Postcolonial Asia Research Articles

Ethnic Identification among Mixed Children in a Post-colonial Asian City: A Case in Hong Kong

Ethnic Identification among Mixed Children in a Post-colonial Asian City: A Case in Hong Kong

Therapeutic governance in Hong Kong’s anti-narcotics war, 1959–1980s

This article examines the medical front of the anti-narcotics war in post-war Hong Kong. Situating Hong Kong in the American global drug war, this article traces colonial Hong Kong’s development of addiction treatment and cooperation with American medical experts in conducting a controversial experiment, methadone maintenance. It argues that the colonial government constructed a new form of therapeutic governance to medicalize social issues as behavioural problems. Through large-scale rehabilitation and methadone maintenance, the colonial government claimed to transform addicts in the island colony into useful subjects and justified its radical intervention into social life. To American experts, Hong Kong was an ideal laboratory to examine the controversial treatment. Hong Kong’s methadone experiment became an international success and a model reimported into the United States in the 1980s. A medical history of the anti-narcotics war not only offers a new way to reassess the social reform in the 1970s but also helps us understand the contemporary hard-line approach against drugs in Hong Kong and post-colonial Asia.

Before Westphalia: Imagining An Alternative Asian Globalization

The world order as it is known and understood today was built upon the foundations of imperialism and colonialism. It must be acknowledged that the very epistemologies and vocabularies that we use in the domains of diplomacy, international relations and politics are part of the legacy of Empire as well. This paper asks, is it possible for us to rethink and/or re-imagine an alternative global system that reconnects with the realities of socio-economic and socio-political life across the Asian continent and the world of the Indian Ocean prior to the arrival of Western imperialism? And, if that is indeed possible, would this also open up new opportunities for us to imagine the manner through which we – as postcolonial Asian and African scholars and subjects – represent ourselves and the ‘Western Other’?

Struggles for Hegemony Have Not Ceased

Peter Thomas’s criticism of arguments advanced recently of an era of “post-hegemony” in Western democracies may be extended by considering the experience of post-colonial Asia and Africa. Reviewing the use of the Gramscian concepts of consent and passive revolution in the study of modern South Asian history, this paper argues that both of Gramsci’s objectives –a general theory of power and the analysis of historically contingent and strategic politics– can be retained to yield valuable analytical insights. The paper concludes that rather than focusing on whether the analysis of hegemony can remain true to Gramsci’s text, one can put the concept to analytical use in explaining political change in different parts of the world today.

Geographies of the classical: Kathak across India and Hong Kong

ABSTRACT This article examines Kathak as an Inter-Asia dance form across India and Hong Kong. Typified as “classical” dance in India, Kathak’s twenty-first-century transposition to Hong Kong is enabled by members of the Indian diaspora and local performers. Kathak’s expansion is also facilitated by an interest in popular Indian culture across Asia, notably through Bollywood. Against this background, Kathak cohabits a tension between a classicized identity in India, and an ethnicized folk representation abroad. Drawing on perspectives of Kathak practitioners and my study of the dance in Hong Kong and India, I examine structures that enable the institutionalization of certain art forms and popularization of others. An analytical consideration of dance as performance art, academic discipline, and professional pursuit requires an Inter-Asia methodology of triangulation to examine narratives of “high” culture. Such an approach offers a variegated understanding of Kathak as an embodied art form that resonates across postcolonial Asian societies.

Remnants of Manshūkoku (Manchukuo): Imamura Eiji, Korean Identity under Japanese Imperialism, and Postcolonial Asian Studies

This paper takes Imamura Eiji (1911–?) as a case study in developing a theory of minor literary style and pedagogical poetics in Japaneselanguage Manshū literature. At the same time, it grapples with reading Japanese-language Manshū literature with postcolonial reflexivity. Imamura Eiji was an ethnic Korean who was an active participant in the Japanese language literary community of Japan-occupied Manchuria. While he is best known for his short story “Travel Companions,” this paper contends that his work and position within the Manchukuoan state can be better understood through the juxtaposition of multiple of his diverse works, including another short story entitled “New Womb.” Borrowing from Elleke Boehmer’s “postcolonial poetics,” I approach these texts from the perspective of not merely what politics they attempt, but also how they do so aesthetically and technologically. I conclude that Imamura produced a form of minor style observable in other contemporary literary production as well. While previous work on Imamura has laser focused on decoding his ethnic politics, I argue that we must aim for a more careful and critical reading by remaining aware of the contemporary politics of the academic field and relationality between scholar and text.

