Pub Date : 2021-04-28DOI: 10.1215/10679847-8852163
Yanshuo Zhang
Abstract:This article probes a long-overlooked concept in modern China—ethnic indigeneity—to propose new ways of looking at the relationship between the Chinese nation and its multiethnic minority groups. The Western scholarly community has long held that because the Chinese state uses the Marxist-tainted term shaoshu minzu (ethnic minorities) as the official designation for the non-Han people, the concept of indigeneity is irrelevant to understanding China and its ethnic diversity. This article investigates how reform-era China has witnessed the emergence of an indigenous cultural consciousness exhibited by the non-Han people such as the Qiang people from southwest China. The article argues that minority groups like the Qiang are enthusiastic about "enterprising" their ethnic identities by writing minority histories into the foundational myths of a multiethnic, unified China and challenging the historical hierarchy of the "civilized" Han center and its "uncultured" non-Han peripheries. By analyzing locally produced scholarly and touristic discourses, ethnocultural writing, and filming efforts in southwest China, the article proposes that "indigeneity" entails the interactive processes for a minority group to carve out its cultural, economic, and political spaces of creative belonging within the state by conversing with national narratives and contending for the epistemological authority to represent itself in multiethnic China.
{"title":"Entrepreneurs of the National Past: The Discourse of Ethnic Indigeneity and Indigenous Cultural Writing in China","authors":"Yanshuo Zhang","doi":"10.1215/10679847-8852163","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-8852163","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article probes a long-overlooked concept in modern China—ethnic indigeneity—to propose new ways of looking at the relationship between the Chinese nation and its multiethnic minority groups. The Western scholarly community has long held that because the Chinese state uses the Marxist-tainted term shaoshu minzu (ethnic minorities) as the official designation for the non-Han people, the concept of indigeneity is irrelevant to understanding China and its ethnic diversity. This article investigates how reform-era China has witnessed the emergence of an indigenous cultural consciousness exhibited by the non-Han people such as the Qiang people from southwest China. The article argues that minority groups like the Qiang are enthusiastic about \"enterprising\" their ethnic identities by writing minority histories into the foundational myths of a multiethnic, unified China and challenging the historical hierarchy of the \"civilized\" Han center and its \"uncultured\" non-Han peripheries. By analyzing locally produced scholarly and touristic discourses, ethnocultural writing, and filming efforts in southwest China, the article proposes that \"indigeneity\" entails the interactive processes for a minority group to carve out its cultural, economic, and political spaces of creative belonging within the state by conversing with national narratives and contending for the epistemological authority to represent itself in multiethnic China.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"20 1","pages":"423 - 450"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88725294","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}
Pub Date : 2021-04-28DOI: 10.1215/10679847-8852150
Christian Sorace
Abstract:After the collapse of socialism in Mongolia, democracy promised life after ideology. This article argues that what disappeared during the democratic transition was not ideology but a conceptualization of ideology as an explicit object, field of intervention, and responsibility. By analyzing the urban form as an invention of ideology, it is possible to locate ideology in material artifacts, cinematic representations, and the cultivation of embodied desires in Mongolia's capital city Ulaanbaatar that originated in the socialist era and continue today, albeit unacknowledged as ideology, and modified to fit the needs of capital and democratic legitimacy. The article concludes with a call to embrace ideology as a self-reflexive concept and practice on the grounds that there is still much to excavate and learn from the ruins of twentieth-century state socialism.
