An open letter/review

Abstract

I first read about you and your book, The Woman Warrior, in the book review sections of several magazines and Sunday newspapers. I read Susan Brownmiller's interview with you in “Mademoiselle” magazine, Jane Kramer's review of your book in the New York Times, and Nan Robertson's interview with you, also in the Times. In addition, several white feminist friends were telling me I should read your book “because it is a powerful, feminist story by a Chinese American woman.” So I read your book.     

Syllabi for a course on the history and society of traditional China

Abstract

For me, organizing and teaching an exciting course on either 19th or 20th century China is a piece of cake. The possible reading assignments are numerous and lively. The subjects for discussion leap off the pages. The students feel an immediate—even envious—relationship with the participants in the history.     

An open letter/response

Abstract

I would offer a comment or two on your review of my book because I think that you did not interpret the book in the way in which I wrote it. I am writing in the hope of clearing up some things; of clarifying our areas of disagreement as opposed to misunderstanding.     

New light on the origins of the Vietnam-Kampuchea conflict

Abstract

“Don't make pretexts about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your jaw of traitor.”

—Security regulation no. 8 for inmates at the Pol Pot regime's Tuol Sleng prison, Phnom Penh, 1977–8.     

Experiencing liminality: housing,renting and informal tenants in Astana

ABSTRACT

This article is intended to contribute broadly to research in post-socialist urban studies. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with ‘newcomers’ to the capital, Astana, from different parts of Kazakhstan, I examine the renting practices of newcomers. I analyse the experiences of newcomers in their new urban milieu of Astana, and try to answer the question of what it means to live in the city for various groups of individuals on a daily basis. I examine the Soviet and post-Soviet housing and the continuities of the Soviet legacy when it comes to the institution of propiska (city registration). I show that living in shared flats is a coping strategy to deal with expensive rents and meant to be a transitory step towards homeownership. For this reason many accept high rents and crowded housing as ‘normal’. Furthermore, I argue that informal renting practices are acceptable mostly for young and single people, who are free to experiment with city life, and are on their way to establishing careers and personal lives. However, elderly newcomers and young families with children who do not wish to live in shared flats, but have to rent, feel ‘homeless’ and trapped in ‘liminal housing’. For them, renting is undesirable, and they feel a sense of incarceration if they fail to secure housing.     

Korean Unification

If you change your past and work together in the spirit that everyone of you, no matter to what community he belongs…is first, second and last a citizen of this state with equal rights, privileges and obligations, there will be no end to the progress you will make…. You are free to go to your mosques or to any other place, belong to any religion or caste or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the state. We are starting in the days when there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one state…. I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal and you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense because that is the personal faith of each individual but in the political sense as citizens of the state.     

Dispossession and displacement of migrant workers: the impact of state terror and economic development on Uyghurs in urban Xinjiang

ABSTRACT

The media often focuses on the visible aspects of state violence. However, the invisible aspects of everyday struggle often go under-reported. How does dispossession and displacement occur for Uyghurs in Xinjiang? What is the role of their dispossession in securing state territorial control? Some Uyghurs from rural areas in Xinjiang, China have experienced a triple dispossession: displacement from the countryside, alienation in the city, and eviction from the city. The stories concern the agony people feel as they move from rural to urban settings and back again, pain caused by severe hardship in the economic, political and cultural senses. This case shows how economic development works together with interventionist state power to violently dispossess and displace the most vulnerable poor minorities from their homes and livelihoods.     

The politics of remembering: Saint Petersburg's 300th anniversary

Abstract

With Leningrad abandoned, what are the stories told about St. Petersburg, the town named after Apostle Peter? In particular, how was the city's Tercentenary jubilee staged? Discarding images related to Lenin and the Soviet era could signal liberation. Tapping into alternative mnemonic resources could allow the city to free itself from a variety of constraints by utilizing the imperial heritage and the various linkages to Europeanness embedded therein. However, the effect could also be one of being trapped in time, with the city thereby also being unable to break outside the established territorial constraints. The stories told could restrain rather than liberate in being told in a manner that is inconsistent with the challenges that the city — and Russia at large — are currently facing both internally and in view of its rapidly changing external environment. This is the issue that we tackle by viewing the city's 300^th anniversary as a mnemonic battlefield.     

Killing the messenger: Environmental reporters under fire in the Philippines

Abstract

In much of the world, reporting on the environment is like reporting on motherhood. It cuts across all political, economic, and social lines, and it's a safe beat. This is not true in the Philippines, where being an environmental reporter means taking on the richest and most powerful forces in the country. It can be, as one reporter put it, “bad for your health.” More to the point, in the Philippines environmental reporting is a life-and-death issue.     

