Pub Date : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8163912
Frederik H. Green
{"title":"The Translatability of Revolution: Guo Moruo and Twentieth-Century Chinese Culture","authors":"Frederik H. Green","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8163912","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8163912","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"141 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83523889","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}
Pub Date : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8163801
Frances Weightman
The authorial preface to works of fiction provides a unique space for exploration of authorial self-fashioning and author-reader mediation. This article argues that, when works of fiction are translated and new prefaces written for a new readership, these prefaces can provide extra insights into the perceptions, expectations, and constrictions of both producing and consuming literature in a global era. Recent debates on world literature have centered mainly on issues of reception and circulation, preferring to define its scope in terms of the reader and the reading context rather than by the author or production process. This study considers the changing role of authors who consciously attempt to locate themselves within this contested and reconfigured field and how they construct a persona to address a newly defined world readership. This article explores the changes throughout the twentieth century by analyzing a selection of authorial prefaces to translated editions of three influential authors: Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936), Ba Jin 巴金 (1906–2005), and Yu Hua 余華 (1960–). All prolific preface writers, they each have, in different ways, in different periods, engaged with the concept of a global literary readership and marketplace and negotiated their respective places within it.
{"title":"Authorial Self-Fashioning in a Global Era","authors":"Frances Weightman","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8163801","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8163801","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The authorial preface to works of fiction provides a unique space for exploration of authorial self-fashioning and author-reader mediation. This article argues that, when works of fiction are translated and new prefaces written for a new readership, these prefaces can provide extra insights into the perceptions, expectations, and constrictions of both producing and consuming literature in a global era. Recent debates on world literature have centered mainly on issues of reception and circulation, preferring to define its scope in terms of the reader and the reading context rather than by the author or production process. This study considers the changing role of authors who consciously attempt to locate themselves within this contested and reconfigured field and how they construct a persona to address a newly defined world readership. This article explores the changes throughout the twentieth century by analyzing a selection of authorial prefaces to translated editions of three influential authors: Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936), Ba Jin 巴金 (1906–2005), and Yu Hua 余華 (1960–). All prolific preface writers, they each have, in different ways, in different periods, engaged with the concept of a global literary readership and marketplace and negotiated their respective places within it.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"403 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75427517","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}
Pub Date : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8163793
Yiju Huang
Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936) has remained a most prominent figure in modern Chinese literary studies, but not so in modern Buddhism scholarship. This article shows the interlacing of Lu Xun's revolutionary vision with Buddhism on three primary terrains: his indebtedness to his teacher Zhang Taiyan 章太炎 (1868–1936), his immersion in a wide range of Buddhist texts before the May Fourth movement, and a close reading of selected poems from Yecao 野草 (Wild Grass) in light of Buddhist philosophy. The author argues that Yogācāra conceptions promoted by Zhang, wanfa weixin 萬法唯心 (all phenomena are nothing but mind), bushi 佈施 (the bodhisattva ideal of sacrificial giving), and kong 空 (emptiness as boundless potentiality), greatly influenced Lu Xun's aesthetics. Ultimately, this article shows how revolution, the dominant mode of secularism, is theistically conditioned. The Buddhist notion of emptiness, rather than an impediment to modernity, informs the worldly action of revolution and the phenomenal possibility of change.
