Etienne RP

Chinese Women Students in Australia

24 Aug 20228 Sep 2022 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West, Fran Martin, Duke University Press, 2022.**

Reading Dreams of Flight made me reexamine my preconceptions about Australia, China, and university studies abroad. When I was a graduate student in France back in the early 1990s, I didn’t identify Australia as a land of opportunity for academic studies. In the disciplines that I have studied, Australia is (or was) a scientific backwater, an outlier when compared to North America or Western Europe. I don’t trust university rankings that much, but last time I checked Australian universities ranked quite low in terms of research output, number of Nobel Prizes, well-identified schools of thought, or emerging paradigms. I was under the impression that an academic career in an Australian institution was a second- or third-best choice for aspiring scholars who failed to land the position of their dreams in North America or in Europe. Spending more than a decade in East Asia made me revise that opinion. I have met many Asian scholars for whom Australia was definitely on the academic map. For a prospective graduate student in South Korea, in Taiwan, or in South-East Asia, pursuing a degree in Australia, applying for a faculty position, or doing research as a post-doctoral student in an Australian university are serious options to consider. Australia’s attractiveness is not only linked to geographical proximity. Language, lifestyle, natural environment, diasporic presence, and academic freedom in well-funded research universities also weigh in the decision for an academic destination. Besides, the international students who form the focus of Dreams of Flight—a cohort of about fifty young Chinese women that the author follows across the full cycle of international study between 2012 and 2020—did not wish to pursue an academic career in science or in the humanities. Their ambition was to acquire a degree in a practical field such as accounting, finance, or communication and media studies, to broaden their horizon by getting an experience of living and studying abroad, and to follow a career marked by international mobility and promotion opportunities. Australian universities could build on these expectations to attract a growing number of students from China: in December 2019, just before Covid, there were over 212,000 Chinese students studying in Australia. Students from China represented the largest proportion of international students, while Australia was the third foreign destination for Chinese students after the United States and the United Kingdom.

Study in France, Study in Australia

Reading that higher education in Australia is also a commercial venture wasn’t really a surprise for me. In my previous posting as cultural counsellor at the French Embassy in Hanoi, I was involved in managing a Study in France programme and in attracting Vietnamese students to French educational institutions. Australian universities were clearly our direct competitors. La Trobe University had an admission office and a partnership program within Hanoi University, while RMIT was the first completely foreign-owned university granted permission to operate in Vietnam, delivering Australian degrees for a hefty tuition fee. But even with this experience in mind, I personally don’t like to think of academic studies abroad as a field ruled by competition and marketization. For France, attracting foreign students is a matter of public policy, not market development: it is a way to promote our model and our values, to uphold the position of French as an international language, to train potential recruits for French multinational firms or research labs, and to build long-lasting influence through a network of alumni who will keep a close connection to France. This assumes, of course, that foreign students will adhere to the values conveyed through education and living abroad, that they will practice French in the classroom (where courses are increasingly taught in English) and in everyday life, and that they will keep a positive attitude toward France after their study period (remember that Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot both worked and studied in France.) Unlike many universities in Australia, in the US or in the UK, French universities and Grandes Écoles offer high-quality training without imposing unaffordable tuition and fees. In fact, the French government offers many foreign students a benefits programme that reduces tuition fees to almost nothing. Although this is not the case for every institution of higher education, these fee structures are still lower than other universities in Europe, let alone Australia or North America. This is not always the best selling point among prospective students and their families: especially in Asia, quality comes at a price, and what is low-priced tends to be perceived as low-quality. But in countries like Vietnam, the affordability of studies in France, coupled with the known quality of French curricula, was clearly a strong argument to attract students to France and to persuade them to study French in our cultural institutes located in Vietnam’s four main cities.

