Pub Date : 2023-07-19DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2221491
Siew-Min Sai
ABSTRACT This article raises a neglected discussion on the intertwined connections between Chinese migration and European imperial formations in the Malay world using Singapore as a focal point. Working from the perspective of critical historiography in contemporary Singapore, the article highlights limitations in current approaches using concepts such as “Chinese migration” and “Chinese diaspora.” I suggest using “the Malay world” to surface the specificity of the coloniality of migratory Chineseness in this region on account of the transethnic and fluid character of the Malay world. Using the Malay world as method and conceptual scaffolding helps to contextualise Chinese migration to Singapore within Indigenous patterns of movement, settlement and identity formation in a region disrupted and reorganised with European imperial formations during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unravelling nationalistic framing of masculine and patriarchal histories of diasporic Chineseness, this approach critiques efforts in myth-making about Chineseness and Singaporean exceptionalism in this region.
{"title":"Becoming Chinese in the Malay world: colonialism, migration and history in Singapore","authors":"Siew-Min Sai","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2221491","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2221491","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article raises a neglected discussion on the intertwined connections between Chinese migration and European imperial formations in the Malay world using Singapore as a focal point. Working from the perspective of critical historiography in contemporary Singapore, the article highlights limitations in current approaches using concepts such as “Chinese migration” and “Chinese diaspora.” I suggest using “the Malay world” to surface the specificity of the coloniality of migratory Chineseness in this region on account of the transethnic and fluid character of the Malay world. Using the Malay world as method and conceptual scaffolding helps to contextualise Chinese migration to Singapore within Indigenous patterns of movement, settlement and identity formation in a region disrupted and reorganised with European imperial formations during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unravelling nationalistic framing of masculine and patriarchal histories of diasporic Chineseness, this approach critiques efforts in myth-making about Chineseness and Singaporean exceptionalism in this region.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":"24 1","pages":"606 - 624"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45783479","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 : 2023-07-19DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2221496
T. Hoogervorst
ABSTRACT From late-colonial times, Chinese-Indonesian writers began formulating competing notions of belonging and diasporic identity. Two political ideologies coexisted. The first and oldest was rooted in the ideals of the 1911 Revolution and encouraged the Indies Chinese to devote themselves to the “fatherland.” This movement attempted to resinicise those culturally hybrid Peranakan families in particular. The second group perceived the Indonesian archipelago as its home and advocated for more integration into the Indies society, often in solidarity with Indigenous people. The resulting tensions manifested themselves on the pages of vernacular publications. This article juxtaposes journalism, fiction and poetry as mutually reinforcing platforms to articulate, problematise and debate Chineseness. These genres and the slightly different messages they produced reveal evolving worldviews and a lack of consensus as key Indies Chinese experiences. Periodicals started exhibiting a greater diversity of opinions by the 1930s. A similar tendency is seen in novels and short stories in which pro-China and pro-Indies factions were often criticised in roughly equal measure. These fictionalised debates offer valuable insights into society’s faults and fissures. Fiction is relevant as it grappled with otherwise elusive social taboos, such as romantic encounters between different communities. Lastly, poetry was the genre par excellence to express frustration, aided by the rhetorical devices of sarcasm and translingual creativity. Across these genres, language proves crucial to understanding society’s conflicting expressions of Chineseness. While most of the discourse took place in vernacular Malay, acculturation through profuse borrowing from Hokkien helped to forge a discourse of identification and belonging.
