Author: Etienne RP

Book reviewer.

The Government of Risk and the Politics of Security in Contemporary Cities

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A review of Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá, Austin Zeiderman, Duke University Press, 2016.

Austin ZeidermanWhen Austin Zeiderman arrived in Bogotá in 2006 to conduct his fieldwork in anthropology, he didn’t know he was in for many surprises. The mismatch between the preconceived notions he had about Colombia’s capital and what he experienced on the ground couldn’t have been greater. People had warned him about the place: Bogotá was perceived as a city fraught with crime and corruption, where danger loomed at every corner. Not so long ago, Bogotá’s homicide rate was one of the highest in the world and assassinations, kidnappings, and bombings were almost routine. Histories of violence often produce enduring cultures of fear that are difficult to dispel: people develop strategies to avoid danger and cope with risk. For individuals as for collectives, the trauma of violence persists long after the traumatic event has faded into the past. People told the young anthropologist that he definitely shouldn’t venture in the slums that occupy the hillsides of Bogotá’s southern periphery. It is therefore with some apprehension that Austin Zeiderman joined la Caja, a municipal agency located in this danger zone, where he was to spend twenty months doing participatory observation. His first surprise was that danger and criminality were much talked about and feared, but he never experienced it firsthand: “not once during my time in these parts of Bogotá was I harassed, mugged, or assaulted.” Indeed, he felt almost more secure in the hillside barrios of Bogotá than in his native place of Philadelphia, where he had learnt to navigate the city with precaution so as to avoid potential threats. There had been a dramatic decline in violent crime in Bogotá, and the city was now safer than it had been for half a century. Instead of criminals, petty thieves, and corrupt officials, he met with law-abiding citizens, dedicated social workers, and peaceful communities.

Entering the danger zone

The second surprise was a conceptual one. Austin Zeiderman had retained from his graduate training in anthropology and urban ecology a heavy theoretical baggage and a commitment to apply critical thinking to his urban terrain. More specifically, his views were shaped by two strands of critical theory: urban political economy, heavily influenced by Marx and his twentieth-century epigones such as Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey, and the more recent approaches of neoliberal governmentality that build on the intuitions of the late Michel Foucault. For the first line of social critique, urban planning is a way to manage the contradictions of late capitalism. Displacement and expulsion of informal tenants are a case of “accumulation by dispossession,” a way by which the capitalist state exerts its monopoly of violence in order to “build the new urban world on the wreckage of the old.” The second paradigm associates “neoliberalism” with the deployment of market-based logics, the valorization of private enterprise, the reform of governmental institutions, the retrenchment of the public sector, and the formation of responsible, self-governing subjects. The author’s plan was therefore to investigate “neoliberal urbanism” at work, and to document the acts of resistance, adaptation, and self-making of the subaltern subjects who are hailed by the constitutive power of the neoliberal state. The fact that the World Bank, the arch-villain of antiglobalization protesters, had extended loans to the city of Bogotá to support the policy of relocation and urban renewal, only reinforced him in his critical orientation.

He was therefore surprised to discover that many individual households were happy to be relocated: indeed, some of them petitioned the municipality to be included in the relocation program. Eviction was not feared and resisted: it was seen as an opportunity to escape from risky environments and relocate to healthier, more secure suburbs. In fact, a hallmark of the resettlement program was its insistence that the decision to relocate was voluntary. Protecting the population from natural and human hazards was not a projection by the rich and the powerful to discipline the lives of the poor: it was based on the recognition of the sacred value of life, and corresponded to a major aspiration of the poorest, who were the first victims of insecurity and risk. The sprawling, self-built settlements of the urban periphery, commonly perceived as posing a threat to political stability and social order, turned out to have the greatest concentration of families living under threat. In other words, risky populations turned out to be the most exposed to risk. Another surprise was to to discover the political orientation of the social workers in charge of the eviction program. They were progressive individuals, who defined themselves half-jokingly as “half-communist” or “communist-and-a-half”, and who were deeply convinced of the positive effects that the relocation program would have on the lives of the poor. Rather than securing the city as a whole by evicting residents and demolishing buildings, their primary objective was to protect the lives of vulnerable populations living in the urban periphery. These social workers were in line with the political priorities of the municipality, which was run by left-of-center mayors who had attracted much appraisal for their reforms. Neoliberalism, it seems, could be used for progressive purposes.

The legacy of Antanas Mockus and Enrique Peñalosa

The young researcher was in a quandary. Should he extoll the virtues of the municipal government that had led over Bogotá’s urban renaissance, or even praise the leadership of the right-wing president Álvaro Uribe who launched successful campaigns against the FARC, Colombia’s main guerrilla movement? The success story of Bogotá had already been told: according to the international media and local pundits, it was the story of two charismatic mayors who, with unorthodox methods, in less than ten years turned one of the world’s most dangerous, violent, and corrupt capitals into a peaceful model city populated by caring citizens. In this book, Austin Zeiderman remains uncommitted towards the legacy of Antanas Mockus and Enrique Peñalosa, as well as their two left-leaning successors at Bogotá’s city hall. He notes that their choice of options remained limited and constrained by the national security landscape: any attempt at fundamentally challenging the status quo would have been countered by paramilitary forces known for persecuting activists or leaders with even vaguely radical agendas. His research site, an urban resettlement agency, was used by progressive mayors in order to distribute patronage and build a political constituency among the urban poor. As for Uribe’s two terms at the presidency, Austin Zeiderman notes that they were characterized by continued internal displacement, violence in rural regions, human rights violations, increased poverty and inequality, and collusion with drug traffickers. The author’s commitment to a progressive political agenda and to critical theory remained untainted: he was not ready for a conversion to neoliberalism. Besides, his academic focus was on social theory and anthropological fieldwork, not political science or media analysis.

This is when, combining these different thoughts and experiences, the young author had his epiphany: he would study “the government of risk and the politics of security in contemporary cities.” The topic was empirically relevant and theoretically adequate. The relocation program in which he worked was dedicated to protecting the lives of the poor and vulnerable populations from environmental hazards, such as floods, landslides, and earthquakes. Risk management had been accepted across the political spectrum as a legitimate way to govern the city and to allocate resources to people in need of support. “Life at risk” had become a category of entitlement through which the urban poor could claim assistance, protection, and care. By interviewing social workers and their benefactors, and by analyzing the techniques used to map risk and relocate people, he could make sense of these new forms of governmentality without falling into hagiography or empty critique. Theoretically, the concept of risk opened a rich space of associated notions and constructions that have been developed to characterize our modern condition. Of particular relevance to him was the notion of biopolitics developed by Michel Foucault and his epigones and defined as the way the state extends its power over bodies and populations by exerting its right to make live and to let die. Foucault’s schema also associates risk with the rise of the modern society by locating it at the center of the new art of government that emerges in the late eighteenth century. Austin Zeiderman proposes the concept of endangerment, and of the endangered city, to describe a world in which the unlimited improvement of urban life, even its sustained reproduction, are no longer taken for granted. The endangered city is not a city where life faces immediate danger: it is a place where citizens live under the shadow of insecurity and risk, even if these threats never actually materialize.

The agony of Omayra Sánchez

If there was a specific trauma that led government authorities and populations to turn their attention to the management of risk, it was to be found in the catastrophic events that took place in 1985. On November 13, a volcanic eruption set off massive mudslides and buried the town of Armero, killing over twenty-five thousand people. A young girl, Omayra Sánchez, became the symbol of this suffering for millions of TV viewers, as rescuers failed to free her from the mud and debris that had trapped her body. Just one week before, members of the M-19 guerrilla group had attacked the Palace of Justice in central Bogotá and had taken the judges and the public as hostages. The siege of the building by the army and the ensuing battle left more than one hundred people dead, including the Chief Justice and dozens of hostages. For the press, these two tragedies were “apocalypse foretold”: they could easily have been prevented, if only the state had lived up to its responsibility to protect the life of its citizens. Critics claimed that in both cases the government had advance warning of the impending tragedy and had failed to prevent known threat from materializing. As a consequence, governmental problems and their proposed solutions began to be increasingly understood within a security framework oriented toward the protection of life from a range of future threats. Prediction, prevention, and preparedness were the solution proposed, and the imperative to protect life by managing risks became the ultimate end of government. Of course, the power of the state to “make live and to let die” (to use Michel Foucault’s expression) is applied unevenly: in the Colombian context of 1985, “the figure of Omayra creates a boundary that differentiates those whose lives matter from those whose lives do not—the outlaws, insurgents, subversives, or terrorists who are dealt with as enemies of the state.” Austin Zeiderman also notes that the responsibility to protect lives imposed itself at the expense of other rationalities and state goals, such as development, democracy, and welfare.

Nothing characterizes more this shift in urban governmentality than the evolving missions of the Caja de la Vivienda Popular, the branch of Bogotá’s municipal government in which Austin Zeiderman did his fieldwork. The Caja was originally created in the 1940s to provide public housing for the poor and for public employees. Its role shifted from hygiene and poverty alleviation to slum eradication and urban renewal in the 1980s and then, starting 1996, to the resettlement of populations living in zones of high risk. Populations deemed vulnerable to environmental hazards, such as landslides and floods, were entitled to state subsidies and could benefit from a relocation program that allowed them to resettle in more secure environments. Rather than organizing housing policy in terms of social class, political citizenship, or economic necessity, vulnerability became the primary criterion that determined one’s eligibility to receive state benefits. In other words, “life at risk” came to displace “worker,” “citizen,” and “poor” as a new political category of political recognition and entitlement. The Colombian constitution’s article proclaiming the “right to life” (derecho a la vida) came to supersede the other article recognizing that all Colombians have the right to “decent housing” (derecho a una vivienda digna). Various disciplines, ranging from geology, hydrology and meteorology to sociology and new public management, were mobilized to establish risk maps and contingency plans delimitating zones of high risk (zonas de alto riesgo) whose inhabitants could claim eligibility to the relocation program. Similar approaches of urban mapping and risk calculation were applied to prevent violent crime and terrorism. In addition, sensibilización programs were conducted to educate the poor to behave in relation to future threats and to instill a collective ethos of risk management.

“Lagos is not catching up with us. Rather, we may be catching up with Lagos.”

In the last decade, Bogotá has become recognized internationally as a “model city” for its achievements in good urban governance across realms as diverse as education, security, transportation, civic order, and public space.  In the context of climate change and increased environmental hazards, disaster risk management has been especially singled out and given as an example for other cities to emulate. For Austin Zeiderman, the endangered city of Bogotá provides another kind of model: one that operates through rationalities of security and techniques of risk mitigation. As he notes, “whereas modernism heralded futures of progress, efficiency, and stability, there is a global trend toward envisioning urban futures as futures of potential crisis, catastrophe, and collapse.” Cities of the global South should no longer be expected to follow the development pathways of the “modern cities” of Europe and North America: indeed, cities from the North are now confronted with problems of insecurity, environmental threats, and terrorist violence that seem to come straight from the South. As one modern critic notes, “Lagos is not catching up with us. Rather, we may be catching up with Lagos.” This dystopian vision of the global urban future stimulates technologies of control and exclusion. A new urban security paradigm demands that all cities deploy protective and precautionary strategies against a range of threats in order to ensure their own reproduction. For Austin Zeiderman, models of urbanity that focus exclusively on risk and security draw resources away from concerns such as poverty, equality, education, housing, healthcare, or social justice. The politics of rights—rights to decent housing, rights to the city, human rights—becomes subordinated to a politics of life. Austin Zeiderman shows that this politics of life—in its devotion to the vulnerable, the dispossessed, and the victim—creates new forms of vulnerabilities, dispossession, and exclusion. By determining how certain forms of life are to survive, endure, or flourish, while others are abandoned, extinguished, or left to go extinct, biopolitics is inseparable from a politics of death, a thanatopolitics.

The Salt and Sugar of the Earth

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A review of The Limits of Okinawa: Japanese Capitalism, Living Labor, and Theorizations of Community, Wendy Matsumura, Duke University Press, 2015.

Wendy MatsumuraOkinawa has been disposed three times in modern history. The first disposition occurred in 1609, when the feudal lord of the Satsuma domain invaded what was then the Ryūkyū kingdom and transformed it into a vassal state. The second annexation took place in 1879, when Ryūkyū was formally incorporated into Japan as Okinawa Prefecture. The third shift in sovereignty happened in 1972 when the US reverted to Japan the islands they had occupied since 1945. On these three occasions, disposition was a form of dispossession: the people were not consulted, and the islands were treated as a pawn in a larger geopolitical game. Okinawa mattered because of its position halfway between Japan and China, intersecting the trade routes that went down to South-East Asia. Central to the former kingdom’s maritime activities was the continuation of the tributary relationship with Ming Dynasty China, which allowed the Ryūkyū islands to flourish and prosper. In terms of culture as well, the Ryūkyū islands were a mix between Chinese, Japanese, and insular influences. Wendy Matsumura’s book focuses on the period between 1879 and the early 1930s and seeks to chart the limits of Okinawa as an imagined community. Okinawa was first conceived as a feudal domain resisting Japan’s imperialism; then as an economic community facing the inroads of imported capitalism; and lastly as a diasporic and deterritorialized ensemble faced with discrimination and marginalization. Each time, the articulations of community by Okinawa’s rulers and intellectual were met with local resistance and led to alternative modes of mobilization.

