Pub Date : 2023-07-19DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2221494
Ying Ruo Show
ABSTRACT Chinese kinship, the basis and vital force of Chinese societies, is defined by patrilineal descent; thus, it has an agnatic character. The Chinese kinship system was brought to Southeast Asia by Chinese communities in their various diasporic trajectories. Its patriarchal norms have been maintained through various social institutions, under which women were generally peripheral. This article utilizes new materials garnered from fieldwork on women’s temples in Singapore to demonstrate how unmarried, widowed, and unattached Chinese women organized themselves and their networks through matricentric religious establishments. Further, they reconfigured, rebuilt, and reorganized their kinships based on religious lineages, dialect groups, and mutual interests rather than blood. Through providing empirical insights into the gendering and religionizing of Chinese kinships in Southeast Asia, this article seeks to address the persistent male bias in studies of Chinese kinship, arguing for the need to consider non-normative family units that center around women and female religious leadership. Many of the religious women concerned were associated with Buddhism in some way; therefore, this article suggests that Buddhist “families” on the ground do not necessarily comply with traditional Buddhist monastic orders. Rather, they have fluid dispositions and diversified natures. The ambivalence that characterized these local forms of Chinese Buddhism enabled women to navigate and negotiate their multiple socioreligious identities and create their own spiritual homes in male-centered Chinese diaspora communities in Southeast Asia.
{"title":"Fluid motherhood: gender, Chinese religions, and kinship maneuvers in the Buddhist women’s Southern Sea diaspora (1880–1960)","authors":"Ying Ruo Show","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2221494","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2221494","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Chinese kinship, the basis and vital force of Chinese societies, is defined by patrilineal descent; thus, it has an agnatic character. The Chinese kinship system was brought to Southeast Asia by Chinese communities in their various diasporic trajectories. Its patriarchal norms have been maintained through various social institutions, under which women were generally peripheral. This article utilizes new materials garnered from fieldwork on women’s temples in Singapore to demonstrate how unmarried, widowed, and unattached Chinese women organized themselves and their networks through matricentric religious establishments. Further, they reconfigured, rebuilt, and reorganized their kinships based on religious lineages, dialect groups, and mutual interests rather than blood. Through providing empirical insights into the gendering and religionizing of Chinese kinships in Southeast Asia, this article seeks to address the persistent male bias in studies of Chinese kinship, arguing for the need to consider non-normative family units that center around women and female religious leadership. Many of the religious women concerned were associated with Buddhism in some way; therefore, this article suggests that Buddhist “families” on the ground do not necessarily comply with traditional Buddhist monastic orders. Rather, they have fluid dispositions and diversified natures. The ambivalence that characterized these local forms of Chinese Buddhism enabled women to navigate and negotiate their multiple socioreligious identities and create their own spiritual homes in male-centered Chinese diaspora communities in Southeast Asia.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42431207","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: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2221499
Taomo Zhou
ABSTRACT In 1973, four cows and one bull were shipped to Guangming Farm, an agricultural production base for China to supply fresh produce to British Hong Kong. The cattle’s human caretakers included Malayan, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Chinese expelled from Southeast Asia due to local ethnonationalist policies. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Guangming was a state-directed productive space with prominent features of the planned economy, ironically installed when the rest of Shenzhen and China was embarking on market reform. The reform of Guangming Farm lagged the marketization in Shenzhen and did not begin in earnest until the early 2000s. This essay explains how the delay in reform ultimately served the state’s interests. The People’s Republic of China mobilized Southeast Asian refugee labor to grow international trade and expand state capital. In this process, the diasporic Chinese became, simultaneously, the agents and targets of Deng Xiaoping’s reform.
{"title":"Dairy and diaspora: postponed reform on the guangming overseas Chinese farm of Shenzhen","authors":"Taomo Zhou","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2221499","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2221499","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In 1973, four cows and one bull were shipped to Guangming Farm, an agricultural production base for China to supply fresh produce to British Hong Kong. The cattle’s human caretakers included Malayan, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Chinese expelled from Southeast Asia due to local ethnonationalist policies. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Guangming was a state-directed productive space with prominent features of the planned economy, ironically installed when the rest of Shenzhen and China was embarking on market reform. The reform of Guangming Farm lagged the marketization in Shenzhen and did not begin in earnest until the early 2000s. This essay explains how the delay in reform ultimately served the state’s interests. The People’s Republic of China mobilized Southeast Asian refugee labor to grow international trade and expand state capital. In this process, the diasporic Chinese became, simultaneously, the agents and targets of Deng Xiaoping’s reform.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46097983","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: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2221489
Ying Xin Show, Siew-Min Sai
,
,
{"title":"Reassessing the Chinese diaspora from the South: history, culture and narrative","authors":"Ying Xin Show, Siew-Min Sai","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2221489","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2221489","url":null,"abstract":",","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49296453","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: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2221491
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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2221497
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":null,"pages":null},"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 : 2023-07-19DOI: 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":null,"pages":null},"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 : 2023-06-23DOI: 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":null,"pages":null},"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: 10.1080/14649373.2023.2209439
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.
{"title":"Mourning for Itaewon Halloween tragedy","authors":"Ji Youn Kim","doi":"10.1080/14649373.2023.2209439","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2023.2209439","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":46080,"journal":{"name":"Inter-Asia Cultural Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45169338","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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