{"title":"Chineseness in Sino-Malay printing: a triptych of self-criticism","authors":"T. Hoogervorst","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2221496","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2221496","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT From late-colonial times, Chinese-Indonesian writers began formulating competing notions of belonging and diasporic identity. Two political ideologies coexisted. The first and oldest was rooted in the ideals of the 1911 Revolution and encouraged the Indies Chinese to devote themselves to the “fatherland.” This movement attempted to resinicise those culturally hybrid Peranakan families in particular. The second group perceived the Indonesian archipelago as its home and advocated for more integration into the Indies society, often in solidarity with Indigenous people. The resulting tensions manifested themselves on the pages of vernacular publications. This article juxtaposes journalism, fiction and poetry as mutually reinforcing platforms to articulate, problematise and debate Chineseness. These genres and the slightly different messages they produced reveal evolving worldviews and a lack of consensus as key Indies Chinese experiences. Periodicals started exhibiting a greater diversity of opinions by the 1930s. A similar tendency is seen in novels and short stories in which pro-China and pro-Indies factions were often criticised in roughly equal measure. These fictionalised debates offer valuable insights into society’s faults and fissures. Fiction is relevant as it grappled with otherwise elusive social taboos, such as romantic encounters between different communities. Lastly, poetry was the genre par excellence to express frustration, aided by the rhetorical devices of sarcasm and translingual creativity. Across these genres, language proves crucial to understanding society’s conflicting expressions of Chineseness. While most of the discourse took place in vernacular Malay, acculturation through profuse borrowing from Hokkien helped to forge a discourse of identification and belonging.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":"24 1","pages":"678 - 693"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42402441","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 : 2023-07-19DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2221495
Lysa Hong
ABSTRACT He Jin, a lifelong member of the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) who was born in Singapore, produced two volumes of short stories which documented the subaltern lives he lived through. They were written thirty years apart but were published in the same year. He penned the earlier stories as a Chinese middle school student in 1950s Singapore and was a CPM soldier in the Thai-Malaysian jungle when he wrote the ones in the 1980s. He Jin also authored two retrospective “autobiographical novels.” The first provides the historical context of the 13 May 1954 protests he participated in against the colonial imposition of compulsory conscription while the second covers his long exile as a CPM member in Indonesia before being sent to fight in the jungle. His works, in particular the novels, have been deemed by a leading literary and academic critic as lacking literary merit and relevance. He Jin’s writings however falls into place as an oeuvre formed from plausible life experiences which are credible on a personal, human level, and which endow the author with a personality, world view and agency. His life as he tells it embodies his understanding of Singapore’s anti-colonial history and historiography and offers a testimony which challenges the dominant narratives of both the Singapore state and CPM.
{"title":"A Singapore communist subaltern writes back: He Jin’s life stories as historical testimony","authors":"Lysa Hong","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2221495","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2221495","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT He Jin, a lifelong member of the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) who was born in Singapore, produced two volumes of short stories which documented the subaltern lives he lived through. They were written thirty years apart but were published in the same year. He penned the earlier stories as a Chinese middle school student in 1950s Singapore and was a CPM soldier in the Thai-Malaysian jungle when he wrote the ones in the 1980s. He Jin also authored two retrospective “autobiographical novels.” The first provides the historical context of the 13 May 1954 protests he participated in against the colonial imposition of compulsory conscription while the second covers his long exile as a CPM member in Indonesia before being sent to fight in the jungle. His works, in particular the novels, have been deemed by a leading literary and academic critic as lacking literary merit and relevance. He Jin’s writings however falls into place as an oeuvre formed from plausible life experiences which are credible on a personal, human level, and which endow the author with a personality, world view and agency. His life as he tells it embodies his understanding of Singapore’s anti-colonial history and historiography and offers a testimony which challenges the dominant narratives of both the Singapore state and CPM.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":"24 1","pages":"662 - 677"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42223524","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 : 2023-07-19DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2221492
Ying Xin Show
ABSTRACT Studies on the Chinese diaspora often privilege male subjects as agents of mobility, the patriarch in kinship, social networks and livelihood, and producers of knowledge and thoughts, perpetuating an androcentric understanding of Chinese-ness and diaspora. This article challenges the dominant framework and highlights the uneven ways of being diaspora in Malaya and the different political, social, and psychological experiences between men and women and between women born overseas and locally. It traces the cultural production, thoughts, and networks of Chinese women in postwar Malaya by uncovering a short-lived socialist Chinese-language women’s magazine titled New Women’s Monthly, founded by Chinese feminist intellectual Shen Zijiu. The article argues that the fluidity of transnationalism mediated the communication of ideas in the new freedom in postwar Malaya, but nationalist movements could not accommodate it. It investigates the ways the editors and writers imagine a model New Women image through transnational sisterhood narratives and how they wove together the macropolitical discourse of nationalism and practical discussion of women’s emancipation, solidarity, and mobilization. These imaginations showcased the complex interplay of the women’s gendered intersubjectivities of the self, the family, the nation, and the world, through which women were empowered and constrained at the same time. In the end, Shen Zijiu’s harsh criticism of “Miss Nanyang” indicated her nationalist expectations for Chinese Malayan women to serve both Malaya and China were impractical and resulted in the exclusion of sisterhood for the creation of a modern national identity.
