Left Internationalisms in Nationalist Times

Abstract

Left Internationalisms in Nationalist Times Andrew Way Leong (bio), Darwin H. Tsen (bio), Paul Nadal (bio), Roanne L. Kantor (bio), Calvin Cheung-Miaw (bio), and Jason G. Coe (bio) This Field Trip consists of five essays written by scholars studying left internationalist imaginaries within Asia and in transpacific relation to the Americas. Our impetus for collaboration was a series of Verge−sponsored panels on “Transpacific Socialisms” at the 2021 Association for Asian American Studies conference. In our call, we asked, “What might happen if we stop assigning sole determinative force to the imperial imaginaries of capitalist powers, and viewed socialist labor networks and revolutionary itineraries as integral to the formation of the ‘transpacific’?” While assembling our Field Trip, we found the grand narrative ambition of “transpacific socialisms” to be less salient as a description for our shared concerns. None of our essays turned to triumphalist imaginaries of the transpacific under conditions of plausible left unity or ascendancy (e.g., the 1920s Third International or 1960s global Maoism/Third Worldism). Instead, we found a structure of feeling in a minor key: a shared attention to instances of parasitic translation, reinvention, or reflective introjection of left internationalist imaginaries under conditions of extreme reaction and repression. This structure of feeling is an understandable response to our present, where ascendant ultranationalisms make the prospects for left internationalist visions of global Asias seem increasingly dire. Like the Asias of “Global Asias,” our left internationalisms are “deliberately plural/pluralizing” (Chen 2021, 1002).1 We build on the insights of Shuang Shen (2009, 65), whose study of “Chinese writers in left-oriented internationalist journals” has encouraged us to shift away from “conventional histories of internationalism” that “tend to focus on major political organizations such as the Communist International” and instead approach internationalisms “from the point of view of translation and cultural circulation.” From the vantages of translation and circulation, [End Page 57] left internationalisms can never be singular because they are constantly embedded within negotiations of “difference and disjunction” (65). As such, left internationalisms are simultaneously explicit programs of “political alliance forged on the basis of the common goal of world revolution among oppressed peoples” and the positive cultural mediations— “literary exchange, critical reading, and imaginative identification”— that make such programs legible and realizable among different languages, cultures, and peoples (73).2 By turning to left internationalisms in the midst of translations and incipient re-formations, our Field Trip exemplifies the ethos of Verge as a forum for what lies on the edges of formations like Asian area and Asian American ethnic studies. We have not focused, as one might in Asian area studies, on direct analyses of the state socialisms of China, North Korea, or Vietnam. We also do not focus, as one might in Asian American studies, on how writers or protest movements conform to U.S.-based modes of ethnic or pan-ethnic identification. The five essays proceed chronologically through internationalist practices and imaginaries from the 1930s to the 2020s. Darwin H. Tsen’s essay, on the travels of Japanese anarcho-socialist Yamaga Taiji (1892–1970), interprets his activities as a publisher and translator in Taiwan and the Philippines as a “parasitic” strategy of building structures for internationalist solidarity while negotiating the infrastructures of Japanese empire at its apex. Paul Nadal’s essay prompts us to consider how negotiation of another “empire at its apex” might be at play in the works and reception of Carlos Bulosan (1913–56). Nadal argues that the retroactive categorization of Bulosan as a “Filipino American” writer has obscured how his long prose works, when read in concert, project an internationalist horizon of Asian socialist futurity. Roanne L. Kantor makes a parallel argument about Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001), arguing, through the trope of the “rearview mirror,” that standard readings of Ali’s post-1980s poetry in terms of his Kashmiri diasporic identity have failed to consider how closely his persona of “witness” not only reflects Pablo Neruda’s vision of a “unified socialist Américas” but also introjects this vision following the counterrevolutions of the 1970s and 1980s. Calvin Cheung-Miaw asks us to reassess the 1980s, seeing this decade not only as a period...