Editor's Note

Abstract

Editor's Note Jeffrey R. Di Leo The region called Asia was culturally defined after the Russia-Japan War and geopolitically designed after the Second World War. Modern Asia was the historical by-product of colonialism and its effects; the rise of nationalism in Asia was collective resistance to colonial modernization. Modernity in Asia has been the consequence of the dialectical process between modernization and counter-modernization. Its complicated historical background registers the strong demand of "Asian theory" for analyzing the structure of Asian modernity. Recently, as participating in the global distribution of labor, contemporary Asia has attracted many scholars to not only its rapid economic development, but also its cultural products. The theme of this issue brings together various theoretical interventions into Asian literature, contemporary art and culture as well as inquiry into the intellectual history of critical theory in Asia. Focus here is placed on the dynamic relation between Western theory and Asian intellectual history. It was edited by the philosopher and cultural critic, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, from Kyung Hee University in South Korea, and the majority of its contributors are from Asia. I am most appreciative for the interdisciplinary spirit with which our contributors approached the topic of Theorizing Asia, and the facility with which Alex brought together this group of scholars from around the world to explore it critically. I hope that you are as pleased with the result as I am—and invite you to read Alex's introduction to the issue and to enjoy the ensemble of perspectives on this timely topic. ________ Looking forward, we have two issues under preparation. The first, entitled Infrastructuralism (Vol. 31, Nos. 1–2 [2023]), will be edited by Christopher Breu and myself. Over the past forty years or so, the humanities have largely been concerned with issues of representation. Such a focus is not surprising, given that the textual, broadly conceived, sits at the center of humanistic endeavor. Much contemporary online discourse has a [End Page vii] similar focus. As our lives become more virtually mediated, questions of representation appear to become ever more central. Yet what is obscured by our investments in the computer screen and avatar culture? The singular focus on representation has worked to mystify the systems, structures, and forms of labor that enable representation to take place and life and ecosystems to flourish. In an era defined by climate emergency, pandemics, and massive inequality, the issue of infrastructure becomes ever more pressing. This issue will be dedicated to thinking about the centrality of infrastructure to the humanities and to the most pressing political questions of our moment. We define infrastructure broadly to include economic structures and systems, ecosystems, material state formations, institutions, computational and web-based materialities (including servers, fiber-optic cables and code), various forms of labor, forms of textuality that exceed representation, as well as all that more regularly goes under the name of infrastructure. As people working in the humanities, we are interested in how cultural objects and forms of theory engage with the question of infrastructure. How does representation engage with that which exceeds and enables it? Deadline: closed. Also, we are preparing an issue entitled Critical Environments (Vol. 32, Nos. 1–2 [2024]), which will be edited by Aaron Jaffe and Robin Truth Goodman. This issue conveys two urgent and co-articulated thematic orientations. First, from environmentalism, the program both for making sense of and contesting unfolding ecological crises and ecocide. Second, from philosophy and critical theory, the necessity of sustaining criticality for concepts within specific, if provisional and pragmatic, contexts, structures, organization and systems. The two words together encompass environment in an ecological sense and also call attention to how thinking itself exists in immanent and material ways integral to nature. Presuming a built world in a profound sense means addressing entanglements of culture and nature in critical concepts like ecology, infrastructure, contagion, infection, contamination, deep time, and, indeed, the very language of critical theory itself. Further, they entail a future orientation to systems and environments that the old humanist legacies and doxas have repeatedly failed. In Critical Environments (1998), Cary Wolfe challenged theory "to renew its commitment to theoretical heterodoxy by confronting its own orthodoxy...