{"title":"Gendering Chinese diaspora: New Women’s Monthly and transnational sisterhood in postwar Malaya","authors":"Ying Xin Show","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2221492","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2221492","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Studies on the Chinese diaspora often privilege male subjects as agents of mobility, the patriarch in kinship, social networks and livelihood, and producers of knowledge and thoughts, perpetuating an androcentric understanding of Chinese-ness and diaspora. This article challenges the dominant framework and highlights the uneven ways of being diaspora in Malaya and the different political, social, and psychological experiences between men and women and between women born overseas and locally. It traces the cultural production, thoughts, and networks of Chinese women in postwar Malaya by uncovering a short-lived socialist Chinese-language women’s magazine titled New Women’s Monthly, founded by Chinese feminist intellectual Shen Zijiu. The article argues that the fluidity of transnationalism mediated the communication of ideas in the new freedom in postwar Malaya, but nationalist movements could not accommodate it. It investigates the ways the editors and writers imagine a model New Women image through transnational sisterhood narratives and how they wove together the macropolitical discourse of nationalism and practical discussion of women’s emancipation, solidarity, and mobilization. These imaginations showcased the complex interplay of the women’s gendered intersubjectivities of the self, the family, the nation, and the world, through which women were empowered and constrained at the same time. In the end, Shen Zijiu’s harsh criticism of “Miss Nanyang” indicated her nationalist expectations for Chinese Malayan women to serve both Malaya and China were impractical and resulted in the exclusion of sisterhood for the creation of a modern national identity.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":"24 1","pages":"625 - 642"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48887563","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 : 2023-07-19DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2221497
Josh Stenberg
ABSTRACT Hei Ying’s 1950 novella Under the Red-and-White Flag concerns the Chinese-speaking institutions and community in Jakarta as they respond to the establishment of the People's Republic of China. Far from the sultry exoticism of his earlier Nanyang (South Seas) texts, this work turned towards a socialist realism broadly in line with the policies of the Chinese Communist Party and prepared Hei Ying for his subsequent career as a “returned Overseas Chinese” (guiqiao) man of letters. Hei Ying's political and literary shift emblematises a larger dynamic: the subordination of some Sinophone Southeast Asian subjects, often voluntarily, to new and starker dichotomies of Chinese political identity, as the foundation of new states in the emerging Cold War foreclosed on flexible Sinophone Southeast Asian cultural and political identities. Sinophone groups like those represented by Hei Ying could and did support Indonesia's National Revolution and striving for prosperity in the name of global solidarity; however, the individual's belonging was for them ethnically defined, and ethnic and political identity were irreducibly linked in works such as this novella. Due to the hardening of political boundaries in the early Cold War, decolonising Asia rendered cultural hybridity increasingly politically suspect as new states defined themselves by autochthony. If the place of ethnic Chinese was to build New China, political duties granted no licence to cultural hybridity, much as they also restricted experimental and effusive veins of literary modernism.
{"title":"Under the Red-and-White Flag: elective Chineseness and socialist realism in Hei Ying's Jakarta","authors":"Josh Stenberg","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2221497","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2221497","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Hei Ying’s 1950 novella Under the Red-and-White Flag concerns the Chinese-speaking institutions and community in Jakarta as they respond to the establishment of the People's Republic of China. Far from the sultry exoticism of his earlier Nanyang (South Seas) texts, this work turned towards a socialist realism broadly in line with the policies of the Chinese Communist Party and prepared Hei Ying for his subsequent career as a “returned Overseas Chinese” (guiqiao) man of letters. Hei Ying's political and literary shift emblematises a larger dynamic: the subordination of some Sinophone Southeast Asian subjects, often voluntarily, to new and starker dichotomies of Chinese political identity, as the foundation of new states in the emerging Cold War foreclosed on flexible Sinophone Southeast Asian cultural and political identities. Sinophone groups like those represented by Hei Ying could and did support Indonesia's National Revolution and striving for prosperity in the name of global solidarity; however, the individual's belonging was for them ethnically defined, and ethnic and political identity were irreducibly linked in works such as this novella. Due to the hardening of political boundaries in the early Cold War, decolonising Asia rendered cultural hybridity increasingly politically suspect as new states defined themselves by autochthony. If the place of ethnic Chinese was to build New China, political duties granted no licence to cultural hybridity, much as they also restricted experimental and effusive veins of literary modernism.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":"24 1","pages":"694 - 707"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47521990","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 : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2209424
Linn Song, Avishek Ray
ABSTRACT In this paper, we employ “everyday techno-nationalism” as a critical lens to unpack the Indian government’s ban of TikTok in 2020. We focus on social media discussions of the ban on Quora and Reddit, and examine how TikTok is perceived as a “Chinese” platform as contrasted, but simultaneously integral, to a techno-nationalist imagination of “Indian-ness.” We put forward two arguments based on our findings. First, we suggest that TikTok’s “Chineseness” is a populist affective outcome of the discursive articulation of Indian “nationhood,” achieved by the effective use of an us-versus-them rhetoric, which signifies a process of digital territorialization amid globalized media flows. Second, we observe that the classist-casteist narrative underscoring TikTok’s association with “cringeworthiness” marginalizes the working-class content creators – so prominently visibilized by TikTok – both from the media landscape and the nationalist imagination. Fundamentally, India’s TikTok ban raises questions about statist interventions into people’s media practices; and as importantly, their own understanding and use of digital technology, which, ironically, within a globalized era, seems to be only notionally more connected, but practically more partisan than ever.