The limits of Okinawa as an imagined community

The first modern theorization of Okinawa as a community distinct from Japan was articulated by the former rulers of the Ryūkyū kingdom who protested the incorporation of the southern archipelago into Japan. Before the Meiji Restoration, Ryūkyū’s independence was formally maintained while the kingdom was under the domination of the Satsuma domain and kept tributary relations with China. Maintaining Ryūkyū’s appearance of independence was vital to Satsuma rulers because it allowed them to indirectly maintain commercially profitable relations with China while the rest of Tokugawa Japan was closed to foreign trade (only the Dutch were allowed to bring in foreign goods through the small island of Dejima in Nagasaki). Wendy Matsumura underscores that the annexation of the Ryūkyū kingdom was a brutal and arbitrary decision. The king was summoned to Tokyo and the delegation that he sent on his behalf in 1872 was abruptly told that the Ryūkyū kingdom was abolished and replaced by a domain under Japan’s rule. Faced with Ryūkyū’s refusal to severe its tributary relationship with China, Meiji rulers transformed the domain into a Japanese prefecture in 1879. While insisting that the people of Okinawa were Japanese subjects, the policy that Tokyo instituted to facilitate the transition from kingdom to prefecture—called the Preservation of Old Customs Policy—was formulated on the assumption of cultural difference. Local elites and politicians developed the notion of a distinct Okinawa community in order to resist the discriminatory conditions imposed on the region. Part of the nobility fought against the annexation and took refuge in China, but the Qing empire was crashed during the first Sino-Japanese war of 1895 that allowed Japan to lay claim over Taiwan. The rest of Okinawa’s elite was bought into submission by a policy that maintained their feudal rights over the peasantry.

This first vision of a community maintaining its “Old Customs” under the guidance of its feudal rulers met with fierce resistance. Under the Preservation Policy, even as the former kingdom became a prefecture, the people of Okinawa were expected to continue to fulfill their responsibilities to their traditional overlords—whom the Meiji government transformed into its functionaries charged with enacting state policy in the villages. In particular, the continuation of the former kingdom’s methods of taxation and collection of revenue allowed the Japanese state to lay hand on the lucrative sugar industry and gain monopolistic profit over the production and sale of brown sugar. Under the pretext of maintaining a pre-capitalist mode of production and traditional customs, the state transformed Okinawa into a domestic site of sugar extraction. But the incorporation of Okinawa into Japan disrupted not only the legitimacy of old rulers but also the entire moral economy that governed peasant-elite relations. These conditions provided small producers with a new method and language to put an end to their generations of suffering. In what came to be known as the Miyako Island Peasantry Movement, small peasants from the southernmost part of the archipelago collectively sent a delegation to the National Diet in Tokyo in order to petition against the rising taxes, exorbitant privileges of the nobility, and impoverishment brought by the new economic conditions. They claimed to be modern subjects of the Japanese empire, not second-class citizens. Their appeal to fairness, progress, and the elimination of the nobility’s feudal rights was attractive to the mainland newspapers, which widely covered the petition movement and helped it gain legitimacy. But they also contributed to the image of Okinawa as a backward, impoverished place that required paternalistic intervention and support.

Mōasobi and yagamaya, noro and yuta

One image that struck the public was the picture of local women with traditional tattoos on the back of their hands and forearms. In the eyes of Okinawa’s leaders and reformers, women became the metaphor for looseness, regression, and barbarism. The inroads of prostitution, the transformation of gender roles, and the prevalence of lewd behavior in rural communities created a kind of moral panic among young intellectuals, many of whom had received their education in Tokyo and who believed it was their duty to mold the people of Okinawa into proper Japanese subjects. The policing of pleasure was one of the main priorities of the Movement to Reform Old Customs. They tried to curb the practice of mōasobi (young men and women meeting at night in the empty fields to sing and dance together) and yagamaya (young men singing songs while the women engaged in handicraft activities indoors). In addition to regulating village festivals and policing play, they launched violent campaigns to diminish the authority of women who had once served important political, spiritual and economic roles in the kingdom. Two key groups that were targets of such campaigns were Okinawa’s female priestesses and fortune-tellers, called noro and yuta. They were accused of spreading false beliefs, running prostitution rings, and abusing people into offering expensive gifts for their services and rites. Reformers also attempted to discipline female cloth weavers and standardize their products in order to transform Okinawa’s craft textiles into an export industry. But although their handwoven cloths became a prized commodity on the national market, traditional weavers refused to cooperate with the trade association and didn’t submit themselves to wage labor discipline. As the author notes, “it must have been quite an outrage for Okinawa’s leaders, recipients of the highest level of education available in the nation, to witness these hordes of barefoot, sloppily dressed, tattooed women who could not even speak proper Japanese stand up to the political and commercial leaders of the prefecture and declare that they would not pay the outrageous inspection fees, membership dues, or fines leveled without their consent.”

If textiles and other crafts such as Panama hats found a market in the urban centers of Japan, the key industry for Okinawa’s economy was cane sugar. Peasants had long produced brown sugar using traditional techniques in small sugar huts called satō goya that were communally operated by groups of neighboring families called satō gumi. As mainland consumers’ demand for sugar increased and the monetarized economy developed, small peasants increased the proportion of cane sugar they produced vis-à-vis staples like sweet potatoes or vegetables. They became increasingly dependent on a system of sugar advances called satō maedai, according to which sugar brokers (nakagainin) from both Kagoshima and Okinawa issued loans prior to harvest at a high interest rate and collected on them during the manufacturing period. After the land reorganization of 1903, the Japanese state converted large surfaces of land that had been held communally into state-owned property, and set out large capitalist societies to exploit cane plantations and manufacture refined sugar or bunmitsutō. But the peasantry resisted the enclosure of their lands, refused the harsh conditions of wage labor in the plantations, and refrained from selling their cane harvest to the large-scale sugar factories, preferring to manufacture brown sugar using their traditional techniques instead. The fact that Okinawa peasants preferred to migrate than to work as wage laborers in the cane plantations or sugar factories gives evidence of the harsh conditions that prevailed in these sites of capitalist exploitation. Meanwhile, Japanese sugar manufacturers found more favorable conditions in Taiwan after the island was turned into a colony in 1895, and their investment in the development of Okinawa was limited.

Brown sugar vs. white sugar

The years immediately after World War I brought an unprecedented level of prosperity to the prefecture because of the sugar price boom that was brought by the destruction of Europe’s beet sugar industry. But the boom was followed by a precipitous fall in prices, the bank system collapsed after the Tokyo stock market crash of March 1920, and farmers who had converted to cash crops were ruined. Mainland journalists coined the phrase Sago Palm hell (sotetsu jigoku) to describe the plight of destitute people roaming the countryside who were driven to eat the deadly poisonous sago palm fruit out of desperation. The Japanese state came to the rescue and extended subsidies to small cane producers who agreed to sell their crop to the sugar factories. But news stories about Okinawa merely confirmed the prevalent view of an backward, distinct people who were always in need of rescue. Some journalists blamed Okinawans for their plight: the climate had made the people lazy. They passed their days making sweet potatoes and goya (a bitter gourd vegetable) and their nights drinking awamori (the local rice spirit) and singing yunta folk songs while listening to soft melodies played on the shamisen. This easy life lulled Okinawans into complacency and left them ill-equipped to handle their affairs on their own. This vision of an exotic, racially distinct people was reinforced by the writings of social scientists such as Yanagita Kunio, whose “discovery” of Okinawa in 1921 was instrumental to the development of native ethnology in Japan. As the Japanese empire expanded to Taiwan and then to the Korean Peninsula, some Tokyo intellectuals vented the idea of downgrading Okinawa from a prefecture into a colony.

It was in this context that Okinawa’s intellectuals elaborated new understandings of national community that affirmed the original unity of Okinawans and Japanese. Iha Fuyū, who came to be known as the father of Okinawan studies, developed the theory of shared origins (nichiryū dōsoron), arguing that the Ryūkyū and Yamato peoples were originally a single race that were separated from each other circa 3000 BC. Iha’s scientific demonstration of the natural community of Okinawans and mainland Japanese gave local intellectuals a sense that it was their natural right to be treated equally. Local political leaders mobilized this new definition of community to argue that Okinawans were fully capable of governing themselves politically and economically. instead of a pure separation of cultivators and producers that worked to the advantage only of mainland industrialists, they proposed combining the existing sugar huts and satō gumi into larger-scale, medium-size factories that could produce more sugar more efficiently. But their vision of Okinawa as a classless, timeless organic community of Okinawans with shared interests was not widely shared. Instead, a younger generation of Okinawan activists and intellectuals who came of age after the recession that followed World War I, and who had often experienced discrimination and prejudice in Japan’s main centers of power and learning, began to organize local communities along class lines. Heavily influenced by Marxism and the cooperative movement, they fanned discontent and mobilized around the agrarian struggles that erupted in the northern region of Okinawa’s main island in the early 1930s. The Ōgimi Village Reform Movement, fueled by resistance against local administrators, led to the ephemeral creation of self-managed communes of producers and consumers that brought anticapitalist struggle to the village.

Marxist historiography all over again

Wendy Matsumura’s study is couched in heavily Marxist terms. The three theorizations of Okinawa that she unpacks, the feudal vision of a sovereign domain, the bourgeois capitalist conception of an organic community, and the alternative model brought by class struggle, correspond to the three stages of history as identified by Marx—feudalism, capitalism, socialism. She borrows from Uno Kōzō the idea that these stages of development can actually overlap, and that the maintenance of noncapitalist relations of production often serves the interests of capitalism. Uno, a Japanese Marxist, used this argument in the interwar and immediate postwar period to argue against the thesis that Japan, being incompletely capitalist, was not ready for revolution. Japan, in this sense, was no exception: as Marx himself noted, it requires only “a mass of human material always ready for exploitation by capital in the interests of capital’s own changing valorization requirements.” Wendy Matsumura complements this Hegelian version of Marxism with the insights of Italy’s autonomia school of Marxism, in particular their attention to the construction of subjectivities and to the positivity of localized struggles. Her description of the various rural movements and labor incidents that punctuated Okinawa’s incorporation into Japan’s economic sphere is a useful reminder of the radical streak that runs deep in the islands’ modern history. Okinawa resists single categorizations, and its inhabitants are prone to mobilize against the various schemes that seek to dispose of their fate without consulting them. But I am not sure that familiarity with Marxist historiography, painfully acquired in the kenkyūkai or study groups of Waseda and Hōsei University, has left the author best equipped to contribute to a modern understanding of Okinawa’s history

A Materialist Reading of New Materialisms

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A review of New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, Duke University Press, 2010.

New MaterialismsIn everyday language, a materialist is defined as a person who considers material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values. According to Madonna’s famous song, “we are living in a material world.” Says the Material Girl: “Some boys kiss me, some boys hug me / I think they’re okay / If they don’t give me proper credit, I just walk away /…/ ‘Cause the boy with the cold hard cash is always Mister Right.” Madonna may not have had in mind the new materialisms referred to in the book edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. Here materialism refers to the philosophical doctrine that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications, as opposed to spiritualism that posits a dualism between subject and matter. But the material girl’s lyrics may provide a good entry point into this volume. After all, Madonna’s kissing and hugging addresses a strong message to the feminists who have been accused of routinely ignoring the matter of corporeal life. In exposing her body, Madonna draws our attention to what really matters (sex), while referring to non-bodily retributions (money) that also matter a great deal. So my materialist questions to the book will be: Do we still live in a material world according to these new versions of materialism? Do the authors give proper credit, and to whom? What does the reader get from his or her cold hard cash? And are the contributors always Mr (or Mrs) Right?

In bed with Madonna, reading philosophy

For the editors, a return to materialism, albeit in newer forms, is a turn away from approaches dominated by post-structuralist theories of language and discourse. The humanities and social sciences went through a long period sometimes referred to as the “cultural turn”, which privileged language, discourse, culture, and values. New disciplines developed, such as cultural studies, gender studies, new literary criticism, and various forms of linguistic analysis, taking as their core task the analysis of texts and the deconstruction of meanings. The cultural turn was also a political phenomenon: it gave rise to identity politics and culture wars, which took university campuses as their battleground and became estranged from broader social trends and political movements. For the editors of this volume, approaches associated with the so-called cultural turn are no longer adequate to understanding contemporary society. In particular, the radicalism associated with the cultural studies curriculum is now perceived as more or less exhausted. As they state in the introductory chapter, “it is political naïveté to believe that significant social change can be engendered solely by reconstructing subjectivities, discourse, ethics, and identities.” To find new forms of social critique, one needs to turn to advances in the life sciences, while revisiting certain tenets of political philosophy that still hold potential.