CHOICE SOULS

It is a great opportunity – a few months – to learn your Paris, the language and the rest – but of what avail if you become corrupted – perhaps cynical, reckless – even coarsened: you can hardly escape this; yet you are the one dedicated to speak delicate truths to choice souls.     

The Prisoner Dilemma: Britain,Germany, and the Repatriation of Indian Prisoners of War

Abstract

Between October 1914 and December 1915, nearly 135,000 Indian riflemen—known as sepoys—fought in the trenches of France and Belgium at the battles of Ypres, Festubert, Givenchy, Neuve Chapelle, Second Ypres and Loos, suffering some 34,252 casualties. At a prisoner of war camp outside Berlin, Indian revolutionaries and emissaries from the Ottoman Empire attempted to convert the allegiances of the sepoys in their custody with a combination of pan-Islamic and nationalist appeals. Although this campaign ultimately failed, it profoundly shaped British repatriation policy at the end of the war when, cautioned Secretary of State for India Austen Chamberlain, the British could not allow men who had been exposed to ‘strongly hostile influences’ to return home unmonitored. The 1918 armistice and British repatriation policy therefore presented a host of new challenges to Britain’s colonial subjects from South Asia as they navigated the post-war imperial landscape and secured what was most important to them—safe transportation home.     

Xenophobia,ethnicity and national identity in eastern Germany

This article offers an explanation of the latent xenophobia in post‐unification eastern Germany from the perspective of national identity. Easterners over‐emphasised ethnicity as the one remaining identity pillar that was still not threatened by the transition processes of unification. However, instead of focusing on the ‘self — on pride in tradition, history and culture, easterners concentrated on the ‘other’ — on ethnic exclusion and ethnic chauvinism. The united Germany therefore faces the challenge of filling the empty shell of German ethnicity with a positive meaning.     

The Baltic states,Finland, and British economic expectations in the early 1920s

Abstract

After the First World War, the Baltic states — not Finland — attracted the British as a bridge to Russian markets. The article deals with the rank of these states in British economic expectations. It is shown that whereas the Baltic states were highly prioritized, in 1920, by 1926 the British preferred Finland as a more trusworthy trading partner than Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The article thus shows how the rank of the Baltic states and Finland changed in British expectations when all of these states were seen as markets in and of themselves.     

East Asia and the world economy

Abstract

The contrast between Japan's emergence from the late nineteenth century as an industrializing nation and China's continued relative stagnation during the same period constitutes a puzzle that has provoked many attempts at solution. To heighten the sense of paradox, a number of observers have echoed the view of the late Alexander Eckstein that

an informed observer appraising the prospects of economic development and modernization in Asia from the vantage point of 1840 might well have picked China—rather than Japan—as the most likely candidate. China was a vast empire more populous than Japan, much better endowed with mineral resources and large internal markets. Even in terms of social and political institutions, China might have appeared to be in the better position [etc.]     

The prostitute

Migrant domestic workers rarely take part in — let alone organize — public protests in the countries where they work. Public protests are virtually unheard of among migrant domestic workers in Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia, and especially in the Middle East and the Gulf States. Over the past decade and a half, however, migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong — mostly Filipinas and Indonesian women — have become highly active, organizing and participating in political protests. Hong Kong's migrant domestic workers protest in a place where they are guest workers and temporary migrants, denied the opportunity of becoming legal citizens or permanent residents. Increasingly, these workers, their grassroots activist organizations, and the nongovernmental organizations with which they are affiliated frame their concerns in terms of global, transnational, and human rights, not merely local migrant worker rights. This article takes the “Consulate Hopping Protest and Hall of Shame Awards” event — part of the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Hong Kong in 2005 — as an ethnographic example of domestic worker protest and as an entrée through which to ask what it is about Hong Kong and about the position of women migrant workers — whose mobility and voice is both a product and a symptom of globalization — that literally permits public protests and shapes their form and content. The article illustrates how migrant workers’ protests and activism have been shaped by domestic worker subjectivities, by the dynamics of inter-ethnic worker affiliations, and by the sociohistorical context of Hong Kong as a post-colonial “global city” and a “neoliberal space of exception.”     

Persian ‘Rashti jokes’: modern Iran’s palimpsests of gheyrat-based masculinity

Abstract

For almost a century, a Persian ethnic joke cycle has circulated among Iranians about the men and women of the northern Iranian city of Rasht, labelling them as cuckolds and promiscuous women. A foray into the historical background and possible (gendered) functions of these jokes is long overdue. I argue that the central motif of Rashti jokes is gheyrat—a gendered social construct based on a man’s sense of honour, possessiveness and protectiveness towards certain female kin—which remains pivotal to our understanding of the texts and the historical context of the jokes. Critically reviewing extant theories on the historical origins of Rashti jokes, I argue they have roots in two modern phenomena: (a) debates among turn-of-the-twentieth-century Iranian thinkers over women’s (un)veiling; and (b) Reza Shah’s methodical promotion of an Aryanist, pan-Persian ideology. Focusing on the gender-disciplinary functions of the jokes, I then show how some contemporary Rashti jokes are deployed to project and inscribe gender-hierarchical notions that clearly surpass the jokes’ immediate, ethnic targets by commenting on broad socio-political topics. Such instances suggest that as a culture-wide joke cycle, Rashti jokes may also reinforce a form of Iranian masculinity obsessed with gheyrat-motivated control and aggression.     

