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A public political sphere, to exist, requires the convergence of phenomena primarily of socioeconomic and cultural nature. In early twentieth-century southern Vietnam, the emergence of new socially, economically, and culturally determined categories among the indigenous population in the context of modern colonial urbanism was an essential condition for the development of this culture of political diversity. This article describes the new forces brought about by the colonial regime — the imposition of a modern state apparatus, the introduction of French education, the opening of society to the global economy — all of which converged in the making of Saigon, the colonial metropolis. In the city, new forms of individual consciousness arose as a result, and with them, new practices of collective socialization. Fraternal and other voluntary associations would develop and lead to the emergence of a public political sphere, what Jürgen Habermas called a culture of open rational enquiry.
This article makes a case, in the study of Korea's colonial modern transition, for supplementing the examination of writings with attention to historical modalities of writing itself considered as a material inscriptive practice, and thus also for the interdisciplinary engagement of Korean history or art history with material culture studies, science studies, and the phenomenological anthropology of landscape. My focus is Sǒkkuram, surely among the most extensively discussed of all Korean historic sites. Initially, I unveil a record of the temple in the unpublished papers of the anthropologist Frederick Starr stemming from his 1911 visit, in the window between Sǒkkuram's 1907 “rediscovery” and its first rebuilding of 1913. This record illuminates long-forgotten aspects of Sǒkkuram's materiality — such as how it was painted. Yet my purpose is not antiquarian; rather, it is to examine two historically significant non -representational orderings of words and things. In the first, what I call “writing in,” a form given phenomenologically by the relation of the figures on Sǒkkuram's walls contained multiple shifts in its meaningful content. Sǒkkuram became a privileged locus for considering Korea's “multiracial” pasts for a generation of Western authors, a commitment that superseded the overall assignment of meaning to the temple within histories of race, religion, or nation. Meanwhile, Starr's 1911 photographs show the practice of some Korean visitors to the temple of literally “writing on” its surfaces using ink or charcoal. I read “writing on” as a spatio-material practice of placing words, in which significance was not mainly an effect of content.
This essay examines the cultural translation of the Western first-person grammatical category into Vietnamese literature during French colonial rule. In the 1930s, Vietnamese writers began to assimilate the first-person pronoun “ tôi ” into their writing. The prevalence of tôi suggests a shift from Vietnamese collectivism to individualism during this period. However, through a reading of Khái Hưng's novel Nửa chừng xuân ( In the Midst of Spring ), this article argues that although male Vietnamese writers adapted the European first-person grammatical category to express individual autonomy, modern female authors and protagonists remained circumscribed by sociolinguistic structures and thus were unable to assume the first-person voice. Khái Hưng's novel, I contend, addresses the gendered transformations of modern Vietnamese language and literature by exploring how the female protagonist must discursively relate herself with and against existing sociolinguistic structures. The heroine's subjectivity is formed not through an appropriation of European individualism but rather through the chasm between the imported first-person and the sociolinguistic structures particular to Vietnam.
This article addresses the conjunction of disease, desire, and language in modernist Korean fiction of the late colonial period, particularly in Pak T'aewŏn's representative novella One Day in the Life of the Author, Mr. Kubo (1934). I bring to bear two central concepts on the work. First, the concept of hysteria is used to describe the thematic use of symptoms in the novella, to theorize the modernist text itself as symptom, and finally to propose the hystericizing force of the text on the reader or critic. The article understands hysteria beyond individual etiology as the product of a certain social discourse, a relational condition linking desire with language in which the hysterical subject attains false satisfaction with the conversion of actual or repressed desire into the symptom and always distrusts the signifier as a medium of truth. Satisfaction is always deferred for the hysteric, including the pleasure of meaning or referentiality. Second, I link Pak's work with its historical context by locating “hysteria” as one possible outcome of the paradoxical demands of discriminatory colonial discourse, which I characterize using Bateson's concept of the double bind. Here I read the novella (at both levels of style and content) in relation to the hystericizing injunctions of forced assimilation. By taking the protagonist Kubo not as a neurasthenic (the text's own diagnosis) but as a hysteric, by insisting on addressing the problematic relationship between signifier and referent in 1930s fiction and literary criticism, and by linking hysteria with the contradictory commands of a differentiating assimilation (“Be like us! But not too much like us”), this article moves toward understanding modernist fiction — and a crisis of representation in Seoul literary circles more generally — as deeply engaged with the difficult questions of subjectivity and language under colonial rule.