To counter the cultural turn’s law of diminishing returns, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost propose a “material turn” that builds on bodies, affects, ecologies, living organisms, and life itself. The focus here is less on matter per se than on processes of materialization: “for materiality is always something more than ‘mere’ matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationally, or difference that renders matters active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable.” Their new materialism exposes the fragility of things, the vibrancy of matter, the agency of nonhuman actors, the affective claims of nonhuman animals, the social life of artifacts, the materiality of experience, and the generative power of life. The editors believe “it is now timely to reopen the issue of matter and once again to give material factors their due in shaping society and circumscribing human prospects.” Their founding gesture aims at establishing identity through differentiation from past approaches and by constituting a genealogy of ancestors who can sustain their materialist credentials on firm philosophical ground. Most importantly, they claim that the return to materialism can lead to more active forms of engagement with our contemporary predicament, attuned to ongoing changes in global economic structures and emerging scientific knowledge. Their approach takes the tone of a manifesto: “to succeed, a reprisal of materialism must be truly radical.”

A turn back to French postwar philosophy

Revisiting materialism takes the form of a random walk through Western philosophy. Three kinds of philosophers are brought to bear: classical philosophers, with a chapter on Hobbes and several references to Spinoza and to Leibniz; the “philosophy of suspicion” formed by the holy trinity of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, to which one could add Bergson and the vitalist school; and postwar French philosophers—the first cohort represented by Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Lefebvre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the post-Mai 1968 generation by Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Ranciere, and Louis Althusser, who themselves revisited the previous traditions. Indeed, the book seems to hark back to the French intellectual scene of the seventies, when philosophers had to steer a course between the two major intellectual currents of structuralism and phenomenology while all the while being sensitive to the legacy of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud. The authors of New Materialisms replay a gesture already performed by Judith Butler, who wrote her PhD thesis on the reception of Hegel in twentieth century France and the appropriation of German philosophy by Kojève, Hyppolite, Sartre, Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault. Why this French primal scene is seen as so productive is left to the imagination of the reader. One suspects it has more to do with intellectual fads and academic conformism than by the urge to develop concepts and advance ideas attuned to our times and modern understanding of the world.

Marxism in postwar France was the “unsurpassable horizon of our time,” and it is only natural that the authors of New Materialisms turn to Marx as the godfather of materialism. For Marxists, the material conditions of a society’s way of producing and reproducing the means of human existence fundamentally determine its organization and development. Marx claimed to have turned Hegel on his head by substituting historical materialism to the dialectical idealism of the phenomenology of spirit. In Hegel, the abstract/ideal is realized in the concrete, whereas to Marx the concrete/material is realized, even when obscured, in the abstract domain of conscious thought. Vintage Marx is represented in this volume by Jason Edwards’ essay on “The Materialism of Historical Materialism”. Against economicist readings of Marx that focus solely on the sphere of production, he argues that Marx’s social philosophy took into account “the totality of the material practices that are required to reproduce the relations of production over time.” Here Marx is read through the lenses of Henri Lefebvre, who recognized the diversity of the forms of practices that are necessary for sustaining economic and political life. Nonproductive practices, such as theoretical work but also the everyday life of consumption and leisure, play a fundamental role in the reproduction of capitalism. For Edwards, Lefebvre’s work on the critique of everyday life and the production of social space should be extended beyond the strictures of the nation-state: the modern reproduction of capitalism has to take into account global processes under conditions of neoliberalism.

Orientation matters

The reference to Marx is also present in Simone de Beauvoir’s work, which develops a phenomenology of lived experience through which, as she famously put it, “one is not born but becomes a woman.” Unlike structuralism, in which subjectivity and the inner self arise as the result of outside forces, going as it were “from the outside in”, phenomenology tends to proceed “from the inside out”, starting from our experience of the world and going back to the subject as to a condition of possibility distinct from that experience. The question of orientation—outside in, inside out—is also addressed in Sara Ahmed’s chapter, taking “the table” as her primary object for thinking about how orientations matter. Philosophers usually sit at a table when they write, and often take this piece of furniture as the starting point from which the world unfolds. But Husserl’s or Heidegger’s writing table is part of a domestic space that excludes as much as it summons. Women writers have a different orientation towards tables, which may provide the support for writing, but also for cooking, eating, attending children, and doing domestic work. As Virginia Woolf claims in A Room of One’s Own, for women to claim a space to write is a political act. The table is not simply what she faces but is the site upon which she makes her feminist point. The politics of the table also involves racial and class-based divisions of labor, as middle-class women could access the writing table by relying on the domestic labor of black and working-class women.

In his 1978 introduction to the English translation of his mentor Georges Canguilhem’s On the Normal and the Pathological, Michel Foucault proposed a famous line of distinction between two strands of philosophy in postwar France. As he wrote, “it is the line that separates a philosophy of experience, of sense and of subject and a philosophy of knowledge, of rationality and of concept. One the one hand, one network is that of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty; and then another is that of Cavailles, Bachelard and Canguilhem.” Similarly, we see two brands of materialism developed in this volume: one one side, a philosophy of life; on th other, a philosophy of the concept. In Bergson, modern readers find what might be called a philosophy of vital interiority, a thesis on the identity of being and becoming; a philosophy of life and change. This orientation would persist throughout the twentieth century, up to and including Deleuze, who once remarked that “everything I write is vitalist, at least I hope it is.” On the other side, we find a philosophy of the mathematically-based concept: the possibility of a philosophical formalism of thought and of the symbolic, which likewise continues throughout the century, most specifically in Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Lacan, and Badiou. The choice here is between conceiving of thought as fundamentally arising from within the depths of animated matter (vitalism), or of conceiving of thought as a cut that interrupts or breaks with vital flux in favor of the strict assemblage of concepts (formalism). This debate between life and concept echoes throughout this book, with some contributions predicated upon the inertia of matter and others on the generativity of flesh.

Finding love and pleasure in the material world

Reading New Materialisms can be a frustrating experience. The chapters are designed as interventions in a debate that has stakes extending way beyond the covers of this volume. The opposition between “old” and “new” feminism, the epistemological challenge of the life sciences, the posthumanist conception of matter as lively or exhibiting agency: these broader themes are only alluded to in oblique fashion. It is to be noted that many contributors have authored books in which they develop their ideas in a fuller form that certainly needs to be addressed. I may come back on this blog to the works of Sara Ahmed, Jane Bennett, William Connolly, Rey Chow, and Elizabeth Grosz (all of which are published by Duke University Press), who certainly deserve better treatment than what one can infer from the dozen pages in which they had to constrain their entry. In particular, the empirical aspect of their research is reduced to a minimum: there is no reference to fieldwork or to systematically collected observations of social realities. The authors limit themselves to the work of theory. Although they comment the texts of (mostly French) philosophers, none of them belong to a philosophy department, and they all come from American or British academic institutions. They all work in political science departments, women and gender studies or cultural studies faculties, or in programs focusing on the humanities. They dabble in theory and practice philosophy without proper qualifications, while pointing to practical implications that are forever deferred.

Despite their intentions, new materialisms remain deeply rooted in cultural theory. They inherit from cultural critics the same political militancy and strident advocacy that sustain their claim to be “truly radical”. In a poorly argumented shortcut, Jane Bennett draws a parallelism between vitalist philosophy exemplified by Hans Driesch (a contemporary of Henri Bergson) and the “culture of life” that opposes abortion, artificial life support, and embryonic stem cell research, but that supports preemptive war, state-sponsored torture, and civilizational imperialism. William Connolly moves from Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Perception to a denunciation of ubiquitous surveillance, cynical realism, and self-depoliticization that characterizes the national security state after 9/11. Pheng Cheah confesses that “it is difficult to elaborate on the political implications of Deleuze’s understanding of materiality as the power of inorganic life,” but nonetheless endorses a creative appropriation of Hardt and Negri’s concept of the multitude as a new agent of social change. Jason Edwards offers a return to Marx’s historical materialism as a solution “to the major problems of climate change, global inequality, and warfare that face the world today.” There are, however, different political conclusions to infer from a return to materialism. We can use the increased salience of materialist philosophies to develop a healthy connection to things material. Like it or not, we are living in a material world, and liking ‘stuff’ is OK, healthy even—we can learn to love and find pleasure in the material world. This is the lesson that seems to me implied in the lyrics and rhythm of Madonna’s songs.

Appetite for Food and Sex is Nature

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A review of Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China, Judith Farquhar, Duke University Press, 2002.

Farquhar“Appetite for food and sex is nature.” Or so says the sage Mencius, as translated by D.C. Lau. But Judith Farquhar begs to differ. For her, food and sex, and our appetites for them, are historical matters through and through. As proof, she points the fact that, in contemporary China, attitudes towards carnal and dietary consumption have changed dramatically in the course of less than two decades. China has transited from a socialist to a market economy and, in the process, a new body has emerged, with new attitudes towards food and sex, with new appetites and desires. The new Chinese body differs substantially from its previous socialist version. The socialist body was frugal, martial, and asexual. The new body is gluttonous, relaxed, and sensual. If what constitutes our most intimate dimension can change in such a short span of time, then it is proof that food and sex do not stand on the side of nature, but belong squarely to the camp of history and human society. Appetite for food and sex is not nature: it comes from our second nature as social and historical beings.

Mouth is from the right, work is from the left

Things in China under Mao used to be so simple. Land owners and capitalist exploiters were the gluttonous class. They fed themselves at the expense of the masses, and ate their feast on the back of poor people. The Chinese character for ‘right’ has the element ‘mouth’ in it, and ‘left’ comes up with the element ‘work’. For Maoists, the explanation was simple: the capitalists, on the right of the political spectrum, were big mouths that endlessly needed to be filled, while the workers from the Left were defined by their work. Revolution was to reverse this unequal repartition by feeding the masses and forcing the idle landowners to work. Mao himself frequently used food metaphors in his political speeches and writings. He famously remarked that “revolution is not a dinner party,” and also argued that “if you want to know the taste of a pear, you must bite into it.” He described “political synthesis” as akin to eating crabs: “eating one’s enemy” involves absorbing the flesh and expelling the waste. Class struggle existed “at the tips of people’s chopsticks”: every pang of hunger, every bite of food, every sip of drink had a class character and an almost martial significance. Providing the “iron rice bowl” was one of the main slogans for communism: the Chinese Communist Party was supposed to provide job opportunities for everyone. Propaganda rejoiced in the newly gained abundance: “in the old society we didn’t see meat from year to year, but now we can have dumplings whenever we want.”

The public discourse on food shifted dramatically in the reform period, but it did not disappear. Economic reforms and the introduction of private forms of property started with agriculture: the objective was, again, to feed the masses and provide a steady diet to everyone. Much of the rationale for “market socialism” had to do with food: private control of the land and entrepreneurship in distribution would “liberate the enthusiasm of the people for labor” and thus be more efficient in meeting the nation’s dietary needs. But people had higher hopes than merely to fill their stomach: their dreams and desires made them pursue not only satiation but pleasure, not only three meals a day but long days of strength, health, and enjoyment. For many, the market economy offered glowing visions of feast and abundance. The return of the banquet, with its elaborate order of dishes and drinks, came to symbolize this newly acquired material prosperity and became a central technique for building and maintaining social relationships under the new entrepreneurial order. For some, the excesses banquets indulged reflected the new social evils in post-Maoist China: the excessive indulgences of the nouveaux riches, the arrogance and corruption of public officials, the disregard for the environment that makes guests cherish treats taken from endangered species, etc. Gluttony led to obesity, to the point that China now has the largest overweight population in the world. Meanwhile, the one-child policy was promoted with the bizarre slogan: “Have fewer children, raise more pigs.”

Have fewer children, raise more pigs

Political change had direct consequence at the dinner table. People could now pick and choose among a variety of domestic and foreign dishes, and they understood their newly-gained pleasures in contrast to their memories of a simpler, poorer, or hungrier past. Historians rediscovered the Great Famine that took place at the end of the 1950s, and tales of hunger and oppression resurfaced in people’s conversation and literary works. Writers evoked the image of bands of children roaming the countryside, eating the bark from trees and the roots of the grass. As novelist Gu Hua writes, “After eating fernroot sweetcakes, your stools would be as hard as iron, jam up in the rectum and make it bleed; you’d have to poke with a little stick or dig it out with a finger—life really sucked!” But writer Mo Yan also remembers his childhood days during the great famine with nostalgia: “When you’re hungry, every pleasure has to do with food. In those days, children were demons for foraging, we were like the legendary Shen Nong [founder of herbal medicine], we tasted a hundred grasses ad a hundred bugs, making our own contribution to broadening the diet of the human race.” There is a subtle irony in finding the same grasses and insects, then eaten out of necessity, now finding their way back into new Chinese cuisine as elaborate dishes and rare treats. The Chinese banquet, with all its abundance and extravaganza, has at its backstory the memory of privation, hardship, and empty larders.