An interview with Leo T. S. Ching: on the politics of sentiment, anti- and pro-Japanism, and the coalitional outlook

ABSTRACT Inspired by his Anti-Japan: The Politics of Sentiment in Postcolonial East Asia (2019), this interview with Dr. Leo Ching invites the readers’ critical attention and examination on the temporally and spatially complicated coloniality and decolonial outlook in the Asia-Pacific. The postcolonial and post-Pacific-War sentiments encapsulated by the terms “anti-Japanism” and “pro-Japanism” are the anchor points for the inquiries about each of the East Asian subjects’ geo-historically specific psychological struggles. The interview covers the following aspects: (1) Dr. Ching’s familial experience and social observations that drove his book project; (2) The clarification of “sentiment” as a politically chosen concept that is differentiated from the psychoanalytical “affect” and logically connects with “feeling” and “emotion”; (3) the “trans-imperial” complicity between the imperial superpowers; (4) the search of alternative narratives that challenge the normative, linear, and masculinist narrative on the Japanese colonization in Taiwan; (5) the search of the sentiments that are not (fully) co-opted or regulated by nation-states; (6) Dr. Ching’s reflection on his gendered positionality and how that positionality takes part in his interpretation of the intersectionally oppressed female bodies. The interview concludes with the appeal for the coalitional politics that responds to contemporary racism and colonial residues.

Substrate Language Influence in Postcolonial Asian Englishes and the Role of Transfer in the Complementation System

ABSTRACT This study aims to contribute to the body of work on the effects of substrate languages and language transfer in World Englishes by asking whether the clausal verb complementation systems of the verb regret in eight Asian postcolonial varieties are affected by the substrate languages. An examination of the most widely spoken substrates in each variety does not seem to indicate that these have an effect on the respective complementation systems, since varieties with similar substrate languages have different distributions. In view of this, a further two factors are explored. First, the role played by the phase of development in the Dynamic Model (Schneider 2007), which also seems not to explain the different distributions: varieties in the same phase of development exhibit distinct distributions. Second, geographical proximity, which appears to explain similarities and differences between varieties, since South Asian varieties display similar characteristics, whereas these differ from those found in Southeast Asian varieties.

Foreign ideas, native spaces: Crime and Punishment in recent Asian cinema

In recent years, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment has furnished source material for two major Asian film directors: Darezhan Omirbaev (Student [2012]) and Lav Diaz (Norte, the End of History [2013]). Each director adapts Dostoevsky’s critique of the newly emerging market economy in 1860s Russia in order to depict the impact of capitalism on postcolonial Asian societies, highlighting the alienation characters experience from themselves and in relation to other human beings in particular. In doing so, Omirbaev and Diaz recreate and transfer the novelist’s opposition between native, eastern, Russian Orthodox values and encroaching western ideas to their own countries. Omirbaev depicts the damage caused to ordinary Kazakhs by a ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ economic model; Diaz chronicles the merciless toll of capitalism on the rural Filipino poor. Like Dostoevsky, each director proposes a return to native cultural, linguistic and environmental elements as a means of countering harmful foreign ideologies that victimize everyday people.

Imagining Nations, Creating States: Nehru, Ben-Gurion and an Analogical Study of India and Israel in Post-colonial Asia

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister (1947–64), and David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister (1948–54; 1955–63), played substantial roles in shaping two modern nation-states in post-Colonial Asia. The article is anchored by a comparative study of the two leaders who influenced nation-building through their individual political values and ideological convictions. The key question posed here is what similarities existed in the nation-building roles these figures played and how they may have contributed to the trajectories followed by their respective nations. Nehru and Ben-Gurion were both modernists in terms of their political visions of a secular, socialist-democratic and egalitarian state. Although the two men never met and remained on non-speaking terms because India had reservations about forging ties with Israel, they both represented qualities of leadership in Asia.

