Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity,Phantasm, Japan by Marilyn Ivy

Abstract

Discourses of the Vanishing has been anticipated for several years now; it won't disappoint. Despite the rising number of authors who seek to “explain” Japan or attack its essentialism, Ivy is one of the few who have the understanding of modernity and the methodological tools to excavate the celebration (Japanese and American) of Japan's “uniqueness.” Discourses is by far one of the most sophisticated inquiries into what Ivy calls—properly I believe—the “Japanese thing.” The juxtaposition between the singular, thing, and plural, discourses, suggests her overall theme: to discuss the always incomplete reconfigurations of the many pasts that have existed within the archipelago into a singular ideology of Japan.     

China’s National Identity and the Root Causes of China’s Ethnic Tensions

This paper seeks to examine the People’s Republic of China’s (China) self-defined national identity and the consequences on China’s ethnic relations with its ethnic minorities. This paper argues that China’s identity is equated with the identity and culture of its ethnic Han Chinese majority—a narrative originally constructed by the Chinese state which its ethnic Han Chinese majority since indulges in. However, this hegemonic narrative is at the root of interethnic issues and tensions in China today, as further ethnic tensions stem from the resistance of ethnic minorities against Sinicization and the imposition of this “Chinese” identity against them. These phenomena thus both indicate what I term a weak “internal soft power appeal” of Han Chinese Confucian culture for ethnic minorities living in the PRC, and imply that China must adopt a different, more inclusive national identity if it were to maintain ethnic stability in the long term.     

Dualistic Identity, Memory-encoded Norms, and State Emotion: A Social Constructivist Account of Chinese Foreign Relations

By tracing the origin and evolution of Chinese nationalism, this paper finds that the dialectical relationship between the Chinese “self” and the foreign “other” has provided the cultural-institutional context for the construction of its national identity. The positional change of the Chinese actor in the self-other interaction—resulting from the institutional shift from the tianxia order to the Westphalian system—and the consequent national humiliation have been embedded in the Chinese collective memory and given rise to the consensual norms ingrained in the national identity. Viewed through the lens of political sociology and identity politics, China’s tenacious struggle for national rejuvenation can be construed as a social practice guided by these memory-encoded social norms. Due to the protracted and ambivalent nature of the state’s purposive action in attaining great-power status on the international stage, the confidence of the resurgent state is compromised by an acute sense of frustration. This identity predicament has engendered a peculiar Chinese state emotion, which has profoundly influenced the in-group members’ evaluation and perception of out-group entities and their behavior in the antagonistic intergroup relations.     

Anand Patwardhan: Social Activist and Dedicated Filmmaker

In this essay—an earlier version of which was delivered as a lecture at a session cosponsored by Critical Asian Studies and the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea (ASCK) at the annual conference of the Association for Asian Studies, San Diego, California, on 23 March 2013—the author argues the need to go beyond the current state of perilous confrontation and volatility on the Korean Peninsula and examine how and why the current division of the peninsula into North and South has evolved into a “division system.” The author contends that “civic participation” (broadly defined to include business entrepreneurs, corporations, NGOs, and private citizens) is necessary to deal with the durable enormity of the division system. He calls this body of nonstate actors the “third party” (the first two parties being those of North and South Korea). Going beyond strictly Korean affairs, this third party, the author concludes, can play a crucial role in creating a larger framework of East Asian cooperation and solidary.     

Separatism or Status‐Quo?: Indigenous Affairs from the Birth of Land Rights to the Death of ATSIC*

Unlike other settler societies, Australia has yet to recognise Indigenous peoples as “peoples” or “nations”. Despite this, we see something of a consensus emerging which suggests Indigenous “separatism” has been tried and failed in Australia, and it is time to revisit an integrationist approach in order to improve Indigenous peoples' socio‐economic position. This paper challenges the assumption that, beginning in the 1970s, Indigenous‐state relations have been characterised by the realisation of a separatist agenda. On the contrary, assessing three decades of Indigenous‐state relations reveals a consistent logic from the state which ultimately seeks to integrate Indigenous Australians, rather than recognise them as having a distinct — and separate — political identity. This logic reached its “natural” conclusion with the abolition of elected Indigenous political representation in 2005.     