Chinese culture charges food with collective values far beyond the nutritional. The techniques of Chinese medicine provide a language of embodiment that brings together body and mind, matter and energy, solids and fluids. Chinese medicine takes account of states of repletion (shi) and depletion (xu) and operates an “economic” rectification in the form of therapies for the imbalances afflicting individual sufferers. Chinese medicine is particularly good at identifying areas of deficiency, which it figures as functional debility or depletion. Diagnosis traces depletions to their systematic roots, and therapy intervenes to nourish these roots and gradually eliminate the state of depletion. States of repletion, in contrast, tend to be static and localized, leading to the stagnation and corruption of crucial substances that should, by their nature, circulate. Excess is more often found outside bodies than in them. Excessive heat, wind, or humidity, especially at unseasonable times, can easily act as a pathogen for people who are already suffering some kind of debility. Too much rich food and drink, overwork, and sexual overindulgence should be avoided in order to lead a healthy life. The Chinese medical language of depletion and repletion applies just as well to economic and social states of excess and deficiency. The coexistence of uneven productivity and widespread shortages with pockets of wealth and privilege is understood by policymakers as a problem of deficiency and excess affecting the national body. The resolution of these tensions is not necessarily equalitarian, nor is it inherently progressive. But economic policies are in harmony with the categories of Chinese medicine, which provides powerful tropes and allegories.

When everything becomes sexual, erotism disappears

China after Mao has undergone a sexual revolution. The story is familiar by now: gender-neutral Maoist clothing and boyish haircuts for girls gave way to cosmopolitan fashion and cosmetics; sex became a topic for online discussions and medical counseling; prostitution and sleaze reappeared in the red-light districts of big cities; and homosexuality was dropped from the list of crimes and mental illnesses. As with the development of banquets and gourmet restaurants, the indulgence of sexual appetites is a highly visible, even flamboyant, aspect of a growing consumer culture. For Judith Farquhar, the shift toward the personal and the private is not conducive to a form of depoliticization: food and sex remain political in China, and the political field is being reconfigured to include the domestic and the sexual as new domains of political action. Except, perhaps, for the youngest consumers, relatively new forms of self-indulgence have a political and transgressive edge: enjoyment of capitalist luxuries is a personal revenge taken on the Maoist past and its regimen of asceticism and chastity. But as with revenge, it has a bitter taste: when sex is found everywhere, it tends to lose its alluring sweetness and emotive appeal. The focus on sexual intercourse leading to orgasm as the only legitimate sexual act leaves out many other forms of intense erotic experiences, such as touching hands, sharing gifts, writing love letters, and engaging in verbal badinage and flirtation. Hence the success of romantic love stories and family dramas that are so prevalent in popular novel and television series.

Changes in intimacies and consumption patterns often resulted from changes in material conditions. Maoist China imposed severe constraints on the intimacy of couples. A single living-eating-sleeping room often accommodated a whole family, including children and an elderly parent; cooking and washing facilities were shared by groups of apartments; and walls and doors were paper thin. Many married couples lived apart for years while struggling for permission for one or the other to shift to their spouse’s work unit. Romance during university years was discouraged, as student couples could be sent thousands of miles apart after graduation. These political constraints on privacy and intimacy did not disappear in post-Maoist China. The hukou system of registration is still in place, and so is the one-child policy that gives the state and party official direct control over the intimate lives of couples. Many married couples still live apart in remote work units, and those who are living together are often crammed into tiny apartments. Busy work schedules and long commutes leave little time for private exchanges and intimacy. Sex education is still lacking, and sex surveys reveal large “fuzzy spots” of ignorance and inhibition. Reviewing the ideological postulates of these surveys, Judith Farquhar reads the Chinese sex education literature as “a form of cultural imperialism.” Rather than rehashed versions of Masters and Johnson, she prefers to immerse herself in recent publications on ancient Chinese sex lore, with their “odd familiarity and quirky charm (that) are apparent even for a reader like me.” Finding “strong evidence that Chinese medicine and sex lore have a common origin,” she documents the reemergence of “life-nurturing techniques” (yang sheng) that also include the traditions of the martial arts, meditation disciplines associated with religious movements, and self-help books.

Anthropology’s new frontier

This book review is part of a series taking stock of recent books on China written by cultural anthropologists. Modern anthropology is especially well attuned to describing China’s modernity. China has emerged as the discipline’s new frontier or its favorite terrain, a place once occupied by Japan in the postwar period. Studying Japan allowed classical anthropologists to describe how one could be modern without being Western. Beyond the usual tropes of East vs. West, tradition vs. modernity, the group vs. the individual, social order vs. economic change, anthropologists writing about Japan were able to explore moral categories such as guilt and shame, face and honor, true feelings and public displays (honne and tatemae), or the need for dependence and care known as amae. They were also able to make the transition from the exotic to the familiar. As social scientists turned into business consultants, Japanese ethnographies provided the background for studies about industrial organization, corporate strategies, and management techniques. China as observed by modern anthropologists raises different issues, and provides different answers. Modern anthropologists come to the field equipped with a different toolkit that their forefathers used to carry with. Exit the focus on rites, kinship, hierarchies, and social structure. Social scientists are now more interested in the individual, the intimate, and the private, while being cognizant of the political nature of these categories in the Chinese context. They put their own experience on the line: Judith Farquhar alludes to the many banquets she attended, refers to her intimate conversations with close friends, and cannot refrain her feeling of nostalgia for the simple pleasures and moral virtues that were to be found in everyday life under socialism. Her solution is not to advocate a return to the past, but to experiment with new collective visions and values compatible with global neoliberal capitalism. If anthropology can help identify and shape these visions, its social role and public contribution as an academic discipline will be very well justified.

Darwin, Nietzsche, Bergson.

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A review of The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely, Elizabeth Grosz, Duke University Press, 2004.

The Nick of TimeIn The Nick of Time, Elizabeth Grosz wants to make Darwinism relevant for feminism, and for critical studies in general. This is a challenging task: social Darwinism has often been associated with a conservative or reactionary agenda. Darwin’s epigones, from Herbert Spencer to Francis Galton, who applied his theories to society and to culture, posited the hierarchy of races and the survival of the fittest. They in turn influenced Nietzsche and his theory of the overman, who was picked up by Nazis and by white supremacists for their nihilistic agenda. There seems to be an inherent contradiction between Darwin’s idea of natural determinism and a progressive agenda that emphasizes equal rights and opportunities. This contradiction is based, according to Elizabeth Grosz, on misreadings of Darwin and a deformation of Nietzsche’s thought. Darwin and Nietzsche never said what some people made them to say. The solution, for her, is to go back to the original texts and to read them in the light of recent advances in the biological sciences and in social theory. In doing so, one not only lays the foundation of a progressive social agenda; reconciling biology and culture, nature and society, is also a way to put back the body, and the corporeal, back at the center of political theory and feminist struggle. As Grosz argues, “the exploration of life—traditionally the purview of the biological sciences—is a fundamental feminist political concern.”

Variation, selection, and retention

Darwin’s ideas are very familiar to those working in the biological sciences, and have even given rise to whole disciplines such as evolutionary biology and genetics. Yet it is important to introduce to readers from the humanities the intricacies and details of Darwin’s own writings which, though popularized, are rarely read or referred to. They demonstrate that Darwin remains, in spite of feminists’ resistance to his work, one of the few thinkers of the nineteenth century to prefigure, not only an equalitarian feminism, but an ontology of sexual difference that has come to occupy a key position in contemporary feminist debates. Universalism, the claim that men and women are the same, always measures women in terms of how they conform to the characteristics and values of men. Darwin posits difference—between species, between the sexes—, rather than equality, as the criterion of social and biological value. Whereas sexual difference is often associated with patriarchal privilege, Darwin develops an account of evolution that is an open and generative force of self-organization and growing complexity. Elizabeth Grosz thus offers a primer in Darwinian studies, including a discussion of recent evolutionary scientists, such as Ernst Mayr, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Jay Gould, that she laces with her own comments on Darwin’s philosophical conception of time.

She shows that Darwin’s model, based on the three principles of individual variation, retention of inherited traits, and natural selection, may provide an explanation for economic and cultural history as readily as for natural history. There are, for example, close resemblances between Darwin’s understanding of individual variation and Marx’s understanding of labor. Through their embodiment as use-value and then as exchange-value, differences in labor are ordered into systems of hierarchical structures that Marx explicitly models on biological categories. Similarly, by characterizing technological innovation as the result of a process of variation, selection, and retention, management scholars use the same model in business schools without even mentioning Darwin’s name. We see the same principles at work in the evolution of languages: here, less than the abstract discussions on the origin of language that were popular in his time, Darwin’s work find echoes in the modern theories of structural linguistics, from Saussure to Jakobson and to Chomsky. Human production, manifested most directly in the history of language or in the operations of economies, must submit itself to the same temporal exigencies as nature itself.

Darwin’s sexual selection and feminist theory

One thing is to posit Darwin’s influence over many scientific disciplines; another is to claim his relevance for radical politics and feminist thought. Darwin is not only the first theoretician of natural selection: he also introduced the difference between the sexes, and its effect on variation and selection of life forms, at the core of his theory of the origin and evolution of species. Sexual selection entails that the human exists in only two nondeductible forms: male and female. Two forms which not only divide most of life into divergent categories, but also produce two types of bodily relations with the world, and two types (at least) of knowing. The Darwinian model of sexual selection comes to a strange anticipation of the resonances of sexual difference in the terms of contemporary feminist theory. For Luce Irigaray, sexual bifurcation—the biological difference between male and female—introduces irreducible difference. She rejects the false universalism of the abstraction of the individual, emphasizing that individuals always come in two sexes. The idea that there can be no human substance without sexual identity implies that democracies ca not legitimately define human rights, which are attributes of this substance, otherwise than as the rights of man and woman. In political terms, this line of thought led in particular to the parité movement, which aimed to achieve full equality between male and female representatives in elected bodies. It should be noted that sexual bifurcation is not the same as the sex/gender argument that American feminists first used and then deconstructed. Gender is a social and cultural construct, while the duality of human (and other) species is a condition for the evolution of life and natural selection as understood by Darwin.

Emphasizing a politics affirmative of sexual difference can also benefit from a rereading of Nietzsche. Nietzsche enables us to consider the most abstract elements of Darwinism, Darwin at his most philosophical and political, even if Nietzsche does not provide a reading of Darwin himself and apparently learned about the author of On the Origins of Species only from secondary sources. His conceptualization of Darwinism is based on several misunderstandings. He sees in Darwin “a respectable but mediocre Englishman,” and detects in him “a certain narrowness, aridity and industrious diligence, something English in short, that may not be a bad disposition.” Darwinism, Nietzsche argues, is a discourse of the triumph of the weak over the strong, the herd over the individual, the servile over the noble, the mediocre and the average over the exceptional and the strong. What Nietzsche admires is not so much the survival of the fittest, which in his society takes the form of the bourgeois individual, as the survival of the noblest, the exceptional, even the abnormal and the monstrous. Only the human who joyously seeks beyond the human is worthy of consideration. Whereas the Darwinian model is based on lack and scarcity, Nietzsche emphasizes excess, a superabundance of energy and power. The struggle for more—that is, the will to power—is greater than the struggle for existence. Life is not about mere survival, but about profusion and proliferation, not existence, but excess, not being but being-more, that is, becoming. It tends towards a future that cannot be predicted but is yet to come. Humanity-to-come, or the overman, cannot be the product of natural selection but is the consequence of artificial selection, the breeding of the superior by means of the eternal return. Evolution, for Nietzsche, designates the precedence of a future that always overwrites and transforms the present, that directs the present to what is beyond its containment.

