Pub Date : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1215/10679847-10122190
M. Berman
Abstract:In Kamaishi, a city in the Tōhoku region of Japan, the aging of the population and the 2011 earthquake and tsunami changed people's relationships to time and place. For many people, "time stopped" when disaster struck. That stoppage compounded a weakening of the appeal of the future that had come with deindustrialization. Despite people's lack of expectations for the future, "hope," which is most frequently conceptualized as an orientation toward a not-yet, was a recurring theme there. This article argues that the form of hope most prevalent among people who lost their homes in the 2011 disasters relied on repetition and the creation of places of refuge. In those particular places, people could use the stoppage of time to their advantage by avoiding the pain of the recent past and the foreseeable future. Ironically, reporters and academics have raised the activities of people in Kamaishi as an example of hope for Japan's future. That is, people closer to suffering focused on place-based hope, whereas people at a distance transformed the struggle to create those places into a vision of the future, which sometimes made it difficult for survivors' hope to endure.
{"title":"Hope without a Future: Conflicts between Time and Place in Japan after 3/11","authors":"M. Berman","doi":"10.1215/10679847-10122190","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10122190","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In Kamaishi, a city in the Tōhoku region of Japan, the aging of the population and the 2011 earthquake and tsunami changed people's relationships to time and place. For many people, \"time stopped\" when disaster struck. That stoppage compounded a weakening of the appeal of the future that had come with deindustrialization. Despite people's lack of expectations for the future, \"hope,\" which is most frequently conceptualized as an orientation toward a not-yet, was a recurring theme there. This article argues that the form of hope most prevalent among people who lost their homes in the 2011 disasters relied on repetition and the creation of places of refuge. In those particular places, people could use the stoppage of time to their advantage by avoiding the pain of the recent past and the foreseeable future. Ironically, reporters and academics have raised the activities of people in Kamaishi as an example of hope for Japan's future. That is, people closer to suffering focused on place-based hope, whereas people at a distance transformed the struggle to create those places into a vision of the future, which sometimes made it difficult for survivors' hope to endure.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"126 1","pages":"203 - 227"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87838457","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 : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1215/10679847-10214150
Ayelet Zohar
When Abe Shinzo 安倍晋三 (1955 – 2022), Japan’s former prime minister, was shot from a short distance on July 8, 2022, the audience was stunned, shocked, and halted. Abe briefly turned back to where he heard the shots coming from before dropping to the floor. Mere seconds later, the murderer was caught with a homemade gun, his motivation not quite clear. The whole sequence took only a few seconds and was caught on multiple mobile phone cameras used in a mundane way to snap pictures of the local event by the audience who, looking toward Abe from various angles, unintentionally documented the shooting. The clips instantly became evidence of the crime committed, and were soon after posted on social media, broadcast on television, and shared with billions of viewers around the globe. Abe’s assassination was not the first one in Japan’s history to be caught on camera. The first was the killing of Asanuma Inejir 浅沼稲次郎 (1898 –
{"title":"Cover Image Commentary—Shooting a Shot: The Decisive Moment of Abe Shinzo's and Asanuma Inejirō's Assassinations on Camera","authors":"Ayelet Zohar","doi":"10.1215/10679847-10214150","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10214150","url":null,"abstract":"When Abe Shinzo 安倍晋三 (1955 – 2022), Japan’s former prime minister, was shot from a short distance on July 8, 2022, the audience was stunned, shocked, and halted. Abe briefly turned back to where he heard the shots coming from before dropping to the floor. Mere seconds later, the murderer was caught with a homemade gun, his motivation not quite clear. The whole sequence took only a few seconds and was caught on multiple mobile phone cameras used in a mundane way to snap pictures of the local event by the audience who, looking toward Abe from various angles, unintentionally documented the shooting. The clips instantly became evidence of the crime committed, and were soon after posted on social media, broadcast on television, and shared with billions of viewers around the globe. Abe’s assassination was not the first one in Japan’s history to be caught on camera. The first was the killing of Asanuma Inejir 浅沼稲次郎 (1898 –","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"43 1","pages":"13 - 9"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87534166","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 : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1215/10679847-10122203
