hearts and minds in foreign lands, leading to a cultural conservatism that often led scholars to focus on “traditional” Japanese music. Recently, however, research on Japanese music has increasingly focused on popular and experimental musics and examines how Japanese contemporary identity is created and maintained through music. Thus this article gives readers a view of how US-based Japanese music scholarship is moving away from such Cold War paradigms and contributes to this shift in studies of Japanese music and culture.","PeriodicalId":513021,"journal":{"name":"positions","volume":" 13","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141132815","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Ideology of the Image: Wu Guanzhong's Abstract Expression, 1979–1983 图像的意识形态吴冠中的抽象表现，1979-1983 年

positions Pub Date : 2024-05-01 DOI: 10.1215/10679847-11024330

Jennifer Dorothy Lee

引用次数: 0

China's Infrastructural Capitalism and Infrastructural Power of Labor: The Making of the Chinese Working Class 中国的基础设施资本主义和劳动力的基础设施力量：中国工人阶级的形成

positions Pub Date : 2024-05-01 DOI: 10.1215/10679847-11024342

Pun Ngai

{"title":"China's Infrastructural Capitalism and Infrastructural Power of Labor: The Making of the Chinese Working Class","authors":"Pun Ngai","doi":"10.1215/10679847-11024342","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-11024342","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article anticipates a political project that underlines China's infrastructural capitalism and the infrastructural power of labor in the making of the Chinese working class. This project embarks a re-departure of the left movement after the Jasic struggle, which inspired a rebirth of global Marxism and Maoism that attempts to confront the failure of the first wave of socialist movements and the neoliberal turn of global capitalism. Meeting this historical conjuncture, this project is situated in the legacy of the Chinese Revolution and its firmly held belief in the class struggles of the working masses who fought for a vision of communism since the early 1920s. As part of a global project in preparation for the new wave of emancipatory movements, this project is also located in a global anti-capitalism movement and attempts to overcome the parochial and nationalistic approach of existing Chinese Marxism. Specifically, the author conceives that Chinese capitalism has entered a new age of monopoly supported not only by new phases of high technology but also, more importantly, by state power in constructing infrastructural bases such as building projects, new economic zones, highways and high-speed railways, digital platforms, and logistics, both internally and externally, to reproduce expanded capitalism, resulting in fierce imperial battles among global powers. The article conceptualizes this historical process not only as “infrastructural capitalism,” a term that vividly embodies the materiality of expanded capitalism, but also the infrastructural power of labor to take root.","PeriodicalId":513021,"journal":{"name":"positions","volume":"4 18","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141137102","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

The Social Production and Political Potency of Home: Contentions between Housing Reconstruction and Place Making among the Chinese Qiang after the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake 家园的社会生产和政治潜能：2008 年四川地震后中国羌族住房重建与场所营造之间的争论

positions Pub Date : 2024-05-01 DOI: 10.1215/10679847-11024354

Qiaoyun Zhang, Guanli Zhang, Wen Huang, Yun Tang

引用次数: 0

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