Moral Darwinism

For Elizabeth Grosz, it is ironic that much of what Nietzsche proclaims as part of his critique of Darwin and Darwinism is consonant with Darwin’s own position. In particular, Darwin provided a model of time and development that refuses any pre given aim, goal, or direction for natural selection. Evolution produces variation for no reason; it values change for no particular outcome; it experiments, but with no particular result in mind. Beings are impelled forward to a future that is unknowable, unconfined by the past, and forever new. Like Nietzsche, Darwin saw morality, reason, and other higher faculties in mankind, as resources that aid or hinder group and individual survival. His relativism provides a strange anticipation of Nietzsche’s own genealogy of morality. Moral Darwinism as seen by Nietzsche privileges the values of life at its highest, its most active and intense. The will to power is the concept that Nietzsche offers to replace Darwin’s account of natural selection. It is a force directed only to its own expansion, without regard for the perspectives of the multiplicity of other forces. The will to power may prove to be another name for the principles of emergence, of the chaotic, competing distribution of forces in systems as they reach a point beyond equilibrium to destabilize and convert themselves to a different mode of organization. It is the principle that underlies the world itself, the most fundamental principle of ontology, the single principle, for Nietzsche, governing all of existence. For Grosz, Nietzsche may help provide a way of understanding politics, subjectivity, and the social as the consequence of the play of the multiplicity of impersonal active forces that have no agency. His postulate of the eternal return, the culmination of Nietzsche’s understanding of a world populated by proliferating and competing wills to power, is a cosmological principle that strangely echoes recent advances in theoretical physics and contemporary philosophy. In modern cosmology, the time of the universe is seen as unlimited in both directions. But the matter of the universe, or equally its energy, is limited, finite, and is blighted by the prospect of the gradual winding down and dissipation predicted by the second law of thermodynamics. It follows that in the infinity of time past and time future, every conceivable combination of matter has already occurred, and will occur again, an infinite number of times. Even the Big Bang is not an origin, the birth of the universe, but a transition, a kind of quantum leap between one universe at its death and the birth of another.

Henri Bergson is another thinker whose fecundity for contemporary science and social theory has yet to be reassessed. Bergson’s writings demonstrate no evidence of having read Nietzsche, as Nietzsche himself never read Darwin; nevertheless, his understanding of duration and creative evolution brings together the key insights of Darwin, modulated by a Nietzschean understanding of the internal force of the will to power and the external force of the external return. The will to power is transformed in Bergson, not into a will to command or obey, but a will, a force, or élan vital, which propels life forward in its self-proliferation. Bergson must also be regarded as the philosopher most oriented to the primacy of time, time as becoming, as open duration. Like Nietzsche, Bergson wishes to elaborate a theory of time in which the past is not the overriding factor, and in which the tendencies of becoming that mark the present also characterize the future. Insofar as the future functions as a mode of unpredictable continuity with the past, the future springs from a past not through inevitability and necessity but through elaboration and invention. Bergsonism has often been equated with dualism, and the French philosopher is indeed best remembered for his couples of oppositions between mind and matter, space and duration, the virtual and the actual, habit-memory and memory-image, differences in kind and differences of degree. Yet Elizabeth Grosz shows that these oppositions are more complex than they first appear: at some point, couples of opposites can no longer be binarized, for they form a continuum and merge into each other, or coalesce into a new whole. The difference between differences in kind and differences of degree is itself a difference of degree. There is a fundamental similarity between mind and matter, between the object of perception and the images formed or memorized. The past does not come after the present has ceased to be, nor does the present become the past: rather, the whole of the past is contained, in contracted form, in each moment of the present. In the end, for Grosz, it all comes down to politics, which she defines as “this untimely activation of the virtuality of the past as challenge to the actuality of the present.”

Reading critical theory with practical concerns in mind

Elizabeth Grosz is concerned with advancing social theory and feminist thought, and sees in the works of Darwin, Nietzsche, and Bergson a source of inspiration for scholars engaged in challenging the present. I come to the study of philosophy and critical theory with more practical concerns in mind. My modest ambition is to contribute to the understanding of business organizations in the context of globalization and social change. I am looking for ideas, concepts, and metaphors that I may use in my research, while being cognizant that reality has to be observed first at ground level and by using the domestic categories of social actors. There is a risk in the flight to abstraction that characterizes the discussion of general notions such as mind and matter, time and space, power and servitude. And yet I see value in rubbing shoulders and stretching minds with the great thinkers who have marked the history of the twentieth century. The three authors discussed in this book are indeed towering figures that dominate the way we approach notions such as evolution, power, and duration. One may think that the gist of these three thinkers’ work has already been extracted by successive disciples and commentators, and that they can now quietly  rest on the dusty shelves of intellectual history. And yet, as Elizabeth Grosz successfully argues, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Bergson cannot be reduced to Darwinism, Nietzscheanism, and Bergsonism. Going back to their original work, and attending to their texts through close readings, allows the social scientist to extract more juice from their pulp. To come back to this book’s title, it appears that the expression “the nick of time” comes from an old custom of recording time as it passed by making a notch or a nick on a tally stick. Ordering my reading notes by writing this review was my way to carve a nick in the (b)log of my reading habits.

A Gender Perspective on the U.S. Military Presence Overseas

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A review of Over There: Living with the U.S. Military Empire from World War Two to the Present, Edited by Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon, Duke University Press, 2010.

Over There.jpgA few years ago Hashimoto Toru, mayor of Osaka and president of Japan’s Restoration Party, caused outrage when he declared that Japan’s wartime use of comfort women was “understandable,” implying that when male soldiers are at war, organized efforts to provide women to satisfy their lust are natural, and that the practice has been adopted by many countries. He further undermined his credibility by saying that U.S. soldiers on Okinawa should use the island’s “adult entertainment industry” in order to reduce incidences of sexual assault on local women. Facing domestic and international uproar, he retracted the second comment and formulated an apology to the American people and to the U.S. military. But he stuck to his first comment on comfort women, claiming he had been misunderstood and that other countries were also guilty of sexual abuses during wartime. He called the use of comfort women, many of whom were recruited in Japanese-ruled Korea, “an inexcusable act that violated the dignity and human rights of the women.”

Comfort women and administered prostitution

To the Japanese public, these comments brought up memories from a not so distant past. They echoed the decision taken by the first postwar cabinet, immediately after Japan’s surrender, to provide sexual services to the U.S. Occupation Forces through a system of administered prostitution. The Japanese officials hoped that special comfort women would provide an outlet for the occupiers’ sexuality, help to prevent mixed blood, and serve as a buffer between “good” Japanese women and GIs. Similar plans were also proposed by German officials managing the postwar transition, only to be turned down by American commanders, who unsuccessfully tried to apply a strict policy of non-fraternization between U.S. soldiers and German male and female nationals. Likewise, during the Korean War, the Korean government reinvigorated the Japanese institution of “comfort stations” to serve Allied Forces and Korean soldiers in the name of protecting respectable women and rewarding soldiers for their sacrifice. These unsavory episodes belong to an immediate postwar or a wartime context; but despite the official ban on prostitution, the institution of camptown prostitution or “adult entertainment” has accompanied the U.S. military presence abroad throughout the years.

Regardless of what Osaka’s mayor has said, or meant to say, there is a genuine need for an open debate on the side effects of large military deployments overseas and on official attitudes regarding the sexual demands of male soldiers. These public attitudes are fraught with ambiguities and contradictions. On the one side, the U.S. military, and many host country governments, maintain a prohibition on prostitution and punish it with variable sanctions. On the other hand, they tolerate and even regulate the presence of camptown prostitution, registering sex workers and imposing medical visits in order to limit the spread of venereal diseases. While modern rest-and-relaxation (R&R) facilities and adult entertainment may not always involve paid sex, the presence of transnational sex workers with little legal protection raises the issue of transborder human trafficking, which the U.S. strongly condemns. At a time when U.S. policymakers are debating the future shape of the global network of military bases, the new global posture, which emphasizes mobile forces sent on short-term deployments without families, has far-reaching implications for gender and sexual relations with host societies.

A global network of military bases

The essays collected by Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon in this volume are not limited to the issue of prostitution – although the book cover makes the theme quite explicit. Written with a historical perspective, and using the lenses of gender and postcolonial studies, they illustrate the various aspects of the politics of gender, sexuality, race, and class that are constitutive of the maintenance of America’s military presence in its main postwar locales: West Germany, Japan and Okinawa, and South Korea (with an additional essay on Abu Ghraib). The authors insist that this global network of military bases constitutes what can only be described as an empire: indeed, “the debate is focused not on whether the United States is an empire at all but on what kind of empire it is.” The absence of formal colonies and the reliance on bilateral or multilateral security arrangements and Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs) obfuscate the deep power imbalances between the imperial power and its military projection outposts, creating a relationship that the authors frame in neocolonial terms.

By focusing on the social and cultural impacts of the United States’ military presence overseas, the authors’ ambition is to “make visible this unprecedented empire of bases.” The U.S. military empire has bearing not only on the lives of soldiers and their families, but also on the lives of camptown workers, who cater to their needs, and on residents of local host communities, who have to deal with the economic, social, and cultural consequences of their presence. America’s global military footprint is ubiquitous. During the Cold War, some 500,000 soldiers, as well as tens of thousands of civilian employees and hundreds of thousands of family dependents, were stationed overseas. Most Americans would be stunned to hear that the United States now maintains military bases in more than 150 countries. In the Middle East, it has kept a substantial military presence in Bahrain and Turkey for more than fifty years. To provide housing and training facilities for its personnel, the U.S. military controls almost 29 million acres of territory. And the SOFA agreements cover relations with host countries in minute detail, granting legal privileges to American servicemen that are deeply resented by local citizens.

American empire and neocolonialism

According to the volume editors, “the U.S. military displayed a colonial perception that women of occupied territories in Korea, Japan, and Germany should be sexually available for G.I.s, just as colonized women of color had been available to European colonialists.” Within the context of these three countries, nowhere was the neocolonial character of the U.S. presence more evident than in South Korea. Clustered in Gyeonggi Province and around Seoul, camptowns became a virtually colonized space where Korean sovereignty was suspended and replaced by the U.S. military authorities. The clubs and bars catering to GIs were legally off-limits to Korean nationals (except for registered hostesses and sex workers). After the Korean War, liaisons between G.I.s and Korean women often took the form of concubinage, a practice developed in European colonies whereby a white man and a local woman would cohabit outside the respectability of marriage and dissolve their relation upon the white man’s departure. Although the U.S. now maintains a zero-tolerance policy with regard to human trafficking and prostitution, many Filipinas or Russian camptown women fall prey to similar arrangements with American soldiers, and are left raising children alone because their G.I. boyfriends or husbands have returned to the United States. Foreign migrant workers continue to be subjected to abuse and violence, and the exploitative working conditions maintained by business owners and managers often comes close to the trafficking in persons that the U.S. State Department so vehemently condemns.

For Seungsook Moon, the U.S.-Korean SOFA has remained far more unequal than comparable agreements in Japan, Germany, or other NATO countries: “under the SOFA, Korean citizens are virtually colonial subjects in their own territory.” The U.S. military bases “have enjoyed extraterritoriality, marking them virtually as U.S. territories where Korean sovereignty ends.” She analyzes the presence within U.S. Army ranks of KATUSAs, or young Korean conscripts who serve as augmentation troops in support functions. This institution, “which resembles nineteenth-century European colonial military arrangements with native soldiers,” was created during the Korean War to compensate for dire manpower shortages. Nowadays KATUSAs often come from privileged social backgrounds and, unlike other Korean conscripts, they benefit from more lax discipline and better infrastructure in an English-speaking environment. While KATUSA service remains the most popular form of military service among Korean conscripts, they often resent the menial work and sense of superiority of their American colleagues. As analyzed by the author, the nonfictional and fictional accounts produced by KATUSAs about their experience of serving in the U.S. military reveal criticism of arrogant male G.I.s and fantasies about sexual encounters with white female GIs. Young Korean men also resent the predatory attitude of white male soldiers towards Korean female college students, who are often seen visiting military bases or going out with G.I.s.

Mama-san and pan-pan girls

The chapters about Japan also highlight the hidden social costs, the unequal power relations, but also the transformative and sometimes even the emancipating aspects of America’s military presence. The United States stations the bulk of its forces on the island of Okinawa, a former colony of Japan, whose inhabitants were regarded as second-class members of the nation. The institution of military prostitution has now disappeared, and the “pan-pan girls” of occupied Japan are a distant memory, but sexual or romantic entanglements around U.S. bases have not ceased. Okinawan women who date or marry U.S. military men are often the target of local scorn and ostracism. They occupy a hybrid space or liminal status in the Okinawan and U.S. military communities. Although social, racial, and cultural hierarchies are also present among the members of a Japanese Wives Club described by one contributor, Japanese women who marry American GI..s feel most at home not in the United States or in their local communities, but in the extraterritorial spaces that the military housing areas provide. Residing in the hybrid spaces created in and around U.S. military bases, local nationals are able to challenge existing hierarchical social relations of race, gender, sexuality, and class in their own societies. These same challenges of class and gender boundaries are also expressed by the young Okinawans practicing for eisa, a traditional dance performed each summer during Obon, the festival of the dead. Formerly practiced by young warriors of noble ancestry, eisa now provides working-class Okinawans, male and female, the occasion to transcend the history of double colonization and contemporary lives dominated by the overwhelming U.S. military presence. Beautifully written and deeply evocative, the text on the eisa dance enchants the reader with a literary interlude, while building on what Ann Laura Stoler has called “the affective grid of colonial politics.”