Young-Hwa Choe
Abstract:This article explores how and why fraudulence and deception get coded as feminine in Korean politics and popular culture. Focusing on the processes whereby deception gets conflated with the female body, it examines filmic articulations of physical and rhetorical attacks—ranging from subtle to overt—against works of art about the female body, in which aesthetic judgments take on a moral character. The article begins with a discussion of Kim Soyoung's new woman: her first song (2004), which locates the possibilities for subject formation that the figure of the new Korean woman exemplifies in deformations, ruptures and breakages. The article then turns to a pair of films, Hong Sang-soo's Night and Day (2007) and Kim Ki-duk's Wild Animals (1997), which explore the threat and possibilities that such a model of feminine subjectivity offers. The article then closes by way of reference to Jeon Soo-il's A Korean in Paris (2015), in which the possibility of formless subjectivity becomes disavowed within a paranoid vision of the new Korean woman as a fraud. In all of these films, the misogynist tendencies within contemporary Korean society are specifically displaced onto the distant location of Paris, which is not coincidentally regarded as the origin point of the new Korean woman. Generally, in Korean cinema, Paris has been featured both as a site of authenticity and formal experimentation in art and also as the scene of sexual awakening for women. The films discussed in this article foreground questions of aesthetic style around the figure of the female body, and in the process, the female subject's engagement to art becomes conflated with and assessed by questions of morality, becoming divorced from the more relevant aesthetic contexts.
摘要:本文探讨了欺诈和欺骗如何以及为什么在韩国政治和大众文化中被编码为女性化。聚焦于欺骗与女性身体混为一谈的过程，它审视了电影对身体和修辞攻击的表达——从微妙到公开——反对女性身体的艺术作品，其中审美判断具有道德特征。本文首先讨论了金小英的新女性:她的第一首歌(2004)，这首歌定位了主体形成的可能性，新韩国女性的形象以变形、破裂和破裂为例。本文随后转向两部电影，洪尚秀的《夜与日》(2007)和金基德的《野生动物》(1997)，它们探讨了这种女性主体性模式所带来的威胁和可能性。文章最后引用了全秀一(Jeon Soo-il)的《一个韩国人在巴黎》(A Korean in Paris, 2015)，在这部作品中，没有形式的主体性的可能性在一种偏执的视角中被否定，这种视角将新韩国女性视为一个骗子。在所有这些电影中，当代韩国社会的厌女倾向都被特别转移到遥远的巴黎，巴黎被视为新韩国女性的发源地，这并非巧合。一般来说，在韩国电影中，巴黎既是真实性和正式艺术实验的场所，也是女性性觉醒的场所。本文所讨论的电影围绕女性身体的形象提出了美学风格的问题，在这个过程中，女性主体对艺术的参与与道德问题混为一谈，并被道德问题所评估，从而脱离了更相关的美学语境。
{"title":"Paris in Korean Cinema: Fraudulence and the Female Form in Hong Sang-soo's Night and Day and Kim Ki-duk's Wild Animals","authors":"Young-Hwa Choe","doi":"10.1215/10679847-10122203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10122203","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores how and why fraudulence and deception get coded as feminine in Korean politics and popular culture. Focusing on the processes whereby deception gets conflated with the female body, it examines filmic articulations of physical and rhetorical attacks—ranging from subtle to overt—against works of art about the female body, in which aesthetic judgments take on a moral character. The article begins with a discussion of Kim Soyoung's new woman: her first song (2004), which locates the possibilities for subject formation that the figure of the new Korean woman exemplifies in deformations, ruptures and breakages. The article then turns to a pair of films, Hong Sang-soo's Night and Day (2007) and Kim Ki-duk's Wild Animals (1997), which explore the threat and possibilities that such a model of feminine subjectivity offers. The article then closes by way of reference to Jeon Soo-il's A Korean in Paris (2015), in which the possibility of formless subjectivity becomes disavowed within a paranoid vision of the new Korean woman as a fraud. In all of these films, the misogynist tendencies within contemporary Korean society are specifically displaced onto the distant location of Paris, which is not coincidentally regarded as the origin point of the new Korean woman. Generally, in Korean cinema, Paris has been featured both as a site of authenticity and formal experimentation in art and also as the scene of sexual awakening for women. The films discussed in this article foreground questions of aesthetic style around the figure of the female body, and in the process, the female subject's engagement to art becomes conflated with and assessed by questions of morality, becoming divorced from the more relevant aesthetic contexts.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"12 1","pages":"229 - 254"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78562071","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 : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1215/10679847-10122112
