Editor's Introduction

Abstract

This issue includes ten articles that are grouped by four themes. The first group, which consists of Kevin Michael Smith's “The Promise of (Un)happiness: 34 Literature and Yi Si-u's Surrealist Poetics in Colonial Korea,” Ferran de Vargas's “Japanese New Left's Political Theories of Subjectivity and Ōshima Nagisa's Practice of Cinema,” So-Rim Lee's “Between Plastic Surgery and the Photographic Representation: Ji Yeo Undoes the Elusive Narrative of Transformation,” and Andrew Campana's “You Forbid Me to Walk: Yokota Hiroshi's Disability Poetics,” addresses the question of subjectivation. Kevin Michael Smith examines a literary surrealist movement in colonial Korea by exploring the dialectics of the colonial regime of (un)happiness and poetic forms of seeking utopian shards of freedom. Taking a psychoanalytic approach to Yi Si-u's poetry published in 34 Literature, Smith proposes a new interpretation of Korean surrealism as a dialectical engagement with the colonial system of interpellation, a system that produced “happiness” as an affective system of control and oppression. Smith argues that Yi's poetry brought to the fore (un)happiness or “dark” aspects of human psychology such as trauma, sadness, tragedy, and death drive that belonged to the everyday realm of unconsciousness. Yi's poetic trope disclosed, according to Smith, utopian shards of happiness and liberation precisely because of its engagement with the unconscious world of despair and depression under colonial rule. Following Herbert Marcuse's observation that individual happiness and freedom can be compatible with the preservation of common existence only when egalitarian organizational forms guarantee material subsistence and human reproduction, Smith concludes that Yi's poetry speaks to the truism that individual gratification is predicated on the guarantee of collective well-being.If Smith explores how the surrealist's articulation of a state of abjection worked as a condition of possibility for the dialectics of subjectivation in colonial Korea, Ferran de Vargas introduces the Japanese New Left's theories of the dialectics of subjectivation in their deployment of the concept of nothingness (mu) or self-negation (jikohitei). De Vargas situates the film director Ōshima Nagisa's Kōshukei, which was based on the 1958 Komatsugawa Incident, within a broader New Left discourse that privileged self-negation (i.e., bourgeois self) as the onto-epistemological ground for individual autonomy or as a state of pure subjectivity that generated a drive to subvert the system of modern (capitalist) alienation. Despite their differences, according to De Vargas, leading New Left theorists such as Umemoto Katsumi, Nakai Masakazu, Yoshimoto Takaaki, Tanigawa Gan, and Tokoto Mitsuko all embraced the theory of subjective nothingness. Ōshima's Kōshukei drew inspiration from Umemoto's theory, as well as existential philosophy such as Sartreanism, for its portrayal of the protagonist R, who in the film develops a rebel subjectivity as a result of “the experience of alienation, of the denial of control over his own being by external social powers.” De Vargas concludes that it is crucial to understand Ōshima's cinematic practice in the context of the Japanese New Left's theories, which offered a far less deterministic view of subjectivation rooted in subjectivism of nothingness, a nondeterministic dialectic of the subjective and the objective, than the well-known Marxian theory of subjectivation developed by Louis Althusser.So-Rim Lee's “Between Plastic Surgery and the Photographic Representation” shifts our attention to the neoliberal fantasy of the desirable subject. Lee focuses on New York–based South Korean photographer Ji Yeo's photographic series Beauty Recovery Room and It Will Hurt a Little to probe how photographic representation of plastic surgery reveals and demystifies the illusive narrative of beautification and upward mobility promised by South Korea's plastic surgery industry. Lee demonstrates how Yeo's photographic images underscore surgery not as a process of obtaining substantive transformation or aspirational personhood that are conducive to the norms of desirability under the neoliberal order, but as a practice of bodily rupture that involves an affective, material, and durational process of painful recovery. The plastic surgery industry's marketing strategy of promoting the fantasy of empowerment is a mode of subject-formation putatively capable of helping patients attain social recognition in the competitive and surface-image-driven world. Lee shows how plastic surgery embodies and draws from the logic of neoliberal ideology through its interpellation of the body into social capital. It was no coincidence, according to Lee, that the 1994 financial crisis that led to the installation of a neoliberal economy in South Korea marked a turning point for the ascendance of the plastic surgery industry. Lee concludes that Yeo's images of bodily rupture refuse any simple narrativization of surgical experience and work as antinarrative to the neoliberal logic of upward mobility by humanizing individual patients in their revelation of the solitary process of recovery.Andrew Campana's “You Forbid Me to Walk” addresses the body “disabled” and stigmatized by cerebral palsy. Campana focuses on the