{"title":"“How can a small app piss off an entire country?”: India’s TikTok ban in the light of everyday techno-nationalism","authors":"Linn Song, Avishek Ray","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2209424","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2209424","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this paper, we employ “everyday techno-nationalism” as a critical lens to unpack the Indian government’s ban of TikTok in 2020. We focus on social media discussions of the ban on Quora and Reddit, and examine how TikTok is perceived as a “Chinese” platform as contrasted, but simultaneously integral, to a techno-nationalist imagination of “Indian-ness.” We put forward two arguments based on our findings. First, we suggest that TikTok’s “Chineseness” is a populist affective outcome of the discursive articulation of Indian “nationhood,” achieved by the effective use of an us-versus-them rhetoric, which signifies a process of digital territorialization amid globalized media flows. Second, we observe that the classist-casteist narrative underscoring TikTok’s association with “cringeworthiness” marginalizes the working-class content creators – so prominently visibilized by TikTok – both from the media landscape and the nationalist imagination. Fundamentally, India’s TikTok ban raises questions about statist interventions into people’s media practices; and as importantly, their own understanding and use of digital technology, which, ironically, within a globalized era, seems to be only notionally more connected, but practically more partisan than ever.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":"24 1","pages":"382 - 396"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45205149","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 : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2209426
A. Zemanek, L. Momesso
ABSTRACT This study contributes to research into multiculturalism and Taiwan’s public discourse on marriage migrants, arguing for the everyday as a site for inquiry into cultural negotiations, hybridity and homemaking in multicultural societies. It analyses two documentaries—My Imported Bride (2003) and Out/Marriage (2012) from the perspective of voice, defined as the filmmaker’s way of seeing the world. It explores migrants’ ownership of their narratives and inhabited spaces and assesses whether the documentaries grant a voice to migrants, speaking with rather than for them. These films show that migrants have already gained a formalized representational space in Taiwan’s public discourse. The narrative power remains with the directors, and their framing of migrants accommodates Taiwanese audiences’ expectations, but in different ways. The earlier documentary successfully showcases typical problems underlying brokered marriages and obstacles in adapting to a new living environment. The more recent film employs discursive categories established by official multiculturalism policies, NGO-led activism, and previous media representations, which echo existing migrant-related stereotypes. Nevertheless, this film, directed by a migrant, also uses visual and auditory strategies that open a window onto migrants’ intimate physical and social home spaces in Vietnam. Thus, it builds potential for alternative representations that can counteract the risk of othering migrants and solidifying ethnic and cultural boundaries, posed by representational categories coming from hegemonic sources.