{"title":"Ideological Conversion: Mongolia's Transition from Socialism to Postsocialism","authors":"Christian Sorace","doi":"10.1215/10679847-8852150","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-8852150","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:After the collapse of socialism in Mongolia, democracy promised life after ideology. This article argues that what disappeared during the democratic transition was not ideology but a conceptualization of ideology as an explicit object, field of intervention, and responsibility. By analyzing the urban form as an invention of ideology, it is possible to locate ideology in material artifacts, cinematic representations, and the cultivation of embodied desires in Mongolia's capital city Ulaanbaatar that originated in the socialist era and continue today, albeit unacknowledged as ideology, and modified to fit the needs of capital and democratic legitimacy. The article concludes with a call to embrace ideology as a self-reflexive concept and practice on the grounds that there is still much to excavate and learn from the ruins of twentieth-century state socialism.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"186 1","pages":"235 - 265"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74172705","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}
Pub Date : 2021-04-28DOI: 10.1215/10679847-8852137
Chenshu Zhou
Abstract:By recounting how Lu Xun 鲁迅 went from studying medicine in Japan to writing for the magazine Xin qingnian 新青年 (New Youth), the preface to Nahan 呐喊 (Outcry, 1923), Lu Xun's first collection of short stories, not only presents an origin story of an important author but also contains important clues for understanding modern Chinese literature. This article offers a new reading of that canonical text by focusing on the problem of medium. Synthesizing author biography, media history, and textual analysis, it examines three intermedial references in the preface—the famous lantern slide, the modern periodical, and the recurring notion of outcry. As an autobiographical account, the preface contains narrated events that call for more mediacentered analysis, including the "slide incident" (renamed "screen incident") and Lu Xun's failed experiment with the periodical medium. Reading the preface as an act of narration, this article scrutinizes textual choices such as the confusing word dianying 电影 (film) and the outcry metaphor. The emergence of both modern vernacular literature and Lu Xun as a major literary figure, it is argued, should be historicized in a broader transnational media environment, in which diverse media practices intersected.
{"title":"Literature by Other Mediums: Revisiting Lu Xun's Preface to Outcry","authors":"Chenshu Zhou","doi":"10.1215/10679847-8852137","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-8852137","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:By recounting how Lu Xun 鲁迅 went from studying medicine in Japan to writing for the magazine Xin qingnian 新青年 (New Youth), the preface to Nahan 呐喊 (Outcry, 1923), Lu Xun's first collection of short stories, not only presents an origin story of an important author but also contains important clues for understanding modern Chinese literature. This article offers a new reading of that canonical text by focusing on the problem of medium. Synthesizing author biography, media history, and textual analysis, it examines three intermedial references in the preface—the famous lantern slide, the modern periodical, and the recurring notion of outcry. As an autobiographical account, the preface contains narrated events that call for more mediacentered analysis, including the \"slide incident\" (renamed \"screen incident\") and Lu Xun's failed experiment with the periodical medium. Reading the preface as an act of narration, this article scrutinizes textual choices such as the confusing word dianying 电影 (film) and the outcry metaphor. The emergence of both modern vernacular literature and Lu Xun as a major literary figure, it is argued, should be historicized in a broader transnational media environment, in which diverse media practices intersected.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"20 1","pages":"373 - 398"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75950253","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}
Pub Date : 2021-04-28DOI: 10.1215/10679847-8852111
Derek Kramer
Abstract:This article examines how Anglo-American evangelicals in colonial Korea employed racialized understandings of the environment to justify a culture of recreation and health. In the metropole and periphery, missionary researchers studying climate, geography, and public health asserted a science-based injunction to rest that was intended to maintain a population of evangelical workers. The production of this scientific research, external to the Japanese colonial state, allowed the missionary community to establish a rationale for collective segregation from the local populations they sought to save. In Korea, this dynamic is profiled through the history of a missionary resort at Sorai beach. Initially believed to have contributed to the suicide of an evangelical worker in 1895, within a few years the Sorai area rapidly transformed. In step with the broader culture of summer recreation that emerged in Korea during the 1910s and 1920s, the missionaries recast Sorai from a deleterious space into a site of strategic and devotional rest.
{"title":"He Rests from His Labors\": Racialized Recreation and Missionary Science in Colonial Korea","authors":"Derek Kramer","doi":"10.1215/10679847-8852111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-8852111","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines how Anglo-American evangelicals in colonial Korea employed racialized understandings of the environment to justify a culture of recreation and health. In the metropole and periphery, missionary researchers studying climate, geography, and public health asserted a science-based injunction to rest that was intended to maintain a population of evangelical workers. The production of this scientific research, external to the Japanese colonial state, allowed the missionary community to establish a rationale for collective segregation from the local populations they sought to save. In Korea, this dynamic is profiled through the history of a missionary resort at Sorai beach. Initially believed to have contributed to the suicide of an evangelical worker in 1895, within a few years the Sorai area rapidly transformed. In step with the broader culture of summer recreation that emerged in Korea during the 1910s and 1920s, the missionaries recast Sorai from a deleterious space into a site of strategic and devotional rest.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"31 1","pages":"347 - 372"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81936112","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}
Pub Date : 2021-04-28DOI: 10.1215/10679847-8852085
Alexander Zahlten
Abstract:This article explores the popular shift to a media-ecological understanding in post-1960s Japan. Bookending its investigation with two actual funerals held for fictional characters in 1970 and 2007, it tracks the trope of death to map the increased interlocking of media temporality and everyday temporality in intensified media capitalism. As characters attain the ability to die, they are increasingly reanimated (to die again) in other media. Death and reanimation thereby become an expression of transformations at the intersection of media-systemic, economic, and aesthetic levels. The article concludes that death and reanimation across media channels point to a new rhythmic temporal regime. Characters are now mortal but cannot die, doomed to become eternally wandering media-mix zombies. The article relates this media economy linked to themes of death and animation to recent discussions of capitalist animism by figures such as Michael Taussig, Achille Mbembe, and Steven Shaviro. The article then offers a brief outlook on the most recent expressions of this zombie economy in narrative tropes of time loops and alternative realities.