The Entropy of Built Things: Postapartheid Anxiety and the Production of Space in Henrietta Rose-Innes’ Nineveh and Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City

Two recent novels reveal two interrelated clusters of postapartheid anxiety in twenty-first-century South Africa: one type is a dread of invasion, contamination, infestation, and other encroachments of the new, alien, and other. A second set of preoccupations involves subterranean spaces—basements, mines, tunnels—and a distrust of the solidity of built environments. Both Nineveh and Zoo City strip away the surface layers of Cape Town and Johannesburg and show us the layers of infrastructure, mechanization, and human labor that constitute or produce the city itself. But the two novels show us different understandings of the urban “underneath”: Beukes’ imagined Johannesburg is one in which spatial inequalities that seem chaotic, in fact structure the city and allow for social regimentation, while Rose-Innes shows us a Cape Town where spatial structures and entrenched inequality appear to be designed to ward off the intrinsic “entropy of built things.”     

Anticipating Future Capital: Regional Caste Contestations,Speculation and Silent Dispossession in Andhra Pradesh

ABSTRACT

In 2014, the state of Andhra Pradesh was bifurcated by the Indian government, leaving the truncated state without a capital city. A period of political uncertainty before bifurcation and the announcement of the new capital city created possibilities for land speculation and for the acceleration of the commodification of real estate in different parts of the state. Concentrating on Guntur-Vijayawada in the Coastal Andhra region and Donakonda town close to the Rayalaseema region, this article explores how speculative investments based on political calculations by members of regional elite castes translated into the emergence of competing regional investment zones as possible future choices of the capital city. Through an extended and largely ethnographic study, this article shows how caste politics and regional processes of land speculation led to land transfers without violent struggles between different groups. Rather, the cultural politics of regional differentiation and the economy of anticipation allowed a pragmatic convergence of interests to emerge, where acquisition of agricultural land was followed by silent dispossession.     

Family history,identity, and public history: writing a history of The Benevolent Society in its 200th year

Abstract

Since 2011, the authors have worked together on outputs associated with the bicentenary of The Benevolent Society of New South Wales, Australia's oldest charity, established in 1813. This article focuses on one of those outputs—a project making use of family histories of clients of The Benevolent Society's Asylum, in the second half of the nineteenth century, to reveal the histories of these families in colonial New South Wales. The project also involves an exploration of the many different ways in which contemporary Australians are active agents in the creation of historical knowledge when practicing family history.     

Genocide yet again: Scenes of Rwanda and Ethical Witness in the Human Rights Memoir

This article investigates three recent human rights memoirs that chronicle the Rwandan genocide of 1994: Emergency Sex (and other desperate measures): True Stories from a War Zone, Shake Hands with the Devil: the failure of humanity in Rwanda, and The Zanzibar Chest: a memoir of love and war. I use these memoirs to explore the complexities of bearing witness to ethnic violence and war as an autobiographical subject shaped by the memory of historical atrocity — as a besieged self in traumatic occupations of the UN protector (Roméo Dallaire), lawyer (Kenneth Cain), and war correspondent (Aidan Hartley). Finally, I suggest that the authors of these memoirs are secondary witnesses, claimants to ethical truths and writers of atrocity testimony that complicate the burgeoning life‐telling compulsion of what is and who can claim to be a genocide victim. “Your mind with time, in fact, doesn't erase things that are traumas. It makes them clearer. They become digitally clearer and then you are able to sit back and all of a sudden have every individual scene come to you instead of the massive blur of many scenes I saw every day. The accumulation of the spirits that would come to you at night in the form of eyes, thousands of eyes, some mad, some simply there, and others bewildered, innocent children and adults, all that accumulated to the fact that I simply totally broke down”. (Roméo Dallaire) “What's true is that we didn't understand at the time the full magnitude of what was happening. I was an ant walking over the rough hide of an elephant. I had no idea of the scale of what I was witnessing. And when I did become aware I discovered Rwanda was way beyond my limited talents as a correspondent”. (Aidan Hartley, The Zanzibar Chest) “I don't know who saved the honor of mankind during my time in the field, but I do know that an ancestral memory of tyranny commands me not to keep silent. There is no ambiguity here. I am a witness. I have a voice. I have to write it down”. (Kenneth Cain, Emergency Sex)