Germany provides an interesting counterpoint to the studies of South Korea and Japan. The narrative about the U.S. occupation and military presence is sharply divided along gender and generational lines. To the men who fought in the Wehrmacht or were enrolled in the Hitlerjugend, the widespread sexual and romantic fraternization between German women and U.S. soldiers came as a shock. A particularly misogynist joke during the bitter occupation years lamented that “German men fought for six years, while German women fought for only five minutes.” Those same men later held deep skepticism about the fighting spirit of their American allies against the Soviet threat. The relaxed attitude of GIs who strolled in German communities, hands in pocket and chewing gum, stood in sharp contrast with the tightness and discipline that Germans educated in the Prussian tradition had come to equate with “manliness”. But this new masculine casualness had opposite effects on the younger generation, who eagerly adopted the clothing habits and musical tastes of their American role models. During the Vietnam War, as they learned about the civil rights movement, German students reached out to African-American soldiers in order to fuel dissent in army ranks and encourage desertion. The racial crisis in the U.S. military was addressed very differently in West Germany, where it led to the adoption of sweeping measures to eradicate discrimination, and in South Korea, where it was framed as a dispute about access to local women. By exposing U.S. servicemen and their families to different racial and gender roles, the overseas military presence also had effects in changing social relations back home.

Framing the U.S. military presence overseas
Over There is a fine volume of advanced scholarship that breaks new ground and explores an issue that has garnered strikingly limited attention from scholars working outside the narrow circle of strategic studies and military history. The decision by the editors to frame the U.S. military presence overseas in imperial and neocolonial terms will not convince all readers. Some of the chapters are avowedly militant in style, and breach the sharp line between academic scholarship and social activism. But the combination of gender studies and a postcolonial perspective sheds light on an important aspect of America’s global military shadow. Referring in particular to Ann Stoler’s work, the editors argue that “social relations of gender and sexuality figure into the working of an imperial power not as a peripheral issue but as a constitutive aspect of producing and maintaining the boundary between the colonizer and the colonized.” A debate on the gender and sexual aspects of America’s military empire is long overdue.

Competing Views on Korea’s National History

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of The Great Enterprise: Sovereignty and Historiography in Modern Korea, Henry Em, Duke University Press, 2013.

Henry EmAchieving sovereignty, and attaining equal standing with other sovereign nations, was Korea’s great enterprise as referred to in the book’s title. It was a thoroughly modern project: previous generations did not feel the urge to compare with other sovereign states or to assert Korea’s distinctiveness. Beginning with the turn of the century, Korea’s commitment to the great enterprise was a necessary condition for avoiding subordinate status in the face of imperial ambitions. Then, as Japan came to dominate Korea, it became a way to break free from its colonial ruler and to campaign for its independence. Later on, emphasizing national sovereignty meant proclaiming the nation’s unity in the face of the North/South division.

Achieving national and individual sovereignty

Historians played a great role in this endeavor. They produced the great narratives that allowed Korea to project its national identity onto citizens. As Henry Em writes in his introduction, “sovereignty provided the conceptual language for writing national histories, but it also constituted the site for the continuous production of oppositional subjectivities and political alternatives.” Sovereignty is not just a prerogative of the state; it is also an attribute of the modern subject. In order to become sovereign subjects, Koreans had to severe their ties with tradition and to reorder their society into a unitary whole. The beginning of the twentieth century saw the birth of the modern individual in Korea. New figures emerged, such as the modern girl with bobbed hair or the political activist facing state persecution. Although collective affiliations are constitutive of the sense of identity in Confucian cultures, the individualist streak runs deep in Korean society. Especially mistrust of rulers is ingrained in the Korean people, who cultivate the spirit of resistance and autonomy.

The discourse of national and individual sovereignty remained a contested field throughout the twentieth century. Competing visions were offered on what it meant to be Korean; when and where national identity originated; and how it could assert itself in the face of imperial dominance or political repression. A characteristic of Henry Em’s book is to refuse simple binaries: between the colonizer and the colonized, between North and South, or Right and Left. At the beginning of the twentieth century, he demonstrates that liberalism retained “an essential link to imperialism and colonialism”. During the colonial period, Japanese were instrumental in shaping Korean identity and helping Koreans connect with their past. After independence, many southern historians migrated north, and continued to be referred to in the historiographic literature, albeit in oblique fashion so as to avoid censorship. In the modern era, the so-called New Right welcomed scholarship inspired by postcolonial studies, and developed a critique of the nation-state that the nationalist Left had left untouched.

Translating and enforcing the nation-state in East Asia

Sovereignty is different in essence from the Mandate of Heaven that Choson dynasty rulers claimed as a justification for their rule, along with the subordinate status they maintained with Ming and then Qing China. Paradoxically, it was the Japanese who introduced the notions of sovereignty, independence, and modern statehood in Korea, confirming Carl Schmitt’s remark that “a nation is conquered first when it acquiesce to a foreign vocabulary, a foreign concept flaw, especially international law.” King Kojong’s Oath of Independence, pronounced in 1895 in a ceremony mixing the antique and the modern, was inspired if not dictated by Inoue Kaoru, Meiji Japan’s envoy to Korea. As the author notes, “by leading the way in utilizing the post-Westphalian sovereignty-based conception of international relations, Japanese statesmen like Inoue Kaoru positioned themselves as the preeminent translators and enforcers of international law in East Asia.”

Whereas the China-centered theory and practice of tributary relations, based on ritual hierarchy and actual autonomy, provided a buffer for the Choson state and warded off imperial ambitions, it was the principle of equal sovereignty and national independence that paved the way for Japan’s domination over Korea. The paradox of sovereignty extended beyond the realm of international law. In order to be what they claimed to be, aspiring sovereign states had to become others, and incorporate cultural traits from European civilization. They had to demonstrate their commitment to modernization by adopting Western institutions and practices, and by discarding some of their age-long traditions.

Korea’s entry into modernity

Lastly, the emergence of the individual as sovereign subject required sweeping reforms touching on language, education, and imaginaries. Korea’s entry into modernity was accompanied by the “inauguration of the Korean alphabet as the national script in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the beginning of modern Korean historiography in the first decade of the twentieth century, the emergence of modern Korean literature, and a host of other beginnings.” As is well known, many Korean words were taken from the Japanese, including minjok (ethnic nation), kukmin (national citizen) or even the word designating the economy (kyongje). Less well-known is the role of Protestant missionaries in promoting the Korean vernacular script, the hangeul, helping to transform it into an icon of national identity. Protestant missions were also instrumental in the creation of the first Western-style schools and modern newspapers, which stand as necessary elements for the emergence of a public sphere and the formation of “imagined communities”.

More controversial perhaps, the author shows that the Japanese authorities played a critical role in shaping Korean’s national identity. Nowhere is this more conspicuous than in the field of patrimonial policies and art history. As the author notes, studying the story of the “discovery” of the Buddhist statue of Sokkuram in southern Korea, “the colonial authorities did not just teach Koreans about their past; they had to restore it for them.” Japan’s encounter with Korean art did not only take the form of looting and plundering, although such forms of colonial exploitation also took place. “Like the British in India and the Americans in the Philippines, the Japanese colonial state invested time, money, and human resources to carry out excavations and surveys, to study Korea’s past and restore some cultural sites (but not others) in order to establish the categories and the narrative strategies by which Korea and Koreans would be understood.”

Competing visions of Korea’s history

It was the Japanese colonial state that identified Sokkuram as an example of Korea’s cultural and religious past, and that restored the statue to its former glory. Yanagi Soetsu, founder of the Mingei folk craft movement in Japan, praised Sokkuram as the “culmination of the religion and the art of the Orient.” Of course, Japan’s self-designated role as a curator for Asia’s art did not just emanate from a consideration of art for art’s sake, and it had political and ideological motivations as well. As reinterpreted by the Japanese, “the story of Sokkuram — its creation and subsequent slide into obscurity — was the story of Korea: a brilliant past that was Asian rather than Korean, followed by a downward slide into the vulgar and trivial art of the Choson dynasty, pointing to the necessity of Japan’s tutelage of Korea and Koreans.” This imperialist vision of art was reinforced by colonial historiography. Through popular essays and media reports, “the Japanese came to believe that Japan had ruled Korea in ancient times and that the Japanese colonization of Korea in modern times represented the restoration of an ancient relationship.”

Of course, Korean historians developed a completely different story. Whereas ancient Korea was divided in terms of village or region, clan or lineage, class or social status, the Koreans became Korean partly thanks to national historiography, when modern intellectuals such as Sin Chae-ho began to write Korea’s national history. “In place of loyalty to the king and attachment to the village, clan, and family, and in place of hierarchic status distinctions among yangban, chungin, commoners, and chonmin, nationalist historiography endeavored to redirect the people’s loyalty toward a new all-embracing identity of Koreans as a unique ethnic group.” It is Sin Chae-ho who emphasized the mythical figure of Tangun as the common ancestor of the Korean people. The Tangun legend later led to various interpretations. Japanese historians dismissed it as a story fabricated in the thirteenth century by the Buddhist monk Iryon. As a nationalist historian, Choe Nam-son read the Tangun story as the expression of religious practice dating to prehistoric times, as an ancient narrative that indicated a common cultural sphere for all of northeast Asia centered around Ancient Choson. In the story of the female bear transformed into a woman and married to Tangun’s ancestor, the Marxist historian Paek Nam-un saw evidence of the beginning of both class differentiation and the privileging of the male over the female descent line in primitive times.

The three schools of Korean historiography

The 1930s saw Korean historians coalescing around three competing schools: nationalist historiography, Marxist or socioeconomic historiography (Paek Nam-un), and positivist historiography (Yi Pyong-do and the Chindan society). Paek Nam-un’s Chosen Shakai Keizaishi was the first book of a comprehensive history of Korea’s historical development in terms of class formation and social forces internal to Korea, as it went from primitive tribal communism to a slave economy and to an Asian feudal society until “sprouts of capitalism” began to emerge independently from outside interference. In the immediate post-liberation period, Marxist intellectuals, with Paek Nam-un taking the leading role, sought to establish hegemony over intellectual production, reaching out to non-Marxist scholars, including nationalist historians who had not capitulated to colonial power. By 1948 many Marxist intellectuals had left Seoul and gone north of the 38th parallel, pushed by anti-communist repression in the South and pulled by offers of employment and opportunity to take part in the DPRK’s national democratic revolution. The progressive historian scholars who stayed found refuge mostly in economics departments.

Although the student revolution of April 19, 1960, that toppled the Rhee regime was crushed by a military coup in 1961, that democratic opening nevertheless allowed a younger generation of historians to narrate history in new ways. Under a nationalist canopy, scholars like Kim Yong-sop and Kang Man-il revived and confirmed Paek’s disclosure of the internal dynamic underlying Korea’s historical development, in which class struggle was central. In Korean History Before and After Liberation, Song Kon-ho presented an ethical critique of how 1945 marked the beginning point of the most horrific chapter in Korean history. Song reminded his readers that it was Syngman Rhee who had allowed notorious collaborators to evade punishment, including former Korean police officers who had hunted down, tortured, and killed independence activists. Spurred by Bruce Cummings’s research on the Origins of the Korean War, a passionate debate took place on the role of various parties and events in starting the war.

The New Right and post-colonialism

As “revisionist” historical narrative gained currency in the 1980s, conservative historians became increasingly frustrated at historiography that conceded nationalist credentials to North Korea and seemingly denied historical legitimacy to South Korea. In an interesting twist, the so-called New Right welcomed scholarship inspired by postcolonial theory that insisted on the acquiescence and participation of colonized people in their imperial domination. With this, the New Right turned to criticism of nationalism in general, and leftist-nationalist historiography of the 1980s in particular, attacking the later for questioning South Korea’s legitimacy. But this accommodation with postcolonial and postmodern scholarship was only tactical, as shown by the New Right’s support of alternative history textbooks that are avowedly nationalistic. In a region still marred in border disputes and nationalist sensibilities, historians should look forward to the day when nationalism can be dispensed with.

Jogo do Bicho

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Laws of Chance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Urban Public Life, Amy Chazkel, Duke University Press, 2011.

Amy Chazkel

The Jogo do Bicho, a number game based on animal figures, has often been described as Brazil’s national vice. It is part of the local urban landscape, just as pachinko defines Japan’s popular culture or PMU is a component of Parisian café life. The difference is that whereas pachinko parlors and PMU counters operate under the law, the Jogo do Bicho is a clandestine lottery that takes place in the shadow of the informal economy. Born on the outskirts of the zoo in Rio de Janeiro around 1890, it has thrived in a gray area between the legal and the illegal, and has been pushed into clandestinity by police repression. Understanding how this great partake between the lawful and the unlawful was made, and chronicling Brazilian citizen’s engagement with the state by way of an illegal activity, is the subject of Laws of Chance, a fine piece of scholarship published in the Radical History Review Book Series at Duke University Press.