Mutant rice and agricultural modernization in Asia

ABSTRACT By using the genealogy of hybrid rice, Mahsuri, developed in Malaysia by Japanese agronomists in the 1960s, this article tells a story of agricultural modernization in Asia that challenges the US-centered narrative of the Green Revolution. Cross-racial hybrid Mahsuri’s parent is Taichung 65 from colonial Taiwan, and its off-spring is irradiated Mahsuri Mutant. By highlighting the deep connection between colonial development and post-World War II technical assistance, the role of intra-Asia networks in crop improvement programs in Asia, and the agency of postcolonial Asian nations, this article critiques the ironies embedded in the mutant rice and in the concept of development.

Book review: Leo T. S. Ching, Anti-Japan: The Politics of Sentiment in Postcolonial East Asia

Leo T. S. Ching, Anti-Japan: The Politics of Sentiment in Postcolonial East Asia (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019), pp. 176, US$23.95, ISBN: 9781478003359 (e-book).

The Crisis of Crisis: Rethinking Epidemics from Hong Kong.

Writing in the late 1980s in the midst of the AIDS crisis in the United States, historian Charles Rosenberg suggested that epidemics furnished "useful sampling devices" for examining "fundamental patterns of social value and institutional practice." This paper reconsiders Rosenberg's seminal essay and the central question it addresses-what is an epidemic?-from the vantage of a historian in Hong Kong working on colonial and postcolonial Asia in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper begins by setting Rosenberg's essay in its historical context and then considers whether explanatory models developed in a Northern American context may be applicable (or not) to other non-Western settings. The paper makes the case for a re-interrogation of the "epidemic" as an epidemiological and social category, and it concludes by suggesting that COVID-19 is challenging underlying assumptions about what a "crisis" is to the extent that the pandemic may be understood as a crisis of crisis itself.

Polyculturalism and Attitudes Toward the Continuing Presence of Former Colonizers in Four Postcolonial Asian Societies.

Polyculturalism is the lay belief that cultures are dynamically interconnected and mutually influencing each other historically and in contemporary times. Belief in polyculturalism is associated with various positive intergroup outcomes in intercultural social contexts, but it has never been studied in relation to intergroup attitudes in postcolonial societies. Two studies with participants from four postcolonial Asian societies (total N = 1,126) explore whether polyculturalism will also be associated with positive attitudes toward the continuing presence of former colonizers. The historical colonial experience may be socially represented positively or negatively in different societies, and in this context, the studies inquire into whether current attitudes toward former colonizers are positively associated with the belief in polyculturalism. In two studies (after controlling for belief in multiculturalism, genetic and social constructivist lay theories of race, and national identity) polyculturalism was positively associated with favorable attitudes toward continuing presence of former colonizers in Hong Kong, Macau, and Jakarta, but not in Johor Bahru, Malaysia and Wonosobo, Indonesia. The positive association with polyculturalism was found only in the three societies with a high degree of intercultural contact, where the core beliefs of polyculturalism may be more meaningful. The results are discussed in terms of how intergroup relations between former colonizers and colonized peoples are forms of between-society intercultural contact that are also influenced by intergroup lay theories.

Disrupting the Nation-ness in Postcolonial East Asia: Discourses of Jong Tae-Se as a Zainichi Korean Sport Celebrity

This study explores how a zainichi (residing in Japan) Korean athlete reveals often-concealed postcolonial and post-Cold War tensions revolving around ethnic essentialism and nationalism in East Asia. The focus of the study is Jong Tae-se, a third generation zainichi Korean football player who has become a star in Japan, North Korea and South Korea. By examining media representations and online responses to Jong in South Korea as well as his autobiographies written in both Korean and Japanese, it is explained how Jong, as a zainichi Korean sport celebrity, both represents the arbitrariness of nation-ness and reproduces unresolved geopolitical and historical issues of postcolonial East Asia. Whereas his mobility, multilingual capability and fluid belongingness may signal changing dynamics of national-ness in East Asia, this analysis also reveals that his media discourses keep him tethered to anti-Japan and anti-communist sentiments. Such vicissitudes of the discourses around him attest that colonial and Cold War memories and historical wounds continue to be conjured in contemporary East Asia. Ultimately, this study discusses both the possibilities and the limits of a zainichi Korean subjectivity as a de-colonial tool for destabilizing national, colonial, and Cold War ideologies.