Australia has a different approach to attracting foreign students. Australia has been recognized as having “the most organized and aggressive international recruitment and marketing strategy” for its universities abroad, and yet the central government has little involvement in higher education promotion. Universities, and in some respects provinces, are in charge of attracting foreign students to Australia and building an image of academic excellence and cosmopolitanism. They compete among themselves and against foreign education institutions for private income from international students, with the students themselves conceptualized essentially as consumers. To attract new students and maximize revenue, they maintain a network of commercial education agents abroad, organize student fairs and promotion events, open offices on the campus of partner universities, and sign agreements with local institutions. They use marketing strategies to target the public and divide the market into various segments: the cohort of young students studied by the author, who belong to the “post-90” (jiuling hou) generation, were more likely than the previous generation to be female, to study business and management as opposed to sciences or engineering, to start studying at the bachelor’s level, and to apply for permanent resident permit after their studies. The selling points for studying in Australia increasingly focus on urban lifestyle, natural scenery, food and beverage, and opportunities for tourism. International student offices at Australian universities emphasize the quality of students’ live & learn experience. They offer a range of support, advice and information about housing, daily life, and job opportunities. The objective is to create value and maximize consumer experience, not to promote a particular model of democracy and use education as a policy instrument. If exposure to daily life in Australia makes student acquire a taste for freedom and democratic ideals, so much the better. But studying in Australia is responding to economic rationality, not to the logic of a sovereign state. The education sector is Australia’s third export market after agriculture and mining. It generates indirect revenues by contributing to nation branding, tourism, and export promotion. If anything, dependence on Chinese student income was construed as a problem, especially at the end of the period studied by Fran Martin. Excessive market concentration affects product quality and exposes producers to increased political risk.

Preconceived ideas

As Fran Martin writes in her preface, “the young Chinese women whose stories are told in this book represent the human face of this marketization of education.” I was surprised by the description of their social background as middle class: they were the (often only) daughters of middle-rank party cadres, local officials, small business entrepreneurs, or corporate executives, who could afford to pay tuition fees and living expenses abroad. By comparison, in Vietnam, studying abroad remains the preserve of the elite or the upper middle class, and parents are making huge sacrifices to send their children abroad. Even in France, where secondary education is mostly state-led and university tuition fees are very low, sending one’s child to study abroad is a tough financial decision, and most French students content themselves with a one-year mobility in a different European country under the Erasmus student exchange program. Getting a degree in the United States, in Australia, or even in post-Brexit United Kingdom is out of the financial reach of most French families. The huge number of Chinese students abroad (over 700 000 in 2019) made me realize how rich China has become, and how devoted Chinese parents are to the education of their children. A related surprise was to read that for these young urban Chinese women, Melbourne and other Australian cities felt provincial and underdeveloped. Words like Mocun (“Melvillage”) and TuAo (“native Oz”) disparage the cultural and economic backwardness of Australia as a whole, while complaints about the nation’s backward infrastructure and early shop closing times were frequent among Chinese students. For some students, the village-like living conditions in Melbourne felt safe and friendly, while other complained against the unfriendliness of the locals, the unavailability of jobs in non-Chinese-run businesses, the ethnic concentration of Chinese students and migrants in clustered urban areas and housing, and racism and violence in public places. The dream of immersing oneself in the local culture and to get to know local people often ended in disillusion and fear. Indeed, many respondents in the study found that they had left China only to arrive in a subworld populated by Chinese friends, Chinese landlords, Chinese classmates, Chinese flatmates, Chinese bosses, Chinese media, and Chinese businesses. Everyday verbal interactions were held mostly in Mandarin, and the city was experienced as a sociospatial network of connected clusters.