"God We Had Fun": The CIA in China and Sino-American Relations

This article deals with two sets of memories of the Partition of British India in 1947. The first is defined as “Partition memory”; the second set consists of the memories of Muslims who reside today in the state of Jharkhand, India. The author shows that the “enactment” of Partition memory — at different times, in different places and ways, and with different intentions — reinforces the original division of British India into two separate nations, along religious lines, and divides people into binary-opposed but internally homogenous communities of “Hindu locals” and “Muslim foreigners.” Drawing on interviews conducted in Jharkhand in 2000-2001, the author shows that local Muslims experienced the events of 1947 very differently from what Partition memory would suggest. Their memories, which are rarely included in the official history of Partition, challenge the dominant history by underscoring multiple identities based on region rather than on religion. The author concludes by emphasizing that memories similar to those presented in this article should be included in the official Partition history for two reasons: they challenge the threat that a one-sided presentation of Partition memory poses and they will enrich and possibly even transform official Partition history.     

China's troubled culture

Abstract

China has spent the twentieth century at repeated efforts, in Ezra Pound's phrase, to “make it new.” But it has repeatedly fallen back on tightly controlled political power and organization as the only means it knows—in the process always discouraging individual initiative and forestalling free expression of ideas, qualities perceived by those in power as twin threats to the order of the state. The use of military force against Chinese citizens on 4 June 1989 is only the most recent example that China has seldom allowed itself to experience the creative chaos that might arise from a true “hundred flowers” era, a protected arena of competing voices. This, at least, is the theme that tugs at the cuff of each of the books grouped here—two cultural studies, three memoirs, and a manifesto.     

Translation,Modernity, and Women in China

The end of the cold war witnessed the emergence of a commercial web sprawling from the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in western China and extending into Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan), Pakistan, and Russia. Running parallel to the state-managed exchange in hydrocarbons, raw materials, technology, and infrastructure, this new Eurasian trade had an informal component as everyday consumer items manufactured in China were imported into neighboring countries, bypassing formal regulatory mechanisms. This inter-Asian trade began as shuttle trading by itinerant merchants for local markets; by the mid 1990s, shuttle trading was overshadowed by largescale export for national markets in neighboring countries without losing its informal character. This informality extending across national boundaries defined the post–cold war commerce in innermost Asia; at the same time, it also signaled a return to pre-cold war trading structures. Moving away from the “retreat of the state” thesis that found traction following the cold war, the author attributes informality in this inter-Asian trade to three factors: (1) a restructuring of state power where informal trade was a new comparative advantage sought in an evolving geopolitical climate; (2) the actors in this inter-Asian trade—party and regional officials in China, along with traders and intermediaries—who found and exercised agency through this exchange; and (3) a chain of inter-locking, commercial macro-regions, which are economically sustainable and which transcended international boundaries. Working in conjunction, these factors constitute a dynamic inter-Asian trade and challenge static state imaginaries of a “New Silk Road” or “Eurasian Continental Bridge.”     

“What Shall We Do With It Now?”: The Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana and the Difficult Heritage of Fascism

This article uses the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana (PdCI) in the Rome suburb of EUR as a case study to explore how Italians have negotiated the “difficult heritage” of Fascism since 1945. Following Sharon Macdonald, the paper understands the term difficult heritage to refer to a historically significant past that remains materially visible through sites, buildings, artworks, monuments and other artefacts, but which is difficult to reconcile with “a positive, self-affirming contemporary identity”. The paper employs a biographical approach to reveal and analyse the post-Fascist “lives” of the PdCI, one of the most recognisable — and, in recent decades, most admired — examples of Fascist monumental architecture in Italy. With reference also to other examples of difficult Fascist heritage in Italy, and to sites associated with the difficult heritage of Nazism in Germany, the paper offers new insights into how Italy has confronted its Fascist past and places the Italian experience of difficult heritage within the broader international context.     

New letters from Hiroshima

Abstract

Wartime censors, as Phillip Knightley's The First Casualty reminds us, perform a twofold mission: (l) deny vital data to the enemy and (2) conceal from the citizenry potentially perturbing news as to how their leaders are conducting the mayhem at the front. This protective zeal tends to be habit forming and can outlast formal hostilities. Take the case of two historians who tried to pry past the “received wisdom and the received ignorance” about Western military activities in a gory conflict fought on Third World terrain: A tyrant launched a lightning invasion into a neighboring southern country over which he claimed historical sovereignty. A U.S. diplomat earlier had “signaled” the avaricious dictator that the target state lay outside the perimeter of vital U.S. interests. Nonetheless, seventeen U.N. countries—though primarily the United States—charged in to repel the invaders with a ferocious aerial campaign and a massive ground assault. The tyrant, alas, survived this onslaught because several hundred thousand—and eventually several million—highly motivated Chinese troops came to the rescue.     