A. A. Johnson
Abstract:Singapore depends upon foreign bodies to maintain its hypermodern, sleek exterior. For many Singaporeans, a live-in foreign domestic worker (FDW) marks a milestone in achieving a certain kind of bourgeois lifestyle, but the incorporation of a stranger into the household gives rise to certain fears. Intimate labor evokes unexpected feelings, and anxieties about the boundaries of class, nation, gender. In tabloid articles, message boards, and everyday conversation, employers discuss the problem of witchcraft practiced by FDWs—stories such as the incorporation of bodily fluids into employers' food, the unwanted generation of affection or warm feelings toward those who according to labor contracts should be employees, the surreptitious switching of FDWs' facial features with those of the employer's children, or other concerns over boundaries and their violation. This article argues that the horror revealed by such stories is one that challenges Singaporean claims to ethnic and economic supremacy in the region, as it points to a return of a perceived threat from an allochronous rural world. Each presents a particular challenge to a sealed, prosperous, "first world" Singaporean self-imagining, a porosity that calls for magical and magico-bureaucratic interventions to set right.
{"title":"Foreign Bodies: Horror and Intimacy in Singapore's Migrant Labor Regimes","authors":"A. A. Johnson","doi":"10.1215/10679847-10122112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10122112","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Singapore depends upon foreign bodies to maintain its hypermodern, sleek exterior. For many Singaporeans, a live-in foreign domestic worker (FDW) marks a milestone in achieving a certain kind of bourgeois lifestyle, but the incorporation of a stranger into the household gives rise to certain fears. Intimate labor evokes unexpected feelings, and anxieties about the boundaries of class, nation, gender. In tabloid articles, message boards, and everyday conversation, employers discuss the problem of witchcraft practiced by FDWs—stories such as the incorporation of bodily fluids into employers' food, the unwanted generation of affection or warm feelings toward those who according to labor contracts should be employees, the surreptitious switching of FDWs' facial features with those of the employer's children, or other concerns over boundaries and their violation. This article argues that the horror revealed by such stories is one that challenges Singaporean claims to ethnic and economic supremacy in the region, as it points to a return of a perceived threat from an allochronous rural world. Each presents a particular challenge to a sealed, prosperous, \"first world\" Singaporean self-imagining, a porosity that calls for magical and magico-bureaucratic interventions to set right.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"12 1","pages":"41 - 66"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81779374","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 : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1215/10679847-10122099
Linh Nguyen
Abstract:In much of the mobilities literature, a dichotomy exists between the urban and rural. The bulk of studies view the urban as a receiving center, one that is cosmopolitan, diverse, and dynamic, while conflating the rural into its opposite: a backward, boring, and unchanging place that sends people away. This split ignores the similarities between the urban and the rural and the complexities of the modern rural. This study, based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, uses a rural community in Vietnam as a node to explore the interconnecting transformations among Asia's rural areas. Findings reveal how rural changes in South Korea have created corresponding changes in rural areas in Vietnam through transnational and translocal rural marriages. Given the nuanced revelations of the ways in which the rural forms and changes, this article calls for its reconceptualization and demonstrates that, similar to the urban, the rural too can be global, heterogeneous, and transformative.