{"title":"Of Emptiness and Revolution","authors":"Yiju Huang","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8163793","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8163793","url":null,"abstract":"Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936) has remained a most prominent figure in modern Chinese literary studies, but not so in modern Buddhism scholarship. This article shows the interlacing of Lu Xun's revolutionary vision with Buddhism on three primary terrains: his indebtedness to his teacher Zhang Taiyan 章太炎 (1868–1936), his immersion in a wide range of Buddhist texts before the May Fourth movement, and a close reading of selected poems from Yecao 野草 (Wild Grass) in light of Buddhist philosophy. The author argues that Yogācāra conceptions promoted by Zhang, wanfa weixin 萬法唯心 (all phenomena are nothing but mind), bushi 佈施 (the bodhisattva ideal of sacrificial giving), and kong 空 (emptiness as boundless potentiality), greatly influenced Lu Xun's aesthetics. Ultimately, this article shows how revolution, the dominant mode of secularism, is theistically conditioned. The Buddhist notion of emptiness, rather than an impediment to modernity, informs the worldly action of revolution and the phenomenal possibility of change.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"1 1","pages":"35-56"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89207939","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}
Pub Date : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8163920
Xiulu Wang
{"title":"Ziyou zhuyi wenxue lixiang de zhongjie (1945.08–1949.10) 自由主義文學理想的終結 (1945.08–1949.10) [The End of Liberalism as a Literary Ideal (1945.08–1949.10)]","authors":"Xiulu Wang","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8163920","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8163920","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"16 1","pages":"212-215"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83542835","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}
Pub Date : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8163809
J. Shea
This article examines the Hong Kong writer Gu Cangwu 古蒼梧 (1945–) and his grassroots activism during the Cold War, namely, his appropriation of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program (IWP). At the IWP from 1970 to 1971, Gu grew critical of US foreign policy, coedited a newsletter produced in the IWP offices, participated in political demonstrations, and published correspondence in Hong Kong in support of the Baodiao movement. The author argues that Gu's activities co-opted a Cold War institution to promote collective political action among the Chinese diaspora and, importantly, among audiences back in Hong Kong, amplified political resistance against both the United States and the United Kingdom. An examination of Gu's writings, including his correspondence, poems, and 2012 faux memoir Jiu jian 舊箋 (Old Letters), in relation to Kuan-hsing Chen's model of “Asia as method” and minjian society, establishes how Gu's political awakening in the United States and the overall student-led Baodiao movement enlarges Chen's conceptual framework. Rather than arising out of indigenous practices, the transpacific movement began overseas among the Chinese diaspora and, in the eyes of Gu, led to genuine political change in Hong Kong.
{"title":"Co-opting the International Writing Program during the Cold War","authors":"J. Shea","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8163809","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8163809","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines the Hong Kong writer Gu Cangwu 古蒼梧 (1945–) and his grassroots activism during the Cold War, namely, his appropriation of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program (IWP). At the IWP from 1970 to 1971, Gu grew critical of US foreign policy, coedited a newsletter produced in the IWP offices, participated in political demonstrations, and published correspondence in Hong Kong in support of the Baodiao movement. The author argues that Gu's activities co-opted a Cold War institution to promote collective political action among the Chinese diaspora and, importantly, among audiences back in Hong Kong, amplified political resistance against both the United States and the United Kingdom. An examination of Gu's writings, including his correspondence, poems, and 2012 faux memoir Jiu jian 舊箋 (Old Letters), in relation to Kuan-hsing Chen's model of “Asia as method” and minjian society, establishes how Gu's political awakening in the United States and the overall student-led Baodiao movement enlarges Chen's conceptual framework. Rather than arising out of indigenous practices, the transpacific movement began overseas among the Chinese diaspora and, in the eyes of Gu, led to genuine political change in Hong Kong.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86456861","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}
Pub Date : 2020-03-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-8163841
H. Tu
This article offers a reconstruction of the intellectual dialogue between Kantian aesthetician Li Zehou 李澤厚 (1930–) and humanist literary critic Liu Zaifu 劉再復 (1941–). By comparing Li's ruminations on “cultures of pleasure” (legan wenhua 樂感文化) and Liu's treatises on “literatures of sin” (zuigan wenxue 罪感文學), the author shows how religious ethics became a crucial medium for them to reflect on the theologico-political aspects of Chinese revolutionary culture. In particular, Li's cultures of pleasure were grounded in the May Fourth aesthetic discourse that highlighted the inculcation of secular humanity as an alternative to religious transcendence. Meanwhile, Liu underscored the transcendence of literatures of sin to stimulate an inner morality through which to excise all secular political commands from human interiority. Whereas Li prioritized a realistic ethical and psychological noumenon in Confucian aesthetics to refute the romantic and sublime figure of the proletarian subject, Liu's espousal of religious transcendence provided Chinese writers with a spiritual dimension to actualize literature's breakaway from the tutelage of the revolutionary state. Their reflections on this-worldly pleasure and otherworldly sin have merged in exorcising the myth of Mao's revolutionary utopia.