Shifting the perspective on identity discourse in Estonia

Abstract

I argue that the post-socialist identity discourse in Estonia should be studied as a result of the dialectic relationship between the international context in which Estonia exists and the perceptions of history and culture that elites deploy in the public discourse of Estonia's identity. Four major narratives that compose much of the identity discourse emerge from this dialectic: Estonia as a reconstituted state and society; Estonia as European; Estonia as Finno-Ugric; and Estonia as Nordic. These narratives can be overlooked if research relies simply on “East” and “West” analytic categories or assumes that history and culture alone yield identity. Estonia provides an excellent opportunity to examine this dialectic because of the international community's role in the country's transformation into a European Union applicant state.     

On Fascist Terror in West Bengal — An appeal to the World Press,Calcutta, 23/3/72

Six models of DEMOCRATS (in capital letters) were introduced in this paper: democrat (in italics); “democrat” (in quotation marks); democrat→ “democrat;” democrat→ “democrat”→ democrat; “democrat”→ democrat; and “democrat”→ democrat→ “democrat.” This paper then attempts to explicate which model(s) of DEMOCRATS do Presidents Chiang Ching-kuo and Lee Teng-hui belong to. It was found that Chiang could be regarded as a “democrat,” and Lee, both “democrat” “and democrat”→ democrat. Both of them have to make sure that democratization in Island China can assure its survival as well as create an impact on Mainland China.     

Manufacturing Black-on-Black Violence in Africa: A Decolonial Perspective on Mfecane and Afrophobia/Xenophobia in South Africa

The phenomenon of “black-on-black” violence among the people of Africa has, ever since the advent of modernity/coloniality, been articulated in such a way that it presents victims as perpetrators. Thus, from the Mfecane violence of the “pre-colonial” era to the xenophobic/Afrophobic violence of the “post-colonial” era in Africa, incidents of black-on-black violence have always attracted explanations that cast doubt on the humanity of the black subject, through the colonial strategy of inventing and inverting causation. This colonial strategy entails both mis-presenting the epochal history of coloniality by representing it in terms of rupture instead of continuity, as well as representing the indigenous African subject as inherently violent. I argue in this article that black-on-black violence is a product of coloniality—a racist global power structure that makes incidents of “non-revolutionary violence” among the oppressed black subject inevitable. Thus, I deploy the case of the Mfecane violence of the “pre-colonial” era in southern Africa, and the Afro-phobic attacks on foreign nationals in “post-apartheid” South Africa to unmask the longue durée of coloniality, and its role of manufacturing blackon-black violence among the black people of Africa.     

Towards a model of asian plantation systems

This article is about the Shan opium-heroin problem which figures largely in many journalistic and academic accounts of political events in Burma, but which has, paradoxically, been neglected. Rather, it has been “hollywoodized” with images of “opium” armies, heroin “empires,” colorful drug “kings,” and warlord-princes, etc., to the extent that it has more or less become but a dramatic backdrop, an “exotic unknowable.” This article is a more mundane account of the opium-heroin phenomenon. I will deal with it from the economic-political perspective, with particular focus on the basic mechanism of the Shan opium-heroin industry. Specifically, I will deal with the actors involved and their role in what is the only viable and integrated (locally and internationally) industry to emerge from Burma in the over three decades of military rule. My contention, in sum, is that the Shan opium-heroin issue constitutes only a part of the regional and global informal complex of investment, trade, and profit, in which are involved a host of non-Shan actors, whose interests are primarily economic; that basically, it is a transnational/global agro-business, no different, in substance and dynamics, from any other lucrative agro-business; and that Shan peasants, and to some extent, rebel armies, cannot be in any way regarded as “winners” in, or the main beneficiaries of, the “illegal” and “unregulated” informal economy of investment, trade, and profit, that spans borders, regions, and oceans.     

Urbanization,education, and the politics of space on the Tibetan Plateau

This article provides an introduction to a special collection of five articles showcasing the work of rising scholars in the geography and anthropology of Tibetan regions in China (Eveline Washul, Andrew Grant, Tsering Bum, Huatse Gyal and Duojie Zhaxi, published in Critical Asian Studies 50: 4 and Critical Asian Studies 51: 1). It contextualizes the authors’ contributions in the recent promotion of planned urbanization in Tibetan regions as the key to achieving the “Chinese Dream” under President Xi Jinping. The paper calls attention to these authors’ focus on Tibetan experiences of new urbanization policies and practices, as well as their less-appreciated entanglement with shifting education priorities. Providing brief summaries of each author’s case study and arguments, it points to the ways in which all five articles address the relationship between space and subjectivity, as well as the issue of constrained agency (versus simple notions of “choice”), in statist urbanization processes.     