{"title":"Between Two Funerals: Zombie Temporality and Media Ecology in Japan","authors":"Alexander Zahlten","doi":"10.1215/10679847-8852085","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-8852085","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores the popular shift to a media-ecological understanding in post-1960s Japan. Bookending its investigation with two actual funerals held for fictional characters in 1970 and 2007, it tracks the trope of death to map the increased interlocking of media temporality and everyday temporality in intensified media capitalism. As characters attain the ability to die, they are increasingly reanimated (to die again) in other media. Death and reanimation thereby become an expression of transformations at the intersection of media-systemic, economic, and aesthetic levels. The article concludes that death and reanimation across media channels point to a new rhythmic temporal regime. Characters are now mortal but cannot die, doomed to become eternally wandering media-mix zombies. The article relates this media economy linked to themes of death and animation to recent discussions of capitalist animism by figures such as Michael Taussig, Achille Mbembe, and Steven Shaviro. The article then offers a brief outlook on the most recent expressions of this zombie economy in narrative tropes of time loops and alternative realities.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"175 1","pages":"291 - 317"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84345086","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}
Pub Date : 2021-04-28DOI: 10.1215/10679847-8852124
Qin Wang
Abstract:While the Japanese sinologist Takeuchi Yoshimi is frequently mentioned in discussions of "alternative modernity" on the part of Asia, people have not sufficiently addressed the asymmetrical relationship between literature and politics in Takeuchi's thinking, as his literary analysis is oftentimes associated with a Hegelian reading of subjectivity. Through a reading of Takeuchi's "What Is Modernity?," published in 1948, this article examines Takeuchi's discourses on politics from a literary standpoint that is radically nondialectical and "powerless" with regard to "politics" as he understands it. Takeuchi's critique of modernity as well as his idea of Asian nationalism cannot do without his idiosyncratic understanding of literature, especially his reading of Lu Xun, and his insistence on the powerlessness of literary resistance. Takeuchi's literary reshuffling of the political, the article argues, opens up a horizon where the very historico-political condition of possibility of existing political institutionalizations can be put into reexamination—it helps us reconsider the concepts of relation, otherness, and equality, which are still in operation to frame our understanding of the world.