{"title":"Geometries of Fractals and Power: Transnational Marriages, Translocal Marriages, and Asia's Global Ruralities","authors":"Linh Nguyen","doi":"10.1215/10679847-10122099","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10122099","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In much of the mobilities literature, a dichotomy exists between the urban and rural. The bulk of studies view the urban as a receiving center, one that is cosmopolitan, diverse, and dynamic, while conflating the rural into its opposite: a backward, boring, and unchanging place that sends people away. This split ignores the similarities between the urban and the rural and the complexities of the modern rural. This study, based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, uses a rural community in Vietnam as a node to explore the interconnecting transformations among Asia's rural areas. Findings reveal how rural changes in South Korea have created corresponding changes in rural areas in Vietnam through transnational and translocal rural marriages. Given the nuanced revelations of the ways in which the rural forms and changes, this article calls for its reconceptualization and demonstrates that, similar to the urban, the rural too can be global, heterogeneous, and transformative.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"17 1","pages":"15 - 40"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78229713","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 : 2023-02-01DOI: 10.1215/10679847-10122151
J. Hetrick
Abstract:This article discusses the significance of Gilles Deleuze's almost passing references to East Asian thought. Even though Deleuze comes to these ideas through the work of other European thinkers—most notably Friedrich Nietzsche, Sergei Eisenstein, François Jullien, and Alan Watts—the article argues that there are ultimately deep resonances between Deleuze's philosophy, especially in its Bergso-Leibnizian articulations, and specific East Asian ideas. The article begins by cataloging and commenting upon Deleuze's various references to Chinese and Japanese thought generally before discussing how one particular concept—that of the gap (écart)—not only lies at the heart of his metaphysics but also forms the very basis for developing an adequate methodology for negotiating his encounter with East Asia. Finally, by also considering some of Jullien's recent ideas, the article examines the ways in which this methodology of the gap may be more adequate than other attempts to characterize contemporary comparative philosophy.
{"title":"Deleuze and East Asia: Toward a Comparative Methodology of the Gap","authors":"J. Hetrick","doi":"10.1215/10679847-10122151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10122151","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article discusses the significance of Gilles Deleuze's almost passing references to East Asian thought. Even though Deleuze comes to these ideas through the work of other European thinkers—most notably Friedrich Nietzsche, Sergei Eisenstein, François Jullien, and Alan Watts—the article argues that there are ultimately deep resonances between Deleuze's philosophy, especially in its Bergso-Leibnizian articulations, and specific East Asian ideas. The article begins by cataloging and commenting upon Deleuze's various references to Chinese and Japanese thought generally before discussing how one particular concept—that of the gap (écart)—not only lies at the heart of his metaphysics but also forms the very basis for developing an adequate methodology for negotiating his encounter with East Asia. Finally, by also considering some of Jullien's recent ideas, the article examines the ways in which this methodology of the gap may be more adequate than other attempts to characterize contemporary comparative philosophy.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"455 1","pages":"117 - 142"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83212169","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 : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/10679847-9967344
Olga Fedorenko
Abstract:This article examines how the Korea Advertising Museum in Seoul participates in constructing narratives of past and present in postmillennial South Korea, and how historical advertisements create ambiguities within those narratives. The analysis is inspired by Benjaminian scholarship on collective dreamworlds and on advertisements as dream-images, while the curatorial choices are situated against, first, the historical-cultural specificity of advertising in South Korea and, second, the social-political imaginaries of the mid-2000s, when the museum was developed and opened. The article details how the Advertising Museum constructs the post-democratization South Korean present as the dreamed-of future, by equating historical progress with a triumphant march of technological, political, and aesthetic freedom to advertise. When museumified old advertisements are brought into the present as technologically and aesthetically archaic, they support the hegemonic narrative of progress and arrival. However, the article also shows how the dream-images of old advertisements are not perfectly contained. Old advertisements still may shock because their collective utopias remain unattainable in the postmillennial present, despite its technological and industrial sophistication and despite it being declared the hoped-for future.