Another preconceived idea I had about China was that increased openness through foreign travel and studies abroad might change Chinese society for the better and steer its citizens toward more liberal attitudes on the political and social fronts. This is a delusion I share with many people in the West: the notion that exposing young Chinese people to our ideas and values will make them think and behave more like us and will turn China as a whole into a responsible stakeholder on the global scene. In France, international education is recognized as a significant tool of soft power, a mechanism of attraction and persuasion. Through student exchange programs and cultural institutions such as Alliance française and Campus France, countries convey particular cultural, social, educational and political images of themselves abroad. These not only enhances their global visibility and influence but also their ultimate goal to reach and win the hearts and minds of people worldwide. It seems hard to deny the fact that internationalized higher education, with its cross-cultural and multi-national exchange activities, lays the ground for an intensified cross-border dialogue, contributes to a greater understanding between countries as well as enhances international cooperation. Education as a global phenomenon attracts people, and generates interest in the languages and cultures of other places. But Australia doesn’t seem to make such assumptions. For Australians, education is a lucrative business, not a policy tool, and promotion efforts focus on short rather than long term objectives. If anything, the increased number of Chinese students in Australian universities, and their dependence on partnership agreements with China, are perceived as a threat to academic freedom and domestic sovereignty. After Fran Martin completed her study, it was announced that Australia’s federal government was to shut down Chinese learning centers, known as Confucius Institutes, after the latter has been suspected of functioning as a plank of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda. In 2021, Human Rights Watch published a report entitled How China’s Long Reach of Repression Undermines Academic Freedom at Australia’s Universities, giving voice to students and academics who felt forced to self-censor their views about the human rights abuses of the communist regime in China. Cases of nationalist outbursts and peer harassment have been reported among Chinese students abroad, making true the Chinese regime’s assertion that “leaving the country is more effective than a hundred patriotic education classes.”

Competing models of identity

This is not to say that international education had no effect on the Chinese students who responded to Fran Martin’s questions or discussed together on their WeChat group. The author identifies two competing models of identity among the young Chinese women from the post-90 generation: neoliberal-style enterprising selfhood, and neotraditionalist familial feminity. The first one values mobility, individual freedom, cosmopolitanism, professional orientation, gender equality, and consumerism. The second one prefers stability, family orientation, filial piety, collective discipline, job security, and traditional gender roles. Studying abroad accompanied a shift from the second to the first model. Contacted a few years after the study, women in the focus group were more likely to be unmarried, independent, focused on their professional career, following a flexible life course, and geographically mobile. They valued professional ambition, cultural reflexivity, and leisure consumption. All were not able to translate international studies into higher-status jobs in the private sector, in China or in Australia, and a significant number experienced downward social mobility. Some remained in Australia, navigating the state immigration regime and accumulating points in pursuit of permanent resident status while doing odd jobs in precarious conditions. Other graduates returned to China and faced gender-based discrimination in their job searches, competing with a large number of haigui returnees and having less guanxi than those who had stayed behind. Most of them delayed marriage and childbearing, with the risk of falling behind the gendered life script of marrying before their late twenties and becoming shengnü, or “leftover women.” The other model of gender neotraditionalism also retained its influence, in alliance with family structures and the modern apparatus of the socialist state. Pressures to marry and have children on a fixed schedule were difficult to escape, and heteronormativity weighed on some women who had developed same-sex leanings while in Australia. In political terms, Chinese students abroad tended to manifest expressions of “long-distance nationalism” and “patriotism from afar.” Faced with “insults to China”, the ethics of national representation demands that one make counterclaims to defend the national honor against hostile outsiders: “A son never complains that his mother is ugly; a dog never complains that its household is poor.” But nationalist feelings were also complicated by time spent abroad: the author observes a growing tendency to distinguish patriotism (aiguo) from attachment to the party or government, as well as a growing appreciation of the heterogeneity of Chinese identity. As she observes, “national feelings on the move are characterized by multiplicity, mutability, and ambivalence.”