A clandestine lottery in the shadow of the informal economy

The Jogo do Bicho has already attracted quite a deal of scholarly interest. Rudyard Kipling, visiting Rio in the 1920s, wrote of seeing bookies wandering the streets carrying placards with colorful pictures of animals. Roger Caillois, a French public intellectual, showed that the game was bound to a system of forecasting the future through dream interpretation, with its own code, classics, and expert interpreters. Gilberto Freyre, probably the most famous of all Brazilian sociologists, described the Jogo do Bicho as a holdover from Brazil’s indigenous and African totemic past. A common tendency of these authors has been to link the game to irrational forces: dream, superstition, fetishism, paganism. The Jogo do Bicho is seen either as a relic of the past or as a way by which tradition encrusts itself upon the modern.

By contrast, Amy Chazkel shows the Jogo do Bicho as a thoroughly modern and rational phenomenon. It became popular at just the moment urbanization and consumer capitalism took hold, and must be interpreted as the product of modernity rather than a refuge from it. It is based on numbers, with elaborate combinations that require the skills of a mathematician as much as the intuition of a dream interpreter. It is part of the money economy, and can be seen as an alternative to saving or insuring against future events. More generally, Amy Chazel distances herself from macro explanations such as invocations to culture, psychology, societal laws, or tradition. To invoke such determining factors is to lose the specificity of historicl causality. The Jogo do Bicho has to be studied at close range, without imposing anachronistic analytical categories, and by paying attention to the few traces the game left in the archives: police records of the arrests of buyers and sellers, judicial cases when these convicts were brought to justice, references to the game in popular culture and in legislation.

Brazil’s only reliable institution

Most commentators on Brazilian culture have marveled at the reliability of the clandestine lottery. “In the Jogo do Bicho, what’s written down counts,” says a local proverb, and the game has sometimes been described as Brazil’s only reliable institution. In his classic work on the sociology of games and play, Roger Caillois comments on the “scrupulous honesty” of the bicheiro, the lottery dealer. Writing in the late 1930s, Stefan Zweig also testified to the reliability of these underworld figures: “In order to avoid the police checking up on the jogo do bicho they played on agreement. The bookmaker didn’t supply his clients with tickets, but he has never been known not to pay up.” Amy Chazel exposes the scrupulous honesty of the bicheiro as part truth and part fiction. The lottery dealer lived by his word: no legal recourse was available if he refused to pay for the winning number. The internal logic of the game and its code of ethics surpassed, in the eyes of ordinary Brazilians, the legitimacy and reliability of the judicial system that censured it. But there were cases where the bicheiro and the banqueiro who backed him refused to pay, either due to turf wars and petty infighting, or because a fortuitous event (say, the death of the elephant in the zoo) had induced a large number of ticket buyers to play the winning animal.

Popular writings on the Jogo do Bicho have long underscored its longevity and popularity in the face of police repression. For sociologists of deviance, it is the law that creates crime. The Jogo do Bicho did not begin as a unitary, distinct practice operating outside the law. Its criminalization brought it into existence by both joining disparate, informal lotteries under a single criminal nomenclature and creating an illicit source of income for police through paybacks and corruption. Yet reversing the causal arrow between criminality and policing does not give full justice to the way the Jogo de Bicho operated. It posits the existence of a clear dividing line between the legal and the illegal, whereas this distinction is precisely the result of negotiated compromises and mutual encroachments. According to Amy Chazkel, “law is, in both form and function, an integral part of society, not something outside it.” She uses the informal lottery as an example of how law and society constitute and interact with each other. Likewise, state and state actors have to be included in the realm of the informal and unofficial which they contribute to create and sustain.

How the “animal game” escaped from the zoo

The Baron de Drummond is commonly credited with creating the game as a marketing tool for promoting the zoological garden that he had created in the new urban settlement of Vila Isabel at the periphery of Rio de Janeiro. Drummond requested a concession from the city government to operate a game that, it was hoped, would raise the zoo out of insolvency without depleting the city’s coffers. Every ticket to the zoo bore the image of an animal, and early each day the baron himself would randomly select one of the twenty-five animals printed on the tickets. Tickets were soon being sold by independent bookmakers or “bicheiros” to those who hadn’t even visited the zoo. By 1895 lottery “bankers,” or banqueiros, unaffiliated with Drummond were taking bets of their own on the outcome of the drawing at the zoo and paying winners out of their own earnings. It did not take authorities long to notice the Jogo do Bicho and remark on its patent illegality. Within months, the municipal government made its first attempt to shut down the game. The animal lottery simply shifted to a new habitat in the city centre, an environment in which it has thrived ever since. Once dissociated from the zoo, it took the outcome of the licit lottery to determine the winning number associated with one of the twenty-five animal series. Jogo do Bicho tickets began to appear among the merchandise offered for sale in kiosks that sold snacks and coffee on street corners. The “animal game” had escaped from the zoo, and would develop in conjunction with police repression and legal jurisdiction.

City authorities who banned the game stated that “games of chance depending upon luck… are prohibited in all times in Roman law and in our own Penal Code.” Yet entrepreneurs like Drummond who set up lotteries at first operated legally, and there was a National Lottery that brought revenue to the public coffers. Indeed the Jogo do Bicho challenged the legal lottery concessionaires with unwanted competition, and they actively petitioned the city government to suppress it. It was only in 1946 that all forms of gambling in Brazil were legally banned, after repression had taken an increasingly moralistic tone. It is no coincidence that the Jogo do Bicho emerged amid Rio’s social upheavals and alteration in its urban environment in the early First Republic, at just the moment it became urgent to demarcate the formal from the informal in myriad realms of urban society. The state attempted to modernize the city by signing concession contracts with large companies to provide the city with public work and infrastructure, including docks, public lighting and other utilities, roads, and civil construction, as well as entertainment and retail commerce. Corruption occurred regularly not only in determining who could win contracts and sinecures, but also in the complicity of public officials with monopoly-seeking concessionaires wishing to suppress competition by making spurious accusations of illegal practices.

The criminalization of everyday life

Amy Chazkel describes this privatization of urban space as a process of enclosure akin to the “enclosure of the commons” that marked the transition from medieval agrarian societies to modern capitalist economies. Alternatively, she uses the expression “criminalization of everyday life” to describe how some parts of the public domain formerly outside the state’s purview came to be associated with public disorder and criminal activity. Jogo de Bicho dealers, unlicensed street vendors, and other participants in Rio’s nascent informal economy were entangled in a struggle over de facto rights and access to resources and became part of the way both the state and the market operated. There was a subtext of moral panic behind urban modernizers’ battle cry of “Ordem e Progresso.” Practices common in the poor and working classes such as gambling, vagrancy, begging, prostitution, and drinking, as well as the martial art called capoeira, were criminalized as part of the authoritarian politics of “enlightened intolerance” that accompanied urban modernization. The issue of public order in Rio and other cities was made more pressing by the explosive growth of the urban population and the flood of immigrants from southern Europe, as well as by racial anxieties following the abolition of slavery.

The criminalization of the Jogo do Bicho was always ambivalent and contested. Compelling evidence shows a lack of consensus within Brazilian society as to whether the state should permit and regulate the game or outlaw it and punish its participants as criminals. During the period from the game’s origin to around 1917 it appears that virtually no one who was arrested for playing the Jogo do Bicho was evec convicted, fined, or handed a prison sentence. The unusually high rate of acquittal in cases of illicit gambling resulted from the wide discretionary power judges and police exercised, but also from the shared belief that “this was only a game”. Above all, men and women of all socioeconomic backgrounds showed their approval of the game simply by buying and selling chances to win. It doesn’t mean the law was ineffective: it protected the interests of the legal lottery concessionnaires, and it gave the police a blanket authorization to intrude into the lives of the working classes. For the poor urban population, most daily interactions with the state occurred at the level of the street police. The policeman was, in effect, the state, and his authority to control and arrest manifested the state’s coercive power over the everyday life of citizens.

A major work of imaginative historical scholarship

I read Laws of Chance as part of a survey of modern anthropological writings, many of which are published by Duke University Press. I would recommend it not only to historians of Brazil and Latin America, but also to anthropologists or sociologists working on contemporary terrains and to scholars engaged in critical studies. This book is proof that you can conduct anthropological work without resorting to participant observation. Familiarity with the archive—and especially with menial, obscure texts and artefacts that have so far escaped the purview of historians—gives a unique perspective into the life-world of ordinary people. Although the topic of a clandestine lottery in early twentieth-century Brazil may appear as mundane and recondite, it allows for a gripping narrative, full of twists and turns as well as theoretical developments. The informal, the illegal and the marginal appear not as residues of a bygone era that are bound to disappear with the advent of the modern economy, but as constitutive concepts that stand at the center of our modernity. The history of the Jogo do Bicho brings a fresh view on the relationship between the state and society in Brazil in the first decades of the twentieth century. It is a delight to read, as well as a major work of imaginative historical scholarship.

Asian Studies in Asia

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Duke University Press, 2010.

Asia As Method.jpgThere are two kinds of Asian studies on North-American campuses. The first, area studies of Asia, grew out of the Cold War and of the United States’ need to know its allies and enemies better. It is politically neutral, although some critics would consider it conservative in essence, due to its modalities of topic selection, standards of scholarship, sources of research funding, and practical applications. It focuses on the production of experts on a specific region of the world which is of strategic interest for the United States. It usually requires the mastery of at least one Asian language, acquired through years of painful learning and extended stays in the country being studied. Great scholars have contributed to the field and have led distinguished careers that have brought them into positions of leadership within and outside academia.

The two kinds of Asian studies in the United States

Faced with a general crisis in area studies that may be linked to the decline of America’s Cold War commitments, the discipline was reinvigorated by renewed interest in Asia-Pacific as the new center of global economic growth. A number of social scientists who learned their trade in sociology, political science, or sometimes even literature studies, reinvented themselves by turning into business consultants and management specialists, offering to unveil the mysteries of Asian capitalism in its successive reincarnations (from Japan Inc. to China’s global reach). In addition, whereas other fields became highly compartmented, it is still possible to pass as a “Japan specialist” or an “expert on China”, covering all aspects of a country’s culture, economy, and political situation, in a way that is no longer possible for countries like France or Germany, let alone for Europe as a whole. Outside academia, one may even earn the reputation of an “Asia hand”, as one experiences successive postings in diplomacy or corporate management in various Asian capitals. As Benjamin Disraeli said: “the East is a career”.

The second kind of Asian studies in the United States, cultural studies of Asia, is very different in its nature and its applications. It is born out of the Civil Rights movement, anti-war protests, the claim of ethnic or sexual minorities, and campus politics. It bundles together a set of disciplines sometimes referred to as “critical humanities”: literary criticism, media studies, cultural anthropology, women studies, and the ethnic curriculum reflecting the distinctive identity of Asian-Americans. Theoretically, it is grounded in or influenced by various kinds of post-isms (postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, posthumanism), as well as by feminism, queer theory, subaltern studies, deconstruction, and critical theory. It is also closely linked to practices of political militancy, social activism, human rights advocacy, and experiments in the performing arts. The focus of cultural studies of Asia is on transnational flux, diasporic mobility, immigration challenges, and shifting identities, as opposed to the centralizing state structures and fixed identities favored by area studies.

American cultural imperialism and Asian resistance

According to Kuan-Hsing Chen, a Taiwanese cultural critic, the second form of Asian studies is no less imperialistic than the first. It considers Asian countries only in relation to the US, and it uses American or European authors, concepts, and points of reference in order to “frame” Asia. Western scholars look to Asia from afar, and with concerns close to home. Not only do they present their partial view as the only legitimate one, but by monopolizing speaking positions they also block the emergence of alternative voices coming from Asia. It is by invoking the right to difference, to cultural identity and to affirmative action, that America exerts its cultural hegemony on a global scale. By promoting multiculturalism, it draws the best elements from the rest of the world into its universities, and dictates the terms of the cultural debate in foreign academia as well. America’s multicultural imperialism gives birth to a new generation of local informants and academic brokers, which Kuan-Hsing Chen labels as “collaborators”, “opportunists”, and “commuters”. In Asia as elsewhere, the staunchest advocates of cultural identity generally come from the diaspora: it is through exile and distance that they come to overemphasize the importance of small differences.

Knowledge production is one of the major sites in which imperialism operates and exercises its power. Kuan-Hsing Chen gives several examples where the West is used as “method” without it even being acknowledged. The existing analytical distinction between the state and civil society cannot account for democratic transformation in places like India, Taiwan, or South Korea. As Professor Chen explains, India does not possess the condition required to develop civil society in the Western European sense, because only a limited part of the Indian population, mainly social elites, could enter such a space. Instead, critical historians like Partha Chatterjee show that subaltern classes and groups have been able to invent alternative spaces of political democracy to ensure their survival and livelihood. Similarly, in Taiwan and Korea during their democratic transition, civil society virtually became the state, as major figures associated with the civil-society camp acceded to power or were coopted by the regime.