{"title":"Pleasure and Sin","authors":"H. Tu","doi":"10.1215/25783491-8163841","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8163841","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a reconstruction of the intellectual dialogue between Kantian aesthetician Li Zehou 李澤厚 (1930–) and humanist literary critic Liu Zaifu 劉再復 (1941–). By comparing Li's ruminations on “cultures of pleasure” (legan wenhua 樂感文化) and Liu's treatises on “literatures of sin” (zuigan wenxue 罪感文學), the author shows how religious ethics became a crucial medium for them to reflect on the theologico-political aspects of Chinese revolutionary culture. In particular, Li's cultures of pleasure were grounded in the May Fourth aesthetic discourse that highlighted the inculcation of secular humanity as an alternative to religious transcendence. Meanwhile, Liu underscored the transcendence of literatures of sin to stimulate an inner morality through which to excise all secular political commands from human interiority. Whereas Li prioritized a realistic ethical and psychological noumenon in Confucian aesthetics to refute the romantic and sublime figure of the proletarian subject, Liu's espousal of religious transcendence provided Chinese writers with a spiritual dimension to actualize literature's breakaway from the tutelage of the revolutionary state. Their reflections on this-worldly pleasure and otherworldly sin have merged in exorcising the myth of Mao's revolutionary utopia.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"79 1","pages":"157-171"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87067218","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}
Pub Date : 2019-10-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-7978531
Belinda Kong
This essay deploys the concept of pandemic as a set of discursive relations rather than a neutral description of a natural phenomenon, arguing that pandemic discourse is a product of layered histories of power that in turn reproduces myriad forms of imperial and racial power in the new millennium. The essay aims to denaturalize the idea of infectious disease by reframing it as an assemblage of multiple histories of American geopower and biopower from the Cold War to the War on Terror. In particular, Asia and Asian bodies have been targeted by US discourses of infection and biosecurity as frontiers of bioterrorism and the diseased other. A contemporary example of this bio-orientalism can be seen around the 2003 SARS epidemic, in which global discourses projected the source of contagion onto Asia and Asians. Pandemic as method can thus serve as a theoretical pathway for examining cultural concatenations of orientalism and biopower.
{"title":"Pandemic as Method","authors":"Belinda Kong","doi":"10.1215/25783491-7978531","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-7978531","url":null,"abstract":"This essay deploys the concept of pandemic as a set of discursive relations rather than a neutral description of a natural phenomenon, arguing that pandemic discourse is a product of layered histories of power that in turn reproduces myriad forms of imperial and racial power in the new millennium. The essay aims to denaturalize the idea of infectious disease by reframing it as an assemblage of multiple histories of American geopower and biopower from the Cold War to the War on Terror. In particular, Asia and Asian bodies have been targeted by US discourses of infection and biosecurity as frontiers of bioterrorism and the diseased other. A contemporary example of this bio-orientalism can be seen around the 2003 SARS epidemic, in which global discourses projected the source of contagion onto Asia and Asians. Pandemic as method can thus serve as a theoretical pathway for examining cultural concatenations of orientalism and biopower.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86799279","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}
Pub Date : 2019-10-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-7978515
R. Visser
In “China as Method,” Mizoguchi Yūzō argues that “a world that takes China as method would be a world in which China is a constitutive element.” Similarly, a world that takes ecology as method is a world in which humans are a constitutive element, one of “the ten thousand things” (wanwu 萬物). In this essay, the author examines distinct ways in which fictional writers imagine relational dynamics between humans, nonhuman animals, regional ecosystems, and the cosmos to theorize ecology as method. Ecology as method works to radically decenter anthropocentric understandings of the cosmos, historicizes regional ecologies in order to illuminate global dynamics, and acknowledges deterritorialization. While mourning loss, it resists sentimentalizing cultural narratives that rationalize the genocide of species as inevitable. This article focuses on three contemporary eco-writers of Inner Mongolia. Mandumai 滿都麥, one of the People's Republic of China's earliest post-Mao eco-writers, romanticizes indigeneity in his Mongolian-language stories (read in this article in Mandarin translation). Mongolian-Han Sinophone writer Guo Xuebo 郭雪波 juxtaposes “grassland logic” against “agrarian logic” in his desert fiction series, illustrating how agrilogistics dominates the ecological imagination of the ethnically diverse desert-dwellers. Finally, the article analyzes the best-selling Wolf Totem by Beijing-based sent-down youth Jiang Rong 姜戎. Despite attributing desertification to Han ignorance, the novel simultaneously maps the steppes via ecological understandings from Hanspace ontology.