Interestingly, the only institutions who really care about the subjectivities of Chinese students in Australia and who want to win their “hearts and minds” are proselytizing churches and religious sects. Among evangelical churches in the West (and in South Korea), China is seen as a new frontier for Christianity, a continent ripe for mass conversion and heavenly salvation. Some churches selectively target foreign students in evangelizing strategies: their personal alienation, disorientation, and insecurity resulting from their immersion into an unfamiliar environment make them easy targets for street preachers and door-to-door missionaries. The church to which there are drawn acts as a “service hub” for foreign students, providing spiritual comfort and material orientation as well as free language classes, outdoor excursion opportunities, and a quick way to meet new friends. In France, where secularism is part of the national identity, proselytizing has a bad image in the general public. It is perceived as undue influence and foreign meddling: evangelicals are routinely characterized as “Anglo-saxon,” and Seventh-Day Adventists or Latter-Day Saints are categorized as “cults.” By contrast, I was surprised to read that Chinese students had a rather positive image of proselytizing churches; despite being warned against “heterodox cults” (xie jiao) in their home country, they were curious about what they perceived as part of the cultural foundation of Western societies, and were favorably impressed by the selflessness and genuine sympathy of Christian missionaries. Some Chinese women used Bible-study classes and Pentecostal church sermons as a type of introspective self-cultivation and self-improvement, not necessarily leading to long-term religious engagement. For others, the church became the center of their social activities and spiritual life. For many Chinese students drawn to religious activities, churches were one of the few places where conversation and friendship with locals could occur. The LDS (Mormon) Church is not allowed to proselytize in China, but it trains its missionaries in Mandarin and tasks them with targeting Chinese citizens abroad in order to expand the faith into Chinese communities. For other churches as well, returnee converts may appear as an efficient means of spreading the faith in China while complying to the strict limitation imposed by the communist authorities on their activities. For the author, “churches’ provision of social services to international students raises some questions when considered in relation to ‘education export’ in Australia”: she sees it as “neoliberal privatization” and “outsourcing” of welfare services that ought to be provided by the secular state. She notes that the LDS Church and Pentecostal megachurches promote “deeply conservative positions on gender identity, (hetero)sexuality, and marriage.” But she also acknowledges the limitation of academic approaches when it comes to religious affects and expressions of faith: “the affective experience of immersion in religious scenes—even in the scholarly guise of ethnographic observation—tends to elude the clinical grasp of academic analysis.”

Market research

I wish I had with me a similar book about Vietnamese students abroad when I was posted at the French Embassy in Hanoi, covering the education sector. In our efforts to attract Vietnamese students to France, we were more or less walking in the dark. We had no market research reports, no focus group results, no customer satisfaction surveys, no communication strategy. When we organized a Study in France fair in a big hotel in Hanoi and in Ho Chi Minh City, we were overwhelmed by the number of young Vietnamese who showed up to gather information. We did invest resources to create and sustain a network of Vietnamese alumni: they were our best salespersons, and often took an active role in attracting their junior peers to the same institutions and programs from which they had graduated. A private philanthropist, who was particularly fond of elite institutions such as Ecole Polytechnique, played a tremendous role in attracting the best and the brightest Vietnamese students to France through a scholarship program. The “bourses de l’ambassade” (scholarships at the graduate level) were also very sought after, and a process was designed to guarantee the total independence of student selection. For many students, the French language was a barrier, as most courses in France were taught in French, but it was also an incentive to enroll in French language classes in Vietnam and develop a deeper engagement with French society. In our efforts to attract Vietnamese students to France, we stood halfway between economic rationality and the logic of a sovereign state. Higher education was not identified as a business sector that could generate revenue and contribute to economic growth, but as a tool of national influence and soft power. We were in competition with other foreign destinations or domestic programs, but we tended to present the Study in France experience as unique and special, not as a competitive option amongst many. Of course, a book like Dreams of Flight is not a market research report or an exhaustive survey of Chinese students in Australia. The insights it generates are, in my view, more relevant for public policy than for private sector development. In this way, it confirms my preconception that studies abroad should not be left to market forces and wealth considerations.

Love With Chinese Characteristics

26 Jun 202214 Mar 2023 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Dreadful Desires: The Uses of Love in Neoliberal China, Charlie Yi Zhang, Duke University Press, 2022.**

In Dreadful Desires, Charlie Yi Zhang advocates “a new approach” and “a different perspective” on love and neoliberalism in contemporary China. As he describes it, “My study integrates the discursive with the ethnographic and combines grave scrutiny of political economies and empirical data with upbeat examinations of popular cultures.” His grave and upbeat essay documents how a neoliberal market logic permeates expressions of love and aspirations for a good life, and how a fiercely competitive conjugal market, polarized gender relationships, and residency-differenciated precarities in turn produce willful subjects who are ready to sacrifice their well-being to maximize the interests of the state and capital. Its content and writing style also reflect his personal background and professional training. Having left China in his late twenties to pursue an academic career in the US, Zhang returned to his homeland for a few months of fieldwork in 2012 in order to complete his PhD in gender studies at Arizona State University. He was subsequently hired by the University of South Dakota to teach global studies to undergraduate students for two years, then landed a job as Associate Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies at Kentucky University, where he completed his book manuscript. During his graduate studies, his sociology professor taught him “how to combine different methodologies into [his] unique voice.” He claims to have developed “a novel theoretical and methodological approach” that builds an “epistemic ground for fundamental change.” His ambition is no less than “to lay the foundation for better futures” and “to develop a different understanding of global neoliberalism and to transform the current system.” His book is published in the Thought in the Act series edited by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, two Canadian theoreticians working at the intersection of philosophy and art critique.

