Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Issue 20.1 introduces changes in the positions project which widen the “Asia” or “Asias” that contributors can expect to reference in their work. The journal's name change from positions: east asia cultures critique to positions: asia critique signals several changes. The cultures signifier fades into the intellectual history of an earlier time; the word critique remains. Walter Benjamin's proposal that critique be the mark of the immanent yet apocalyptic claim to historical truth cannot be vacated. Thus twenty years after the founding of the project, we pause to invent an appropriate anniversary issue for renewing this journal. Essays consequently focus on the maturation of lines of research and on what, in light of the passage of a full generation of scholarship, might be issues just arising on the historical horizon. The first set of essays introduces the reader to the ideological and intellectual conditions that laid the foundation for the critiques during the journal's founding years. The second section of the anniversary issue indicates some viable directions for future scholarship, and the third section includes interviews, commemorations, and commentaries. This anniversary issue showcases a wide range of contemporary art of “Asia.”