{"title":"Ecology as Method","authors":"R. Visser","doi":"10.1215/25783491-7978515","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-7978515","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In “China as Method,” Mizoguchi Yūzō argues that “a world that takes China as method would be a world in which China is a constitutive element.” Similarly, a world that takes ecology as method is a world in which humans are a constitutive element, one of “the ten thousand things” (wanwu 萬物). In this essay, the author examines distinct ways in which fictional writers imagine relational dynamics between humans, nonhuman animals, regional ecosystems, and the cosmos to theorize ecology as method. Ecology as method works to radically decenter anthropocentric understandings of the cosmos, historicizes regional ecologies in order to illuminate global dynamics, and acknowledges deterritorialization. While mourning loss, it resists sentimentalizing cultural narratives that rationalize the genocide of species as inevitable. This article focuses on three contemporary eco-writers of Inner Mongolia. Mandumai 滿都麥, one of the People's Republic of China's earliest post-Mao eco-writers, romanticizes indigeneity in his Mongolian-language stories (read in this article in Mandarin translation). Mongolian-Han Sinophone writer Guo Xuebo 郭雪波 juxtaposes “grassland logic” against “agrarian logic” in his desert fiction series, illustrating how agrilogistics dominates the ecological imagination of the ethnically diverse desert-dwellers. Finally, the article analyzes the best-selling Wolf Totem by Beijing-based sent-down youth Jiang Rong 姜戎. Despite attributing desertification to Han ignorance, the novel simultaneously maps the steppes via ecological understandings from Hanspace ontology.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88532726","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}
Pub Date : 2019-10-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-7978539
Shuang Shen
The current state of Chinese literary studies is undergoing a process of re(b)ordering where the nation-state is no longer seen as the only acceptable framing for Chinese literature, and existing identificatory markers of Chinese literature—locality, language, ethnicity—are subject to radical rethinking. This article proposes a paradigm of border as method for Chinese literary studies, following the lead of Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson's volume by the same title. Border as method refers to a reflexive glance at the cognitive bordering that we as knowledge producers cannot avoid practicing as we set out to define our object of study or outline a polemic or paradigm. It invites questions such as, What sociological facts of compartmentalized space does the study of Chinese literature yield? If we follow the space making capacity of literature, would we take note of other trajectories of connectivity and relationality and produce alternative configurations of literary assemblage? How does the delineated space of Chinese literature engage with the unevenness and differentiation of Asia and the world? This method manifests as a constructionist engagement with Chinese literature and literary history. It also proposes a cultural geography fundamentally different from the conventional center vs. periphery model. In this new mapping, a borderscape defined in terms of a site or locality, a period, or a variety of other ways could become the de facto center that plays a definitive role in shaping the dynamics and critical terms of Chinese literature and culture as a whole.