{"title":"The Advertising Museum in Seoul: Dream-Images and the Freedom to Advertise","authors":"Olga Fedorenko","doi":"10.1215/10679847-9967344","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-9967344","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines how the Korea Advertising Museum in Seoul participates in constructing narratives of past and present in postmillennial South Korea, and how historical advertisements create ambiguities within those narratives. The analysis is inspired by Benjaminian scholarship on collective dreamworlds and on advertisements as dream-images, while the curatorial choices are situated against, first, the historical-cultural specificity of advertising in South Korea and, second, the social-political imaginaries of the mid-2000s, when the museum was developed and opened. The article details how the Advertising Museum constructs the post-democratization South Korean present as the dreamed-of future, by equating historical progress with a triumphant march of technological, political, and aesthetic freedom to advertise. When museumified old advertisements are brought into the present as technologically and aesthetically archaic, they support the hegemonic narrative of progress and arrival. However, the article also shows how the dream-images of old advertisements are not perfectly contained. Old advertisements still may shock because their collective utopias remain unattainable in the postmillennial present, despite its technological and industrial sophistication and despite it being declared the hoped-for future.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"23 1","pages":"763 - 792"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80255873","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 : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/10679847-9967292
K. Smith
Abstract:This article examines Korean surrealism—the avant-garde movement most explicitly preoccupied with questions of the psyche and subjectification within an historical context of colonial unfreedom—through attention to the short-lived journal Samsa munhak 三四文學 (34 Literature, 1934–37) and its most representative poet, Yi Si-u 李時雨. Drawing from psychoanalysis and affect theory, it addresses Yi Si-u's scholarly underexamined but substantive meditations on the constitution of the subject, desire, and repression, focusing specifically on the question of (un)happiness and its implications for psychic and political freedom in a colonial climate of despair only partially brightened by the allure of the commodity. The author aims to demonstrate how Yi's surrealist refraction of subjective desire both registers the sociopolitical pressures of his historical context as well as negatively conceptualizes a liberated form of happiness at odds with the standardized variant administered by the hegemonic colonial authority. As such, the dialectical inseparability of collective liberation from psychosocial repression and the individual pursuit of happiness can become legible, an insight that may contribute to current theorizations of affect, commodification, and emancipatory movements.
{"title":"The Promise of (Un)happiness: 34 Literature and Yi Si-u's Surrealist Poetics in Colonial Korea","authors":"K. Smith","doi":"10.1215/10679847-9967292","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-9967292","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines Korean surrealism—the avant-garde movement most explicitly preoccupied with questions of the psyche and subjectification within an historical context of colonial unfreedom—through attention to the short-lived journal Samsa munhak 三四文學 (34 Literature, 1934–37) and its most representative poet, Yi Si-u 李時雨. Drawing from psychoanalysis and affect theory, it addresses Yi Si-u's scholarly underexamined but substantive meditations on the constitution of the subject, desire, and repression, focusing specifically on the question of (un)happiness and its implications for psychic and political freedom in a colonial climate of despair only partially brightened by the allure of the commodity. The author aims to demonstrate how Yi's surrealist refraction of subjective desire both registers the sociopolitical pressures of his historical context as well as negatively conceptualizes a liberated form of happiness at odds with the standardized variant administered by the hegemonic colonial authority. As such, the dialectical inseparability of collective liberation from psychosocial repression and the individual pursuit of happiness can become legible, an insight that may contribute to current theorizations of affect, commodification, and emancipatory movements.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"12 1","pages":"653 - 678"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86902115","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 : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/10679847-9967396
Lorenzo Andolfatto
Abstract:Recent discussion concerning the Chinese government's autocratic practices has been orienting public attention toward the large scale of its surveillance apparatus. Observed from afar, the integration of digital and material infrastructures for discipline and control—whether in the form of factory/detention complexes in the Xinjiang region, face-recognition technology, or the Great Firewall—cannot help but convey the impression of a faceless authority acting upon statistics and data. Yet data and statistics refer to individuals and communities, whose interactions with the powers that be are negotiated daily on concrete grounds, such as over a cup of tea. The expressions hecha 喝茶 (drinking tea) and bei hecha 被喝茶 (being asked for tea) long ago acquired a chiefly political connotation and are now commonly used to imply being approached by the State Security Police for a forced interrogation. As the everydayness of the expression suggests, this type of state interventions in civil society attests, in Foucault's terms, state power's "capillary form of existence, the point where [it] reaches into the very grain of individuals." This article makes use of an extraordinary corpus of online texts presenting firsthand accounts of bei hecha experiences to explore questions of everyday governance and governmentality in contemporary China. Adopting a text-based approach to matters conventionally pertaining to the realm of political science, it argues for an understanding of hecha ji texts (written recollections of tea-drinking sessions) as a distinctive form of writing that is functional to the construction of counter-public spheres of dissent in the tightening authoritarian environment of Xi Jinping's China today.