{"title":"Multiculturalism through a lens: migrants’ voice in Taiwanese documentaries","authors":"A. Zemanek, L. Momesso","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2209426","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2209426","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This study contributes to research into multiculturalism and Taiwan’s public discourse on marriage migrants, arguing for the everyday as a site for inquiry into cultural negotiations, hybridity and homemaking in multicultural societies. It analyses two documentaries—My Imported Bride (2003) and Out/Marriage (2012) from the perspective of voice, defined as the filmmaker’s way of seeing the world. It explores migrants’ ownership of their narratives and inhabited spaces and assesses whether the documentaries grant a voice to migrants, speaking with rather than for them. These films show that migrants have already gained a formalized representational space in Taiwan’s public discourse. The narrative power remains with the directors, and their framing of migrants accommodates Taiwanese audiences’ expectations, but in different ways. The earlier documentary successfully showcases typical problems underlying brokered marriages and obstacles in adapting to a new living environment. The more recent film employs discursive categories established by official multiculturalism policies, NGO-led activism, and previous media representations, which echo existing migrant-related stereotypes. Nevertheless, this film, directed by a migrant, also uses visual and auditory strategies that open a window onto migrants’ intimate physical and social home spaces in Vietnam. Thus, it builds potential for alternative representations that can counteract the risk of othering migrants and solidifying ethnic and cultural boundaries, posed by representational categories coming from hegemonic sources.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":"24 1","pages":"413 - 430"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44324564","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 : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2209432
John Hutnyk
The following is the second set of papers from the conference “Innovations in the Social Sciences and Humanities,” in December 2021, at Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. As mentioned in the January issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, the idea of “transforming knowledge production” (Chen 2010, 216) brings us to this special section interested in the ways media connects Indian audiences with the world through different formats. We reach back from the “imagined communities” of “print capitalism” (Anderson 1983), through global-social “mediascapes” operating through new technologies and connectivities, that now mediate a “naked struggle between the pieties and realities of Indian politics” (Appadurai 2006, 595). The theme is the significance of the formations of Indian media, though without covering all angles, the section investigates newspapers, film, video and television news. The indicator of note is that there is more to be done to build on the new South Asian media studies work represented in texts as diverse as Madhava Prasad (1998, 2014), Gera Roy (2012, 2015), and Ravi Sundaram (2009; 2013), among others. There are five papers here. The first tells the story of the emergence of English and vernacular language newspapers in India, entailing engagement with the early formation of the Bengali intelligentsia—the bhadralok class fraction prominent. Some older controversial history, about papers like Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (Otis 2018) is required to understand why the nineteenth-century formation of the press is still hugely relevant to how thewidermedia sees itself today. Reforming and informing, campaigning and campafflicted, knowledge-promoting and seemingly all-knowing, Shaswati Das shows how this estate took some time to negotiate its path between the forces of Government (then the British colonial regime) and the factional aspirations of emergent nationalism. Film history has been central to Indian political imaginings since the emergence of cinema— the first films made in the 1910s as “mythologicals” and by the 1960s cinemahad a political and national role without question. Within this, as John Hutnyk shows, the Bengali auteur cinema of Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak made international linkages, in this case reacting to the struggle in Vietnam, but verymuch fromwithin the sensibilities of a national Indian andBengali, even Calcuttan imaginary (see Mrinal Sen in Reinhard Hauff’s film, Ten Days in Calcutta, Hauff 1987). The importance of international solidarity and a cinema of the world was very much a part of the self-understanding of Indian media from its earliest manifestations. Histories of the cinema spaces, and subsequently video halls, are an aspect of this same trajectory. Still, the paper of Dattatreya Ghosh alerts us to critical submerged aspects of this narrative that need to be brought out through close, careful archival media work.