Methodology and theory-building

Zhang’s methodology is far from unique in cultural studies and social science. He uses the standard anthropological method that relies upon informal conversations, focus group discussions, and direct observations collected in two Chinese cities, Hai’an and Wuxi, located in the Jiangsu province north of Shanghai. The first is a county-level city of one half-million inhabitants that encompasses rural areas and industrial zones on the south-western shores of the Yellow Sea; the second is a prefecture-level city of more than five million people in the southern delta of the Yangtze River with a rich history of silk weaving and artistic expression. During his four months of fieldwork, Zhang interviewed over a hundred rural migrants and local farmers or workers, men and women, asking questions about love, family life, and aspirations for the future. He “spent considerable time in the homes and dormitories of [his] informants” and at “various locations of production, such as construction sites, factories, small workshops, family mills, and farms.” He also participated in “nonproductive activities such as family dinners, birthday parties, weddings, festival celebrations, and mundane chores.” There are only two chapters, however, that are organized around his analysis of field data. The remaining three chapters, two of which were published in academic journals in earlier versions, offer a commentary on cultural productions and events, namely the sixtieth-anniversary ceremony of the regime’s founding in 1949, a popular TV reality show titled If You Are the One, and an analysis of middle-aged women’s passion for danmei fictions featuring same-sex relations between beautiful young men, based on a sample of sixteen fans. These chapters are written in the ethnographic tradition that combines factual description and abstract theorizing. Although he quotes data on China’s economic development and social transformation taken from the popular press and expert reports, Zhang does not use quantitative methods, structured questionnaires, or comparative case studies.

It is on the theoretical front that Zhang displays more originality and novelty. To quote from the introduction, he takes “a feminist intersectionnal approach to interrogate and untangle the mechanism that the Chinese state relies upon to define and redefine the affective parameters of desire and intimacy in binaristic terms of gender, class, sexuality, and ethno-race.” He also takes a “queer of color critique approach […] to foreground power relationships and engage the becoming aspects of the machinery to interrogate its speculative manipulation of affective ecologies.” He borrows from Judith Butler’s playbook the idea that “gender is intentional and performative” and that anatomical sex, gender identity, and embodied performance do not always align. He is attuned to the thinking of Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, and Brian Massumi, who have developed new ways of articulating affective economies to neoliberalism. Ahmed allows him to present a “postorthodox Marxist perspective” in which affect is viewed as a different form of capital, which “does not reside positively in the sign or commodity, but is produced only as an effect of its circulation.” Berlant is another important source of inspiration: a dithyrambic endorsement on the book’s back cover advances that “Zhang offers to do for love in China what Lauren Berlant, in Cruel Optimism, does for hope.” As for Massumi, also associated with the affective turn in cultural studies, Zhang borrows his model of affective temporality that conflates an anticipatory present, a promisory future and a virtualized past. All three authors allow him to address “the theoretical lacunae that leaves affect, emotions, and feelings fatally underdiscussed in scholarly examinations of neoliberal subject and world making.”