{"title":"Literature, Powerlessness, and Modernity: A Reading of Takeuchi Yoshimi's \"What Is Modernity?\"","authors":"Qin Wang","doi":"10.1215/10679847-8852124","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-8852124","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:While the Japanese sinologist Takeuchi Yoshimi is frequently mentioned in discussions of \"alternative modernity\" on the part of Asia, people have not sufficiently addressed the asymmetrical relationship between literature and politics in Takeuchi's thinking, as his literary analysis is oftentimes associated with a Hegelian reading of subjectivity. Through a reading of Takeuchi's \"What Is Modernity?,\" published in 1948, this article examines Takeuchi's discourses on politics from a literary standpoint that is radically nondialectical and \"powerless\" with regard to \"politics\" as he understands it. Takeuchi's critique of modernity as well as his idea of Asian nationalism cannot do without his idiosyncratic understanding of literature, especially his reading of Lu Xun, and his insistence on the powerlessness of literary resistance. Takeuchi's literary reshuffling of the political, the article argues, opens up a horizon where the very historico-political condition of possibility of existing political institutionalizations can be put into reexamination—it helps us reconsider the concepts of relation, otherness, and equality, which are still in operation to frame our understanding of the world.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"2 1","pages":"399 - 421"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89461015","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}
Pub Date : 2021-02-01DOI: 10.1215/10679847-8722836
Zawawi Ibrahim, Lin Hongxuan
Abstract:The Penan of Sarawak, East Malaysia, on the island of Borneo, are an indigenous community who have adapted to survive under the strictures and expectations of the Malaysian nation-state while proudly holding on to their traditions and identities. One such tradition is the practice of Penan storytelling (tosok), which plays a remarkably effective exogenous role in engaging the attention of everyone from state functionaries to visiting anthropologists while continuing to perform the endogenous function of reinforcing community bonds. The role of storytelling in mediating the relationships between indigenous peoples and the nation-state, which claims the territory they inhabit, has rarely been subjected to scholarly scrutiny. This article explores how Penan elders and community members have used and adapted their practice of storytelling to engage with the Malaysian state, civil society, and the public imagination, ensuring that Penan voices are heard on issues as varied as access to education, the predations of logging companies, and the existential questions of land tenure. In setting aside space for a Penan storyteller to speak in his own eloquent words, this article is itself a channel for Penan perspectives to be heard, an opportunity the Penan are not hesitant to use where available.
{"title":"Penan Storytelling as Indigenous Counter-Narrations of Malaysian Nation-State Developmentalism","authors":"Zawawi Ibrahim, Lin Hongxuan","doi":"10.1215/10679847-8722836","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-8722836","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The Penan of Sarawak, East Malaysia, on the island of Borneo, are an indigenous community who have adapted to survive under the strictures and expectations of the Malaysian nation-state while proudly holding on to their traditions and identities. One such tradition is the practice of Penan storytelling (tosok), which plays a remarkably effective exogenous role in engaging the attention of everyone from state functionaries to visiting anthropologists while continuing to perform the endogenous function of reinforcing community bonds. The role of storytelling in mediating the relationships between indigenous peoples and the nation-state, which claims the territory they inhabit, has rarely been subjected to scholarly scrutiny. This article explores how Penan elders and community members have used and adapted their practice of storytelling to engage with the Malaysian state, civil society, and the public imagination, ensuring that Penan voices are heard on issues as varied as access to education, the predations of logging companies, and the existential questions of land tenure. In setting aside space for a Penan storyteller to speak in his own eloquent words, this article is itself a channel for Penan perspectives to be heard, an opportunity the Penan are not hesitant to use where available.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"19 1","pages":"163 - 182"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86936375","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}
Pub Date : 2021-02-01DOI: 10.1215/10679847-8722784
L. Sears
Abstract:Storytelling brings into vivid focus the emotions and affects that different classes and races of people experienced in the imperial Dutch Indies island worlds. The storyteller explored in this article is Maria Dermoût (1888–1962), a mixed-race Dutch woman (Indo) who was born and raised on Java in the Dutch East Indies and who spent more than thirty years there. This article argues that Dermoût is a key writer for understanding affective economies, because she devotes significant time and effort in her fiction to fleshing out Native characters, something that few writers of her time did. The novella Toetie, one of Dermoût's last works, uncovers Indies and Dutch attitudes toward race and color, moving her work from the genre of Indies Letters, or Dutch colonial literature, to that of postcolonial critique, with an exploration of forms of servitude, affect, and the social relations of her time.