poet Yokota Hiroshi, a leader in Japan's disability rights movement, and the way he used his experiences of having cerebral palsy to create a new kind of “disability” poetics. According to Campana, Yokota's poetic form shows consistent resistance against the normalization of “able” bodies or the “givenness” of the body by provoking a perspective that demonstrates how social forces such as policy discourse, spatial arrangement, and infrastructures disable a certain kind of corporeal existence. Campana argues that Yokota's use of a “body otherwise” challenges “conventional conceptions of what it means to be disabled, as well as what it means to have and be a body.” The body otherwise, writing otherwise, and speaking otherwise in Yokota's performance and poetics radically problematizes the cognitive and material conditions that produce and naturalize the distinction between the “abled” and “disabled” bodies. Yokota's work requires, Campana concludes, its readers and audiences to adapt to a different mode of understanding, sensation, and relating to others, defamiliarizing and decentering the normative mode of social relations and interactions that privilege the “able” body. In this sense, Yokota's work is an example par excellence of resistance against the regime of interpellation in its radical questioning of received norms and practices, senses and sensations, both personal and institutional.The second group takes up the question of memory. Olga Fedorenko's “The Advertising Museum in Seoul: Dream-Images and the Freedom to Advertise” carries out a Benjaminian analysis of the Advertising Museum in Seoul. Building on the scholarship on collective dreamworlds and on advertisement as dream-images, Fedorenko not only teases out how the historicist underpinnings of the museum construct the post-democratization South Korean present as a triumphant moment of technological, political, and aesthetic freedom but also discusses how the dream-images of the old advertisements inadvertently conjure unrealized collective utopias sedimented within them. According to Fedorenko, the pastness of pre-democratization advertisements is brought into the present in such a way as to support the progressive narrative of history and to legitimize post-democratization South Korea as a terminus whereby major historical tasks (i.e., establishment of procedural democracy and institutionalization of liberal freedoms) have been accomplished. This fantasy of arrival fulfills the ideological function of generating dream scenes of South Korea's progress, prosperity, and prestige while trivializing persisting economic and social injustices caused by neoliberal capitalism as merely minor wrinkles. Such fantasies affirm, Fedorenko argues, the dominant official discourse that there are no better alternatives than the catastrophes of the neoliberal present. These advertisements, however, possess dialectical potentialities of redeeming collective dreams of egalitarian democracy and confronting the failure of their realization. In this sense, Fedorenko insists, advertising should be understood as a repository of “unfulfilled pasts, whose will-have-beens unlock hereafters discontinuous from the now.”Chialan Sharon Wang's “Native Soil of Postmemory and Affective Archives in Wu Ming-Yi's The Stolen Bicycle” examines “postmemory” as a significant dimension of Taiwan's cultural memory that offers a counternarrative to totalizing official history. Postmemory refers to, Wang explains, “the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before” (Hirsch 2012: 5) and “unpacks the cross-generational transference of traumatic experiences both within and across species.” By reading Wu's The Stolen Bicycle as a nativist work that reveals memory as a multidirectional and multigenerational construct, Wang teases out how threads of personal memory present multifarious accounts or polyphony of colonialism, wars, and the White Terror. In Wu's works, according to Wang, multidirectional and multigenerational postmemories not only (re)construct human events but also offer a vision of symbiotic community in which humans and nonhumans are engaged in complex relationships deeply entangled with historical violence such as war and genocide. Such post-anthropocentric memories are a product of imaginative investment, projection, and creation that occur in the cross-generational transference of traumatic experiences. They are profoundly local and personal, and constitute an “archive of feelings,” challenging common understandings of what makes an archive.The third group addresses the question of border and identity. Eun Ah Cho's “Familiar Strangers: North Koreans as ‘Dangerous Refugees’ and the Crisis of Korean Chinese Community in Zhang Lu's Dooman River (2010)” examines how two types of border crossing—the crossing of North Koreans into China and the crossing of Korean Chinese into South Korea—cause a crisis of community in a way that confronts the questions of collective ethics and responsibility to others. Cho focuses on a Korean Chinese boy (Chang-ho) in the film Dooman River as a figure symbolizing refugees who have no choice but to take their captivity or nonhome as a home in which to live a precarious life. Chang-ho takes his own life to demand the release of his North Korean friend (Jung-jin) who frequently crosses the border to find