This essay examines the discursive constellation of the concepts of sovereignty, coinage, and kinship from the Warring States Period to the first empires of the Qin and Han dynasties. Drawing upon philosophical texts, including the Lunyu, Mengzi , and Guanzi , as well as historical texts such as the Shang shu, Shi ji , and Han shu , I will argue that the foundational narrative for the emergence of coinage in China was inextricable from theories of both sagely and tyrannical sovereignties — an ideological ambivalence that was reflected in the discourse on coinage itself. The coin of the realm was the symbol of power and profit and thus of the political and the economic realities of empire. Yet imperial anxieties over political tyranny would lead classical political theorists to recode the minting of coin in terms of a moral discourse, one that was also instrumental in the moral legitimation of imperial sovereignty itself. This would be the discourse on kinship, which allowed theorists to equate the sovereign with the parent. Coinage, then, like sovereignty, would appeal to the language of kinship, and in this way would be translated from base tokens of material profit into symbols of the sovereign's beneficent concern.
This article explores the visual representation of minority (especially queer) identities in the highly stylized and experimental documentaries of independent filmmakers Shi Tou and Cui Zi'en, two of the most prominent cultural figures in the Chinese queer community. My analysis focuses on Shi's documentary 50 Minutes of Women (2005) and Cui's semi-documentary Night Scene (2003) in conjunction with discussions of Shi's paintings and Cui's queer science fiction as well as his other video works such as The Narrow Path (2003) and Shi Tou and That Nana (2005). Through a close examination of the intimately embodied vision, haptic camera, reflexive performances, as well as subjectivized editing strategies manifest in their works, I demonstrate that Shi and Cui not only present alternative perspectives on identity issues from inside the queer communities but, more significantly, they practice a boldly performative and intimately engaged mode of documentary filmmaking and in the process challenge the very distinction between documentary and fiction, truth and opinion, self and other. Their embodied approaches not only demonstrate the potential of minority discourses to actively and critically engage social reality but also represent an important direction — that of increasing reflexivity — for the continued development of documentary filmmaking in China.
This article examines Mickey Chen's queer documentaries and their tactics of subversion, especially in his representation of both positive and negative images and in his formal strategies of mimicking mainstream media. Issues of “visibility” permeate the general landscape of documentary representation of Taiwan's GLBT or the so-called tongzhi (同志, literally “comrade”) community. Thus questions of resistance and subversion must be viewed through the lens of visibility.
In this interview, Aaron Kerner speaks with Takahiko Iimura about the relationship between butoh and film. The discussion focuses specifically on Iimura's films Anma ( The Masseurs, 1963) and Rose Color Dance (1965), which feature the legendary Tatsumi Hijikata, founder of butoh. Kerner frames the discussion by noting that there are in effect two different types of “butoh film”; on the one hand, there are films that document, constituting a record of an event, and on the other hand, there are films that integrate butoh elements into the practice of filmmaking itself. Iimura's films fit into this latter category, and he fittingly refers to this practice as “cine-dance.” Over the course of their discussion, Iimura and Kerner talk about the filmmaker's practice and his relationship with Hijikata and many other prominent artists working in the mid-1960s (Yoko Ono, Eikoh Hosoe, Jonas Mekas, Allan Kaprow, Natsuyuki Nakanishi, and Genpei Akasegawa).
On July 13, 1990, a group of shamans innovated and performed a ritual they refer to as the haewŏn chinhon to appease the deceased spirits of Japanese military “comfort women.” Caught unprepared for the large number of spirits who appeared, as well as the accompanying spiritual and emotional toil, they made a promise to the spirits that they would perform the ritual in all eight provinces of Korea — three in the North and five in the South — keeping in mind, of course, the obvious geo-political problems in that regard. Eventually in 2003, the shamans began their fulfillment of that promise with another series of haewŏn chinhon rituals, this time better prepared and stronger in numbers. This article analyzes one of these rituals in detail, not only focusing on its structural aspects but also considering it as a site to reexamine Gayatiri Spivak's conceptualizations of the subaltern, as they relate to both comfort women and shamanic activity. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, Spivak theorizes the subaltern as both stemming from and producing what she refers to as a “blank space” in text, and consequently speech, which opens a fissure for the potential constitution of the other. This productive space — unscripted and undifferentiated — I argue, is likewise a potential site for what Walter Benjamin referred to as the emergence of “historical materialism,” which reveals itself in flashes, or unexpected moments of danger. Within the structured mechanics of ritual there is space for chance and contingency. The unforeseen accident lurks as a break in the action, which takes place outside ritual structure and goes beyond representation and repetition. During the performance that I detail, there was one such moment — completely unexpected — that reveals more about the mimetic possibilities of shamanism than a ritual that goes entirely as planned. This article examines this incident, when a shaman, unable to control the possessing spirits, collapses to the ground, as well as the events that follow. The article also contextualizes this ritual in relation to debates surrounding the “comfort women” issue, and how it is both situated within and outside of what C. Sarah Soh refers to as the “paradigmatic” narrative of victimization, in addition to the larger problem of representation as it relates to both presence and discursive claims to factual truths.
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