{"title":"Racial Slurs and Whispers in Situated Testimonies of Dutch Imperial Fiction","authors":"L. Sears","doi":"10.1215/10679847-8722784","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-8722784","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Storytelling brings into vivid focus the emotions and affects that different classes and races of people experienced in the imperial Dutch Indies island worlds. The storyteller explored in this article is Maria Dermoût (1888–1962), a mixed-race Dutch woman (Indo) who was born and raised on Java in the Dutch East Indies and who spent more than thirty years there. This article argues that Dermoût is a key writer for understanding affective economies, because she devotes significant time and effort in her fiction to fleshing out Native characters, something that few writers of her time did. The novella Toetie, one of Dermoût's last works, uncovers Indies and Dutch attitudes toward race and color, moving her work from the genre of Indies Letters, or Dutch colonial literature, to that of postcolonial critique, with an exploration of forms of servitude, affect, and the social relations of her time.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"40 1","pages":"67 - 91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90934396","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}
Pub Date : 2021-02-01DOI: 10.1215/10679847-8722743
Ileana M. Rodríguez-Silva, L. Sears
Abstract:This article highlights the overall aims of the special issue, which reconceptualizes island worlds as situated historical places, that is, islands and their networks as spaces that come to life through the multiple and contested meanings constantly attached to them, formed in the milieu of overlapping and competing European, US, and Southeast Asian empires and diasporas. By investigating the forms and politics of storytelling in the island South and Southeast Asia, along with parallel and intersecting formations in the Caribbean and diasporic Asian America, this article underlines the two scholarly interventions of the special issue in the study of world making: (1) it refashions the notion of comparison to move away from the project of "knowing"—habitually constituted through a top-down gaze aimed at assessment and measuring, which consequently leads to the formation of hierarchies, categories of containment, and reductionism—and to unearth forms of comparison emerging from local environments and local knowledge; and (2) in thinking of storytelling events or inscriptions as situated testimonies (i.e., identifying the politics of location of a telling), it centers affect and emotion as the means for unraveling and connecting different, contesting registers of experience.
{"title":"Introduction: Thinking Comparison with the Politics of Storytelling","authors":"Ileana M. Rodríguez-Silva, L. Sears","doi":"10.1215/10679847-8722743","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-8722743","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article highlights the overall aims of the special issue, which reconceptualizes island worlds as situated historical places, that is, islands and their networks as spaces that come to life through the multiple and contested meanings constantly attached to them, formed in the milieu of overlapping and competing European, US, and Southeast Asian empires and diasporas. By investigating the forms and politics of storytelling in the island South and Southeast Asia, along with parallel and intersecting formations in the Caribbean and diasporic Asian America, this article underlines the two scholarly interventions of the special issue in the study of world making: (1) it refashions the notion of comparison to move away from the project of \"knowing\"—habitually constituted through a top-down gaze aimed at assessment and measuring, which consequently leads to the formation of hierarchies, categories of containment, and reductionism—and to unearth forms of comparison emerging from local environments and local knowledge; and (2) in thinking of storytelling events or inscriptions as situated testimonies (i.e., identifying the politics of location of a telling), it centers affect and emotion as the means for unraveling and connecting different, contesting registers of experience.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"32 1","pages":"1 - 20"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83930374","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}
Pub Date : 2021-02-01DOI: 10.1215/10679847-8722769
Carlo Bonura
Abstract:This article considers two films by the Malaysian filmmaker Amir Muhammad, The Last Communist of 2006 and the Village People Radio Show of 2007. Both films are focused on the Malayan Emergency and the lives of a small group of Malayan communists. Through an engagement with Walter Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller," the analysis in this article examines the aesthetic forms that structure Amir's films, namely nonlinear narratives, intertextuality, and the use of images and stories as comparative frames. This article argues that Amir's films enable audiences to recognize how the truth of a communist past in Malaysia, both of its politics and suppression, inflects the present. The films provide an opening to recognize how the absence of communism today is the effect of the ideological clearing of all leftism that became the hallmark of the end of the British Empire in Malaysia. Communism is made meaningful in Amir's films both as a lived experience and as a displacement that is absent from the postcolonial everyday.
{"title":"The What-Has-Been and the Now of a Communist Past in Malaya in the Films of Amir Muhammad","authors":"Carlo Bonura","doi":"10.1215/10679847-8722769","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-8722769","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article considers two films by the Malaysian filmmaker Amir Muhammad, The Last Communist of 2006 and the Village People Radio Show of 2007. Both films are focused on the Malayan Emergency and the lives of a small group of Malayan communists. Through an engagement with Walter Benjamin's essay \"The Storyteller,\" the analysis in this article examines the aesthetic forms that structure Amir's films, namely nonlinear narratives, intertextuality, and the use of images and stories as comparative frames. This article argues that Amir's films enable audiences to recognize how the truth of a communist past in Malaysia, both of its politics and suppression, inflects the present. The films provide an opening to recognize how the absence of communism today is the effect of the ideological clearing of all leftism that became the hallmark of the end of the British Empire in Malaysia. Communism is made meaningful in Amir's films both as a lived experience and as a displacement that is absent from the postcolonial everyday.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"15 1","pages":"47 - 65"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73427759","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}
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：