{"title":"Subcontinental media","authors":"John Hutnyk","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2209432","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2209432","url":null,"abstract":"The following is the second set of papers from the conference “Innovations in the Social Sciences and Humanities,” in December 2021, at Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. As mentioned in the January issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, the idea of “transforming knowledge production” (Chen 2010, 216) brings us to this special section interested in the ways media connects Indian audiences with the world through different formats. We reach back from the “imagined communities” of “print capitalism” (Anderson 1983), through global-social “mediascapes” operating through new technologies and connectivities, that now mediate a “naked struggle between the pieties and realities of Indian politics” (Appadurai 2006, 595). The theme is the significance of the formations of Indian media, though without covering all angles, the section investigates newspapers, film, video and television news. The indicator of note is that there is more to be done to build on the new South Asian media studies work represented in texts as diverse as Madhava Prasad (1998, 2014), Gera Roy (2012, 2015), and Ravi Sundaram (2009; 2013), among others. There are five papers here. The first tells the story of the emergence of English and vernacular language newspapers in India, entailing engagement with the early formation of the Bengali intelligentsia—the bhadralok class fraction prominent. Some older controversial history, about papers like Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (Otis 2018) is required to understand why the nineteenth-century formation of the press is still hugely relevant to how thewidermedia sees itself today. Reforming and informing, campaigning and campafflicted, knowledge-promoting and seemingly all-knowing, Shaswati Das shows how this estate took some time to negotiate its path between the forces of Government (then the British colonial regime) and the factional aspirations of emergent nationalism. Film history has been central to Indian political imaginings since the emergence of cinema— the first films made in the 1910s as “mythologicals” and by the 1960s cinemahad a political and national role without question. Within this, as John Hutnyk shows, the Bengali auteur cinema of Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak made international linkages, in this case reacting to the struggle in Vietnam, but verymuch fromwithin the sensibilities of a national Indian andBengali, even Calcuttan imaginary (see Mrinal Sen in Reinhard Hauff’s film, Ten Days in Calcutta, Hauff 1987). The importance of international solidarity and a cinema of the world was very much a part of the self-understanding of Indian media from its earliest manifestations. Histories of the cinema spaces, and subsequently video halls, are an aspect of this same trajectory. Still, the paper of Dattatreya Ghosh alerts us to critical submerged aspects of this narrative that need to be brought out through close, careful archival media work.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":"24 1","pages":"491 - 492"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45732339","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 : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2209439
Ji Youn Kim
ABSTRACT On the eve of Halloween on 29 October 2022, a crowd was killed in a narrow alley of the South Korean capital. Known for its diversity and ethnic communities, Itaewon is a melting pot of cultures and the mediating place to enjoy a new culture, and aptly so, for the celebration of Halloween. The common response to the tragedy was that of mystery and disbelief. However, the real mystery is why none of the local district offices, police, and business associations, who have governed and managed festivals in the area, had prepared safety measures nor anticipated a tragedy of this nature. After the incident, a series of demonstrations have been held by bereaved families and civil societies to demand a thorough investigation, legal punishment of those responsible, and protective advancements. Although relevant authorities have expressed regret publicly, there was neither an official apology nor sincere condolences to the victims and their families. In the case of the Halloween tragedy in Itaewon, the mourning is politicized and delayed as debates on whether public mourning is deserving have started.
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Pub Date : 2023-06-23DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2209431
Jian Xiao, Zheng Wan
On 21 August 1980, Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (SEZ) was officially born and the guideline of “the whole country supports the SEZ, and the SEZ serves the whole country” was set. As the first shot of China’s reform and opening up, Shenzhen Shekou industrial zone broke ground in 1979 and immediately started a high-intensity practice. The slogan “time is money, efficiency is life” proposed by Yuan Geng, was affirmed by Deng Xiaoping and gradually spread from the region to the whole country. Similar to other big cities, migrant workers serve as a crucial role in making it. In this visual essay, we focus on those city actors and use nine pictures of the migrant workers’ portraits taken by professional photographers in Shenzhen from 1980 to 2000 in order to understand the relationship between the process of urbanization and the impacts of it on people who build it up. This approach is in line with how Xiao and Chen (2022) regards photographic archive of normal people and their daily life as a way of demonstrating the China modernity and can become an important method to understand a city. In contrast to the “new” Chinese era featured with platform economy and digital labors, it presents a pre-digital working and living lifestyle of the “old” Chinese. Overall, one of the most common pictures associated with Shenzhen is mobility: many foreign visitors make a short transition through the Shenzhen Customs, and many leave and return for long periods of time; the gap between the rich and the poor in Shenzhen and Hong Kong breeds a desire to move, and the border encourages flight and return, deeply manifested in the geographical memory. The infinite expansion of the power of capital is accompanied by profound social changes. In the constant fusion of capital, culture, and social forces, the process of globalocalization eventually leads to cultural uniqueness, the transformation of villagers’ roles, the tremendous growth of wealth, and the rise of the creative, financial, and technological classes, the prevalence of consumerism and the transformation of the power of capital into one dream after another. Being constantly constructed and shattered, the city is narrated in ever more grotesque images. Urban mobility is often encouraged to fit in the urban development initiated by the government. This would also result in many social consequences and problems such as gentrification, displacement, and mental issues. In the case of Chinese migrant workers who mostly live in the urban villages, gentrification would often happen when those places are in demolition and rebuilt to attract the white-collar workers or the middle class. In consequence, the migrant workers would either leave the city or join into a new style of economy such as working for the digital platforms. The
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