The borderless Loveland and the difference-making machinery

Zhang’s distinctive contribution to social theory is to build a bridge between emotional affect and calculative reason, between love and neoliberalism. He brings affect theory to bear on political economy reasoning and geopolitical considerations. Specifically, love and aspirations for the good life are used strategically by the state to obtain acquiescence and participation in a polarized market economy. Class disparities and gender differences are exploited by the authoritarian state to recreate competition from within and to serve capital’s productive ends. Zhang also proposes a vast array of idiosyncratic concepts and neologisms to make sense of the entaglement between reason and affect in neoliberal China. He situates his ethnography in “the borderless Loveland,” an “affectsphere” or “fantasmatic lovescape” that shapes people’s love and caring capacities in order to harness China’s national interest with the transnational interests of capital. The Loveland is to be understood as a topological notion, not a geographical concept, as the author draws “a speculative topography of the everyday sensibilities.” The Loveland extends its reach beyond mainland China; it is alternatively presented as “borderless” or within boundaries that are “indeterminate” or “expansive.” Zhang’s creative use of topology extends to the concepts of biopolitics and biopower borrowed from Michel Foucault. The first, assimilated with calculative reason and state power, follows a top-down, vertical axis; while the second, located on the immanent plane of affects, circulates horizontally. Feminist scholarship complicates this two-dimensional diagram by introducing a “multilayered and multifaceted architecture” where domination and resistance are “multidirectional and multidimensionnal.” These overlapping layers consist of gender, class, ethno-race, and sexuality. The assemblage of these orthogonal coordinates and multiple dimensions give shape to what the author calls the “difference-making machinery,” a polarizing mechanism that pits disenfranchized groups against another to allow for their compound exploitation by the nation-state and multinational corporations. This neoliberal machinery “integrates the borderless Loveland into the regulatory biopolitical system to drive and sustain China’s marketization and reintegration into the global economy.”

Dreadful Desires documents two different moves: the colonization of love and sentiments by the market and the state, and the way “lovable and love-able” subjects in turn uphold the functioning of the market and the expansion of the state’s interests. The encroachment of a neoliberal logic upon the emotional lifeworld of Chinese citizens is illustrated by the TV date game show If You Are the One, a copycat of a British TV reality show with added Chinese characteristics. The crass materialism of female participants is illustrated by the attitude of one young woman who, asked by a male suitor if she would “like to go out for a ride on my bicycle”, bluntly answers: “I would rather be crying in a BMW car!” In the show as in real life, it is standard for a Chinese woman to evaluate a potential male partner’s worth and accomplishments by asking him questions about his educational background, job, salary, amount of savings in the bank, ownership of property and cars, and so on. Indeed, having an appartment, a luxury car, a hefty savings account and a high-paying job has replaced the “four big items” (si dajian) that prospective grooms were supposed to possess under Maoist China: a bicycle, a sewing machine, a wristwatch, and a radio. A new kind of masculinity has emerged, which valorizes entrepreneurship, business acumen, and material possessions. As for women, the requisites placed upon them are no less stringent. The “three good girl” (sanhao nüsheng), a honorary title for meritous students under Maoism, used to designate girls with good morality, good learning, and good health. Now women have to respond to superlative standards of attractiveness, including breast size and leg length; hold glamorous jobs in the service sector; and be ready to carry out expanded family duties to support their husband, in-laws, and future children. These impossible requiements are exerting a heavy toll on Chinese masculinities and feminities. The amount of cash and gifts exchanged in a wedding ceremony can result in lifelong debt for the average family. Migrant workers working on construction sites or women in textile factories stand ready to sacrifice their health and well-being in the hope of a better future, if not for them, then at least for their children. But the dream of a good life is forever deferred: “the harder they try, the more they are alienated from their homes.”