{"title":"Semantics of Tea Drinking: Online Writing and the Shaping of Counter-public Spheres in Xi Jinping's China","authors":"Lorenzo Andolfatto","doi":"10.1215/10679847-9967396","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-9967396","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Recent discussion concerning the Chinese government's autocratic practices has been orienting public attention toward the large scale of its surveillance apparatus. Observed from afar, the integration of digital and material infrastructures for discipline and control—whether in the form of factory/detention complexes in the Xinjiang region, face-recognition technology, or the Great Firewall—cannot help but convey the impression of a faceless authority acting upon statistics and data. Yet data and statistics refer to individuals and communities, whose interactions with the powers that be are negotiated daily on concrete grounds, such as over a cup of tea. The expressions hecha 喝茶 (drinking tea) and bei hecha 被喝茶 (being asked for tea) long ago acquired a chiefly political connotation and are now commonly used to imply being approached by the State Security Police for a forced interrogation. As the everydayness of the expression suggests, this type of state interventions in civil society attests, in Foucault's terms, state power's \"capillary form of existence, the point where [it] reaches into the very grain of individuals.\" This article makes use of an extraordinary corpus of online texts presenting firsthand accounts of bei hecha experiences to explore questions of everyday governance and governmentality in contemporary China. Adopting a text-based approach to matters conventionally pertaining to the realm of political science, it argues for an understanding of hecha ji texts (written recollections of tea-drinking sessions) as a distinctive form of writing that is functional to the construction of counter-public spheres of dissent in the tightening authoritarian environment of Xi Jinping's China today.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"47 1","pages":"865 - 893"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76189348","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 : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/10679847-9967370
E. Cho
Abstract:This article examines the humanistic relationship between Korean Chinese and North Korean refugees on the Sino–North Korean border in Zhang Lu's film Dooman River (2010) and delineates how the ethical obligation to "our" people, or brethren (dongpo), is removed by understanding North Koreans as potential criminals. The first part conceptualizes Korean Chinese villagers' ethical obligation toward North Koreans, which I call ethnic ethos, and focuses on how the director preserves the Korean Chinese's conscience by stereotyping North Korean border crossers as "dangerous refugees." The second part focuses on the meaning of ethnic identity that the director pursues, offering insights into the crisis of community in the context of urbanization and globalization, or the "Korean dream." The two types of border crossing—the crossing of North Koreans to China and the crossing of Korean Chinese to South Korea—offer clues to the causes of the crisis of community, in which collective ethics and responsibility to others have been eroded. This article answers questions about the death of a Korean Chinese boy, who voluntarily becomes a stranger by entering into the zone of "nonlife" or refugees. I argue that the boy's death is a sacrifice suggested to audiences by the director in an attempt to preserve the communitarian ethics of Korean Chinese and maintain the value of ethnic identity.
{"title":"Familiar Strangers: North Koreans as \"Dangerous Refugees\" and the Crisis of Korean Chinese Community in Zhang Lu's Dooman River (2010)","authors":"E. Cho","doi":"10.1215/10679847-9967370","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-9967370","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines the humanistic relationship between Korean Chinese and North Korean refugees on the Sino–North Korean border in Zhang Lu's film Dooman River (2010) and delineates how the ethical obligation to \"our\" people, or brethren (dongpo), is removed by understanding North Koreans as potential criminals. The first part conceptualizes Korean Chinese villagers' ethical obligation toward North Koreans, which I call ethnic ethos, and focuses on how the director preserves the Korean Chinese's conscience by stereotyping North Korean border crossers as \"dangerous refugees.\" The second part focuses on the meaning of ethnic identity that the director pursues, offering insights into the crisis of community in the context of urbanization and globalization, or the \"Korean dream.\" The two types of border crossing—the crossing of North Koreans to China and the crossing of Korean Chinese to South Korea—offer clues to the causes of the crisis of community, in which collective ethics and responsibility to others have been eroded. This article answers questions about the death of a Korean Chinese boy, who voluntarily becomes a stranger by entering into the zone of \"nonlife\" or refugees. I argue that the boy's death is a sacrifice suggested to audiences by the director in an attempt to preserve the communitarian ethics of Korean Chinese and maintain the value of ethnic identity.","PeriodicalId":44356,"journal":{"name":"Positions-Asia Critique","volume":"69 1","pages":"815 - 838"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81730847","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}
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