Feudalism in the Service of the Revolution

This article discusses the way the past is being reexamined in modern-day Vietnam, particularly through the medium of heritage. Hue, the old royal capital of Vietnam, provides the case study, as this city reflects the great themes and events of Vietnamese history over the last two hundred years, from the establishment of a unified nation under the Nguyen, through the imposition of colonial control, the devastation of war, reunification, and the establishment of communism, to the consolidation of an independent postcolonial nation. The importance of Hue's heritage is recognized in its status as a “world heritage” site. The author argues that Hue's heritage is, nevertheless, problematic for Vietnam's ruling communists, because to them it largely represents a regime—the Nguyen Dynasty—that was “reactionary” and that had sold out the country to the French. The apparent contradiction between the standard communist view of the Nguyen past and the value accorded to Nguyen heritage in Hue is resolved, the author contends, by recourse to the depoliticized practices of heritage preservation and tourist promotion.     

Rejoinder

Abstract

Many of Mr. van Walt's criticisms are based solely on fabrications of his own making. For example, I am accused, twice, of referring to myself as a “scholar” and to my article as “scholarly.” I could find no trace of either. I am further accused of considering all Tibetan refugee accounts as “unreliable.” To be sure, I believe that one cannot base the study of historical events solely on refugee accounts, but that does not make all of these stories “unreliable.” After all, Dawa Norbu, a refugee himself, wrote in Red Star Over Tibet, “I never saw or heard of any case of misconduct by a Red soldier.” I would never argue that this statement was unreliable. We are further told that I refer to Tibetans as Chinese when in the second paragraph of my review I wrote, “… Tibetans [are] only one of 56 minority nationalities.” Chinese citizens yes, ethnic Hans no. A final example, although there are many more, is Mr. van Walt's attempt to attribute to me the opinion that

… the only importance to the Western academic world is that the situation in Tibet can teach us how to eliminate a “mystical religion” and that “it gives clues as to how Peking will integrate a capitalist Taiwan into a Communist China in the future”. (emphasis added)     

IMPERIAL DESIGNS

For a very short period after the attacks on 9/11, as the United States bombarded Taliban positions and the alleged training camps of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida organization, Afghanistan was center stage. Then, as the mundane mopping up, the political haggling, and the international community's efforts to manage the postwar mess took over, the spotlight turned to Iraq. Yet even while Afghan landscapes, politics, and economic and social practices were the focus of the world's attention, the country's history and its place in Central Asia and in the wider realm of Asian and global geopolitics were little covered by the media. This essay outlines how Afghanistan has figured in the imperial designs of regional and international powers for more than two thousand years. From the Mongol invasions of the “civilized” world in the thirteenth century to the U.S. intervention just after the turn of the second millennium CE., the “deep” political history of Afghanistan is described with a view to “locating” the country in a wider political-economic context. Afghanistan's relationship to the great regional empires of Persia, India, and China in the late medieval and early modern periods is discussed, as is its role in “the Great Game” of imperial politics between Russia and British India during the nineteenth century. The regional impact of the Russian Revolution and of efforts to consolidate the USSR are described, as is the rising nationalism and Islamism of the peoples of the region during the final years of the Soviet Union. The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the longer term implications of U.S. support for the mujahiddin – support that ironically contributed to the movement that gave rise to al-Qaida -- are analyzed as the final episodes before 9/11 and the recent dramatic U.S. military and political intervention.     

Introduction to dalit poems

Abstract

The word dalit in Marathi, the language spoken by 50 million people in the state of Maharashtra in Western India, means “downtrodden,” “ground down,” or “depressed.” A caste-less word which ex-Untouchables have chosen for the new school of literature they have created, it includes all those who have suffered from the religio-social system. Short stories by ex-Untouchables began to appear in the 1950s, but the great swelling of creativity — poetry, novels, short stories, plays — appeared only in the late 1960s. The school is acknowledged by the Marathi literary establishment as a new and important development in the long history of Marathi literature. It represents a new voice, and its themes are protest, grievance, pride — and often revolution.