Xi Jinping’s love and peace ideology

The Chinese state is complicit in the exploitation of labor by capital and the reproduction of oppositional differences out of the intersection of class, gender, and sexuality. It fuels the construction boom that sacrifices migrant workers on the altar of economic development and excludes them from the cities they have helped build. It pits categories of labor and gender roles against each other, while repressing nonnormative forms of intimity in the name of “homepatriarchy”—a portmanteau word that combines heteronormativity, male privilege, state authoritarianism, and home ownership. For Zhang, internal migrations and the hukou system of residence registration play the role that racial segregation occupies in racially-divided America or in South Africa under apartheid. Hukou registration gives access to education, medical care, basic life insurance, and other social services. It considerably enhances the value of a prospective bride or groom on the marriage market; bachelors lacking the urban residence permit must work harder and save more to improve their marriageability, or find a bride from a poorer area of China or a less-developed country such as Vietnam. To be sure, the socialist state run by the Chinese Communist Party cannot condone class hierarchies and labor exploitation. New regulation on TV dating shows now mandates diversity of participants and equality of treatment—even though the guy with the biggest property portfolio still gets the girl. Drawing upon Marxist-Leninist ideology, the party-state extolls the eradication of class differences and the liberation of China from exploitation and oppression; but in the choreographied extravaganza of the sixtieth anniversary ceremony, gender difference reemerges in the celebration of the post-reform era as a way “to conceal the new class structure and class differentiation.” The figure of Xi Jinping, construed as a benevolent father and a good husband to the nation, reinforces the patriarchal nature of the regime. The party-state offers love and harmony as a solution to internal developments and external challenges; but in the eyes of the author, “China’s love-gilded cosmopolitan dream proves no less pernicious than the hate-filled paranoia stoked by incendiary nationalists” such as Donald Trump in the United States.

Is Charlie Yi Zhang a Marxist? He shows little interest for the historical Marx, noting only his endorsement of normative heterosexualiy as the foundation for human and societal development. He prefers to borrow from Petrus Liu a “queer Marxist approach” that rejects “inclusion as a mode of social redress.” He retains from Marxism and radical thought the role of crisis and contradictions in fostering political upheaval and social change. The “difference-making machinery” is ripe with contradictions and fault lines, the first being the “contradictory needs of freewheeling capital and the border-making nation-state.” Zhang uses the concept of apparatus that he borrows from Marxist thought; but whereas for Louis Althusser apparatuses were an emanation of the state and reflected its repressive or ideological functions, Zhang refers to “a fantasmatic apparatus of desire and intimacy” that draws people to “work hard, dream big, and die slowly.” Like Marx, Zhang also believes that the role of critical theory is not just to interpret the world, but to change it. His declared goal is “to find a place where the subalterns can survive and to help lay a foundation for long-run transformation.” Exposing the dissonance between promise and fulfillment in the “borderles Loveland” is bound to send shockwaves to the system, shattering the “life-sustaining fantasy” on which it is built. His economy of affects places contradiction and change solely on the side of the reproduction of capital, neglecting entirely the relations of production and the reproduction of labor that form the bedrock of Marx’s thought. Indeed, borrowing from Sara Ahmed’s “economic model of emotions” where capital and affect are the sole factors of production and reproduction, he completely ignores labor as the primary scene of class antagonism and alienation. The only form of labor that is acknowledged in this affect-dominated economy is emotional labor. Indeed, this neglect of “hard labor” that characterizes postmodern political economy reflects the disengagement of the younger generation of Chinese men and women, who shun factory or construction work in favor of lower-paid jobs in the service sector.

The cultural unconscious

To simplify Zhang’s thesis, love in China is shaped by the market, and the market in turn is moved by love, while the party-state sustains this dynamics by accentuating polarization in society. Charlie Yi Zhang is not the first one to raise the issue of love and sentiments in post-Mao China. Yan Yunxiang wrote a splendid ethnography on Private Life Under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, while Lisa Rofel used her extended fieldwork in a Chinese silk factory to write about Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. These two ethnographies are based on solid empirical ground, cross-generational historical depth, and a broad-ranging critique of the meaning of modernity and social change during transition from socialism to the market. They have become classics in the anthropology literature, and allow us to understand the evolution of Chinese masculinities and feminities through experience-near concepts and thick descriptions. By comparison, Dreadful Desire is relying on more shallow observation and thinner engagement. The author attempts to compensate the limited time spent on the field with ambitious efforts at theorizing and conceptualizing, drawing from a broad range of authors and subdisciplines. But the experience-far concepts and philosophical metaphors like the “borderless Loveland” and the “difference-making mechanism” taught me more about the context of academic production on North American campuses than on the travails of migrant workers and urban citizens in Xi Jinping’s China. There is a cultural unconscious at work in the emphasis put on “the pursuit of happiness,” the possibility of a “new birth of freedom” that the author experiences while moving to the US, the protestant urge to publicly confess one’s personal background and life expectations, and the belief in the transition from a love-inpaired present to a “love-enabled future.” The proliferation of differences, gendered or otherwise, that the author attributes to a Chinese ideological state apparatus, better characterizes in my view the scissiparity reproduction of ever-increasing subfields of cultural studies and the multiplication of gendered, classed, sexualized, and ethno-racialized categories brought forth by identity politics on American campuses.