Heideggerian `Out-of-Joint' Situation and New Horizons in Postcolonial Literature: Interpreting the Zizekian `Extimacy' in <i>The Mimic Men</i> by V.S. Naipaul

Though Naipaul's geo-spatial dislocation from periphery to centre generates an optical distance that helps observe postcolonial reality objectively, he simultaneously attaches to the reality that he initially left behind. This can be termed `ex-timated' ctionalization, where the inner is intimately ex-centred with outer. This sense rises from Naipaul's territorial dislocation that does not indicate a decisive ontological detachment from the postcolonial reality that he is alienated with. His de-territorialization is unable to fully embrace the new metropolitan reality and forget the former completely, as shown mainly in ctional characters i.e. Salim (A Bend in the River) and Ralph Singh (The Mimic Men). This review considers The Mimic Mento explore this postcolonial situation, even though the symptom is visible even in his other novels, where major characters are positioned between tradition and modernity that emerged from post-colonial reality. While accepting the fact that his repetitive literary revisits to postcolonial Asia and Africa could provide the objective reality within the failed project of decolonization, a Zizekian analysis suggests that Naipaul could not eectively elevate himself from his Heidaggerian `out-of-joint' situation and exploit his `homelessness' to discover a better reality. Instead, he is ex-timately conned to an `ex-static' (or ex-centric) postcolonial situation that leaves him in the deadlock of `de-personalized objective narrations' and `situational consciousness' of Third World Literature. On the basis of the said extimated alienation of Naipaul's existential literary endeavor, this review suggests that to understand the postcolonial situation better, Zizek's idea of extimacy is of substantial signicance.

Queering imperial history: The ethics of reconciliation in Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain

Drawing on the postcolonial discourse of reconciliation, this article critically examines The Gift of Rain (2007) by Malaysian Chinese writer Tan Twan Eng. It attends to the reparative work that the novel performs in relation to Japanese imperialism in Asia, particularly the Japanese occupation of British Malaya (1941–1945). It argues that Tan’s text, with its investment in the Buddhist-inflected queer passion between its Anglo-Chinese protagonist (the colonized) and his Japanese aikido master (the colonizer), gestures towards an ethics of reconciliation. Framing the queer romance in the Buddhist idiom of reincarnation, the novel offers a distinct cultural conception of reconciliation as an ongoing process. By queering and querying the specific Asian imperial encounter that is the Japanese Occupation, the novel ultimately registers a desire for restoring cultural connections in the wake of atrocities in postcolonial Asia.

International student accommodation and changing foreign policy alignments in 1950s Australia

Australia’s popularity as a study destination increased markedly from the 1940s, with growing demand for tertiary education in postcolonial Asia. The advent of scholarship initiatives, including the Colombo Plan’s Technical Cooperation Scheme in 1951, further increased interest in Australia as an educational provider for both sponsored and privately funded students. This article explores the print media’s commentary on international student accommodation shortages in the 1950s. While Australian housing availability was impacted by wartime cessation of construction and postwar immigration, print media coverage generally attributed international student accommodation shortages to discrimination within the rental market. Overwhelmingly, this alleged discriminatory treatment was condemned within the print media, with the dual rationale of moral and diplomatic objections prominent in newspaper discourse. This media censure is examined within the context of shifting foreign policy alignments, growing national and international condemnation of the so-called ‘White Australia policy’, and the broader political agenda of Australian Colombo Plan involvement.

Social Forces and Regime Change

This article discusses three recent books that analyze patterns of political conflict and regime change in postcolonial Asia and Africa using a social forces approach to political analysis. The social forces tradition, originally pioneered by Barrington Moore, studies the social origins and political consequences of struggles between social groups whose members hold shared identities and interests. The works under review examine, respectively, the varied regime trajectories of Southeast Asia's states, divergent regime outcomes in India and Pakistan, and the institutional origins of social cleavages and political conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. Although historically the social forces paradigm has focused on conflict between class actors, the author argues that these three works fruitfully extend the social forces approach to encompass struggles between nonclass social groups, including those defined along the lines of ethnicity, religion, nationality, region, and family. This pluralized version of the social forces approach is better suited to studying patterns of regime change in Asia and Africa, where the paradigm has been less frequently applied than it has been to cases in Europe and Latin America.

Youke and Sanke - Toward affective geography of postcolonial Asia

Youke and Sanke - Toward affective geography of postcolonial Asia