{"title":"Border as Method","authors":"Shuang Shen","doi":"10.1215/25783491-7978539","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-7978539","url":null,"abstract":"The current state of Chinese literary studies is undergoing a process of re(b)ordering where the nation-state is no longer seen as the only acceptable framing for Chinese literature, and existing identificatory markers of Chinese literature—locality, language, ethnicity—are subject to radical rethinking. This article proposes a paradigm of border as method for Chinese literary studies, following the lead of Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson's volume by the same title. Border as method refers to a reflexive glance at the cognitive bordering that we as knowledge producers cannot avoid practicing as we set out to define our object of study or outline a polemic or paradigm. It invites questions such as, What sociological facts of compartmentalized space does the study of Chinese literature yield? If we follow the space making capacity of literature, would we take note of other trajectories of connectivity and relationality and produce alternative configurations of literary assemblage? How does the delineated space of Chinese literature engage with the unevenness and differentiation of Asia and the world? This method manifests as a constructionist engagement with Chinese literature and literary history. It also proposes a cultural geography fundamentally different from the conventional center vs. periphery model. In this new mapping, a borderscape defined in terms of a site or locality, a period, or a variety of other ways could become the de facto center that plays a definitive role in shaping the dynamics and critical terms of Chinese literature and culture as a whole.","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"60 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73321332","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}
Pub Date : 2019-10-01DOI: 10.1215/25783491-7978563
Hsiao-hung Chang, C. Rojas
By taking the recent legalization of same-sex marriage in Taiwan as a point of departure, this paper attempts to differentiate a “bloc asia” as a virtual aggregate from an “Area Asia” as a concrete geo-historical region in order to theorize the possibility of taking Taiwan or Asia as a counter-method. The paper starts with an examination of Takeuchi Yoshimi's 1960 “Asia as Method” in light of the two possible Asias—Asia as entity and Asia as method—suggested in Koyasu Nobukuni's poststructuralist reinterpretation. It then moves on to the two possible methods as disclosed in Kuan-Hsing Chen's Asia as Method—one adopts an “Asian studies in Asia” approach with an inter-referencing system; the other foregrounds a dynamic process of turning and hybridizing that occurs between Western colonial powers and local structures—to warp up the similar differentiation of Area Asia and bloc asia, as well as that of Asia as entity and Asia as method. The second part of the paper focuses on Taiwan's recent “Pikaochiu” incident, which uncannily conflates questions of same-sex marriage rights and ancestral tablet terminology. Instead of regarding it as merely an Internet kuso, the paper takes it to demonstrate how out of the old clan patriarchy in East Asia there may emerge new “homophobic” forms that rely not on a proscription of specific sex practices but rather on defending the integrity of the family surname and patrilineage. Yet its potentiality as a rollback against a Euro-American model of marriage, kinship, and family, and simultaneously a reversal against East Asian Confucian values, makes it a bizarre yet challenging case to explicate how Asia could function as a counter-method, a virtual “not yet.”
{"title":"Asia as Counter-method","authors":"Hsiao-hung Chang, C. Rojas","doi":"10.1215/25783491-7978563","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-7978563","url":null,"abstract":"By taking the recent legalization of same-sex marriage in Taiwan as a point of departure, this paper attempts to differentiate a “bloc asia” as a virtual aggregate from an “Area Asia” as a concrete geo-historical region in order to theorize the possibility of taking Taiwan or Asia as a counter-method. The paper starts with an examination of Takeuchi Yoshimi's 1960 “Asia as Method” in light of the two possible Asias—Asia as entity and Asia as method—suggested in Koyasu Nobukuni's poststructuralist reinterpretation. It then moves on to the two possible methods as disclosed in Kuan-Hsing Chen's Asia as Method—one adopts an “Asian studies in Asia” approach with an inter-referencing system; the other foregrounds a dynamic process of turning and hybridizing that occurs between Western colonial powers and local structures—to warp up the similar differentiation of Area Asia and bloc asia, as well as that of Asia as entity and Asia as method. The second part of the paper focuses on Taiwan's recent “Pikaochiu” incident, which uncannily conflates questions of same-sex marriage rights and ancestral tablet terminology. Instead of regarding it as merely an Internet kuso, the paper takes it to demonstrate how out of the old clan patriarchy in East Asia there may emerge new “homophobic” forms that rely not on a proscription of specific sex practices but rather on defending the integrity of the family surname and patrilineage. Yet its potentiality as a rollback against a Euro-American model of marriage, kinship, and family, and simultaneously a reversal against East Asian Confucian values, makes it a bizarre yet challenging case to explicate how Asia could function as a counter-method, a virtual “not yet.”","PeriodicalId":33692,"journal":{"name":"PRISM","volume":"115 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75669483","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}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：