some food for his sick sister. The captivity of Jung-jin signifies, according to Cho, the Korean Chinese villagers’ disavowal of shared identity and ethical obligations they felt toward the North Koreans, announcing the insurmountable legal and emotional boundary to the latter. For the Korean Chinese, the North Koreans are after all “familiar strangers.” Cho interprets Chang-ho's death as a sacrifice suggested to audiences by the director of Dooman River in an attempt to preserve the communitarian ethics of Korean Chinese and maintain the value of ethnic identity.Yi-Ting Chang's “Archipelagic Optics in Wu Ming-Yi's The Man with the Compound Eyes” calls for a fundamental rethinking of the epistemological framework of transpacific and Asian/American studies by shifting our inquiries from an intercontinental and nation-state–centered perspective to “archipelagic optics” that foreground “noninnocent multiplicity, decontinental seeing, and immanent dependencies.” Seen from archipelagic optics, Chang argues, boundaries determined by the global system of sovereignty and nation-states lose their onto-political meanings and give way to forms and relations of social formation as a new cognitive paradigm that brings forth a new language capable of theorizing onto-political meanings of liminal beings. Chang demonstrates a possibility of such theorization by examining Wu Ming-Yi's The Man with the Compound Eyes: “The Man assembles different ways of knowing to imagine planetary connection from the islands of Taiwan and the Pacific.” In the story, not only an imaginary county in Taiwan but also Indigenous Austronesian peoples as well as nonhuman creatures play central roles in invoking the multiplicity of Taiwan's settler colonial formation and environmental injustices. In The Man, according to Chang, human existence poses a destructive threat to the existential memories of other creatures as well as of their own. It foregrounds the vision that “no life can survive without other lives, without the ecological memories other living creatures have, memories of the environments in which they live.” In this regard, Chang's reading of The Man has much resonance with Wang's analysis of The Stolen Bicycle as an attempt to articulate post-anthropocentric memories and their role in a radical rethinking of given onto-epistemological paradigms.The fourth group analyzes malleable power. Lorenzo Andolfatto's “Semantics of Tea Drinking: Online Writing and the Shaping of Counter-public Spheres in Xi Jinping's China” examines what Foucault calls “capillary” forms of state power in China's everyday governance under Xi Jinping. He approaches this issue by closely reading online texts that present people's bei hecha (being asked for tea) experiences. Bei hecha or hecha (drinking tea) are expressions commonly used to imply being approached by the State Security Police for a forced appointment and interrogation. Andolfatto unpacks not only the intricacies of the state's surveillance and mode of everyday governmentality but also people's counter-public spheres of dissent by analyzing hecha ji texts (written recollection of tea-drinking sessions) where they share their bei hecha experiences. Hecha practice reflects, according to Andolfatto, the state police's “hybrid” orientation within the Chinese legal field vis-à-vis the law and the government's directives, which is best represented by the policy of “stability preservation.” Hecha developed as a method of “preemptive authoritarian” intervention into people's everyday lives to ensure stability preservation and was adopted at the local level by a police force to implement the methodical “decomposition” of internal dissent. But at the same time, Andolfatto concludes, hecha ji writing offers a tool for the reconstitution of surveilled voices into a “counter-public sphere” or “oppositional community” (Felski 1989: 168) through its shared articulation of oppression, harassment, and fear.Hans Steinmüller's “Shanzhai: Creative Imitation of China in Highland Myanmar” looks at the Wa State in contemporary Myanmar to unpack the material and symbolic implications of creative imitation or appropriation of China's ideological and political policies. Central to Steinmüller's inquiry is shanzhai (mountain fortress), a term that is commonly used to describe creative and ironic brand imitation in the People's Republic of China today. The Wa State, being a “literal” mountain fortress located between China and Myanmar, has been called a cheap copy, a miniature version of China. It has adopted a pragmatic imitation of China for its own survival in the cases of Maoism, authoritarian capitalism, and ethnic identity-formation. Tracing the history of the Wa State's close relationship with China in the areas of economy and military, Steinmüller discusses the pragmatic limitations and possibilities of the Wa's strategic decisions in following China as its model and ally. He concludes that the Wa State's “imitation” “tends to follow practical contingencies, rather than paradigmatic similarities,” exemplified in its adoption of Maoism and capitalism. In this sense, the commonsensical distinction between the original and the copy embedded in the essentialist conception of imitation does not help us understand the Wa State's appropriation of China and the malleable nature of its power.