The demise of the nation-state is a luxury only the West can afford

Another issue with “the West as method” is the academic insistence on the demise of the nation-state and the advent of post-nationalism. For Kuan-Hsing Chen, this is a luxury only the West can afford: “at this point in history, a total negation of nationalism is nothing but escapism.” As he comments a documentary on Singapore made by an independent filmmaker, “one has to sincerely identify with the nation, genuinely belong to it, and truly love it in order to establish a legitimate position from which to speak.” His relation with Taiwan is itself ambivalent. He refuses the rigid binary structure that demands a choice between unification with mainland China and independence from it. He tries to sketch a “popular democratic” alternative, based on grassroot movements, anti-imperialism, and local autonomy. For that, he recommends an effort to liberate from the three-pronged grip of colonialism, cold war, and imperialism. But if attempts to engage these questions are locked within national boundaries, it will not be possible to think beyond the imposed nation-state structure and work toward genuine regional reconciliation.

Kuan-Hsing Chen wants to contribute to the emergence of the new field of Asian studies in Asia by proposing a radical alternative: Asia as method. “Using the idea of Asia as an imaginary anchoring point,” he writes, “societies in Asia can become each others’ point of reference, so that the understanding of the self may be transformed, and subjectivity rebuilt.” In a lecture given in 1960, the Japanese critic Takeuchi Yoshimi intuitively proposed the notion of Asia as method as a means of transforming the Japanese subject. But he concluded aporetically to the impossibility of defining what such a transformation might imply. Mizoguchi Yûzô, a recently deceased scholar, took up from where Takeuchi left and proposed “China as Method”, by which China or Asia ceased to be considered as the object of analysis and became a means of transforming knowledge production. In this sense, the emerging field of Asian studies in Asia will have a very different historical mission than the Asian studies practiced in Europe and North America. Studying Asia from an Asiatic standpoint is a means of self-discovery and collective emancipation. As Chen puts it succinctly, “the more I go to Seoul, the better I understand Taipei.”

Using Asian frames of reference

A first step in pursuing “Asia as method” is by using Asian authors and frames of reference. This is what Kuan-Hsing Chen does, noting that “Asia as method is not a slogan but a practice. That practice begins with multiplying the sources of our readings to include those produced in other parts of Asia.” His references include classic thinkers such as Lu Xun and Gandhi, or more recent critics like Mizoguchi Yûzô and Partha Chatterjee or Ashis Nandy. He borrows from Lu Xun a certain critical tradition that addresses broad political issues by responding to concrete events, such as a campaign to expand Taiwanese investments in South-East Asia, or the claim of a group that wishes to register Taiwan as America’s fifty-first state. The non-violent philosophy of Gandhi is mobilized to broaden the concept of civil society and to discuss the emergence of subaltern classes in conjunction with the Chinese concept of minjian. Takeuchi Yoshimi complements these references by suggesting that Japan has gone through the opposite direction of India and China, and that its cultural dependence toward the US prevents it to build a more penetrating critical subjectivity at the societal level.

Professor Chen also uses foreign authors who have become common references in postcolonial studies, in order to design “a methodology specific to the colonized third world.” The central figure here is Franz Fanon, a Martinique-born French psychiatrist, writer, and militant of decolonization, whose work inspired many revolutionary leaders from the Third World. His basic affirmation, “the black man wants to be white”, suggests that Asian people also want to become American, and end up wearing the same masks and fetishes. The psychic dimensions associated with colonialism have also been studied by Octave Mannoni, who showed that the colonizer and the colonized are bounded together by a relationship of mutually constituted subjectivity, and Albert Memmi, who posited that the alienation of the colonized cannot be reduced to the question of individual subjectivity: it has to be addressed at the level of the social structure, which conditions the collective psyche. The use of these sources and others allows Kuan-Hsing Chen to build an alternative narrative of decolonization, deimperialization, and “de-cold war” that stands at variance with North American academic references.

Decolonization, deimperialization, and “de-cold war”

The author goes farther. Asian scholars have been doing “Asian studies” all along without realizing it, “just like Europeans, North Americans, Latin Americans, and Africans have also been doing studies in relation to their own living spaces.” “That is,” Chen insists, “Martin Heidegger was actually doing European studies, as were Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jürgen Habermas.” The choice of names is not insignificant, and quite ironic as well. Thinkers who attempt to “provincialize Europe” and call into question Western philosophy’s pretense to universality usually find themselves at home in the philosophy of Heidegger, that quintessential provincial who never left his Heimat and had only contempt for science and technology. Similarly, Michel Foucault dreamt of other horizons without ever using non-Western sources. “If a philosophy of the future exists,” he wrote, “it must be born outside of Europe, or equally born in consequence of meetings and impacts between Europe and non-Europe.” Kuan-Hsing Chen does not rule out the possibility of a synthesis, but he sees universalism as the end of a process as opposed to a starting point. “Universalism is not an epistemological given but a horizon we may be able to move toward in the remote future, provided that we first compare notes based upon locally grounded knowledge. Universalist arrogance serves only to keep new possibilities from emerging.”

Notes from a Disoriented Reader

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora, Edited by Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa, Duke University Press, 2001.

OrientationsScholars working in cultural studies are an unruly lot. They spend a great deal of energy patrolling disciplinary borders, falling down on trespassers and ensuring conformity within the field. Some mount raids on neighboring fields for intellectual loot, or claim new territories as their own. They try to regulate their quarrels with political correctness and abstruse jargon. But attacks are not muffled by circumvolved syntax or otiose vocabulary. If anything, they are made even more venomous, as one can articulate in complex sentences what one wouldn’t dare to write in plain English. Liberals are very illiberal when it comes to arguing with each other. Academics of the cultural bent are willing to wash their linen in public, to bring cadavers out of family closets, and to expose the dirty little secrets of the profession, if only for the sake of enhancing their own status. For them, it appears like business as usual. But for outside observers, who have come to associate scholarly pursuit with disinterestedness and gentlemanly behavior, this aggressiveness comes as something of a shock.

Settling scores between Asian Studies and Asian American studies

I didn’t expect to find so much venom, personal attacks, and political bickering in a book on Asian studies. To be true, the book centers on a different discipline, Asian American studies, which in the US context designates the curriculum designed for Asian American students who wish to reconnect with their ethnic roots and affirm their distinct cultural identity within American society. The authors insist that Asian American studies find their origins in the civil rights movement and that it espouses a progressive political agenda. The possibility of a conservative or politically neutral contribution to the field is not even envisaged. The contribution of ivory-tower scholars to the realization of social justice and the fight against racial prejudice is rather thin. One author mentions various student movements who organized campaigns and signed petitions for Asian sweatshop workers and slum dwellers. Another stresses the emancipatory dimension of avant-garde theater played by and targeted at ethnic minorities. Yet another focuses his research on Filipino immigrants and their struggle for survival. And this being the US, there is even one lawyer specializing in “Asian Americans and the Law” studies, which stands at the intersection between human rights approaches, Chinese legal studies, and Asian American critical jurisprudence.

The best way to unite is to have a common enemy. One such enemy—paradoxically, considering the fact that most authors purport to bridge the gap between Asian studies and Asian American studies—is area studies as it is still commonly practiced. This volume is tantamount to a hostile takeover bid over Asian studies by Asian American scholars with a background in cultural studies and a taste for loosely defined “theory”. For Dorinne Kondo, “hegemonic East Asian studies… stand as heir to an Orientalist legacy, permeated by an unproblematized empiricism hostile to ‘theory’, yet blind to its own theoretical presuppositions and its conservative politics.” Rey Chow denounces the persistence of a scholarly tradition of Orientalism among specialists of Chinese literature and other area studies scholars. For cultural critics, accusations of Orientalism, culturalism, and essentialism are the most damning indictments one can make, and the authors of this volume use them in abundance. The enemy can also be well-meaning, left-leaning intellectuals: Karen Shimakawa sees in the orientalist inspirations of avant-garde theater artists such as Ariane Mnouchkine or Peter Brook a neocolonial appropriation and culturalist sampling of pseudo-Asian heritage. Rey Chow makes a scathing indictment of the modern Maoist, by which she designates “a cultural critic who lives in a capitalist society but who is fed up with capitalism.” Then the enemy can also be within: Kuan-Shing Chen, a Taiwanese critic and proponent of “Asian Studies in Asia”, accuses his North American colleagues of ignoring the question of US imperialism and of trying to “discipline” Asia.

A community of victimhood

Another way to close ranks is to stress the menace posed by an outside enemy. According to the editors, Asian-Americans face three types of prejudices in the US imagination. They are considered as a distinct and unassimilable body in mainstream American society. They are perpetually associated with their country of origin, and cannot achieve full US citizenship. And they are considered as a threat to the American nation, especially in times of crisis when relations with Asian countries become strained. For the authors, “these are ideas that have effected violence against, and exclusion, disenfranchisement, and internment of, Asians in the United States over the years.” The history of the Asian presence in America is one of victimization, persecution, and silencing. No word is strong enough to characterize their plight: Dorinne Kondo even refers to “a centuries-long history of exclusion, penetration, interimperial rivalry, war, incarceration, even genocide.” (yes, genocide.) Asian-Americans contribute only negatively to the buildup of the US national identity. Asia is America’s “other”, and its exclusion reinforces the wholeness and coherence of Western self-identity. David Palumbo-Liu goes as far as saying that the US nation-state grounds its stability in large part on the successful drawing of the Asian/American line: “Asians are deemed inadequate to America, marginalized or excluded in order to (re)consolidate the nation’s image of its ideal self, which is nonetheless contradicted by its white supremacist ideology.”

Another characteristic of Americans’ alleged perception of Asians and Asian Americans is its heavily sexualized content. According to this view, Asia is forever the mysterious and feminized territory in need of US male dominance and militarized protection. In the cultural cliches conveyed by Hollywood movies and popular novels, Asian men are emasculated and Asian women are hyper-feminized, thereby contributing to maintain unequal racial, gender and class hierarchies. Stories generally favor romances involving white males and Asian females, and the reverse combination is seen as transgressive and doomed to failure. Although most people call for racial tolerance and appear to condemn racism, they never question the racial hierarchy that makes Asian women available to white males but preclude the possibility of a union between white women and Asian men. In addition, as Lisa Lowe notes, “this radicalized constructions of both Asian “masculinity” and Asian “feminity” have tended to elide non-heteronormative sexualities as threats to national integrity or to foreclose such sexualities by placing them outside the boundaries of the nation and the family.” Although sexuality as such is not addressed in all chapters, contemporary academic discourse, as noted by the editors in their preface, is “transected and substantially informed by feminism and gay and lesbian studies.”

Cultural studies fuel discourses and practices that are far from liberatory

The only occasion when the authors refrain to make personal attacks is when they talk about themselves. This they do in abundance, to the point that the whole field of Asian American studies may be considered as a strategy for self-expression and personal aggrandizement. I didn’t like the book Dorinne Kondo wrote about Japan because it was mostly a book about herself. In her contribution to this volume, she leaves all pretense to address social and cultural issues and instead writes—again—about herself, offering “an autobiographical political history”. For her, ethnic studies stem from a “politics of representation”: people who were formerly the objects of representation are now entering the academy and the arts in order to “represent themselves”. The result is navel-gazing and, in the end, the abandonment of academic disciplines in favor of artistic performance. The epitome of this flight into aesthetics is offered by Russell Leong in his “performance text” imagining a dialogue between a sociologist and two queer informants. Postmodern anthropology has taught us to call into doubt claims of authorship and to consider texts as social fictions. Now even the pretense of a real encounter between the ethnographer and social actors is abandoned in favor of imaginary hyperbole and fictitious dramatization.

Perhaps most depressing in this book is the sense of closure one gets after reading all the chapters. The claims of the editors notwithstanding, there remains no place for alternative voices coming from alternative places. America calls the tune, and the new mantra of multiculturalism and diasporic identities is offered as a global remedy that all societies should apply to their own situations. This matters a lot, because what happens in US academia has global consequences. The impact of America on knowledge production on Asia is huge. Cultural studies fuel discourses and practices that are far from liberatory, and that can even reinforce racial prejudices rather than combat them. With identity politics and the insistence on the ethnic component of power relations, an ethnicized vision of society is taking hold, where every group clamors for its own specific rights. The competition among victims create a cycle of accusations and counter-accusations, with no end or reconciliation in sight. This exhibitionary multiculturalism is the post-colonial version of the colonial fair. The rhetoric of multiculturalism inherits colonial categories that divide a population along the dominant axes of race and ethnicity, covering up the history of mixing, cross-influences, and flexible identities that have characterized human populations since the origins. To me, importing the schemes and constructions of Asian American studies to the field of Asian studies is a very bad idea indeed.