The Moral Economy of Management Consulting in China

20 Jun 202223 Jun 2022 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China, Kimberly Chong, Duke University Press, 2018.**

Best Practice There was a time, not so long ago, when the “China Dream” was to make China more like the West. Foreign multinational companies were invested with a transformative mission: they would teach the Chinese how to do business the modern way. They would bring with them practices of good corporate governance, increased productivity, and organizational efficiency. Global consulting firms were at the vanguard of this transfer of management knowledge. They opened shop in China to ride the wave of globalization, and they applied to Chinese firms the tried-and-true management techniques that had made their fortune in the West. Best Practice: Management Consulting and the Ethics of Financialization in China is a product of such times. As part of her PhD in anthropology, the author spent sixteen months of fieldwork during 2008-2009 in a global management consultancy operating from Dalian, Beijing, and Shanghai. The firm’s mission was to provide services to Chinese companies, including Chinese state-owned enterprises, in order to help them achieve their digital transformation and become viable capitalist entities. The anthropologist’s conclusion is that Chinese state capitalism proves remarkably compatible with the logic of shareholder value maximization, which she describes as financialization. Consulting firms are in the business of making financial capitalism come true, and they do so by creating ethical subjects whose moral outlook and cultural norms are made commensurate with the cultural values of finance. I take a different perspective. I believe the original China Dream was a delusion, which led the West to sell the Chinese the rope with which they will try to hang us. The corporate practices and ethical values that financial capitalism promotes are incompatible with state capitalism as it operates in China. The recent wave of CEO arrests, company delistings from the New York Stock Exchange, governmental clampdown on tech firms, and negation of minority shareholders’ rights are just the first instantiations of a repressive trend that will make China less and less like the West.

Getting access

Multinational companies are notoriously difficult for anthropologists to observe and rarely grant authorization to do fieldwork. Kimberly Chong is proud of getting access and of studying up the corporate ladder. But did she? The consulting firm she boasts of cracking open let her enter through a side door, and allowed her only minimal access to its clients. She spent one year in Dalian teaching English and providing soft skills training to the employees of the shared service center where the firm was outsourcing its back-office operations worldwide. She succeeded in moving to the front office in Beijing as an unpaid external contractor, and she was able to interview consultants and to follow them to client sites where they were supervising the introduction of new IT systems in Chinese companies. She then spent a few weeks as a junior employee in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) division of the firm’s China practice. Considering her limited access and lack of prior experience, the amount of information she was able to gather on the internal workings of the consulting firm is no small feat. She compares her achievement to Karen Ho’s ethnography of a Wall Street investment bank, published in 2009 by Duke University Press. In Liquidated (which I reviewed here), Karen Ho was able to show how investment bankers tend to project their own experience onto the economy by aspiring to make everything “liquid” or tradable, including jobs and people. In her own ethnography, Kimberly Chong shows how consultants embody the same values of “best practice” and high performance that they use to reshape corporate China in their own image. The ethos of outsourcing, cost-cutting, and business process engineering, which they apply to Chinese companies, also defines the inner workings of the consulting firm.

Best Practice can be read at two levels. On the one hand, it is an ethnography of a global consulting firm which applies uniform techniques in its own management and in the expertise it sells to its clients. On the other hand, Kimberly Chong shows how these best practices are adapted to the Chinese context and how they help to shape moral subjects in post-Mao China. The first aspect makes Best Practice a contribution to the booming field of critical management studies. The consulting industry has a bad image among anthropologists and ethnographers, and indeed in the eyes of large segments of society. Consultants are accused of peddling false dreams and empty recipes or, in the words of a popular critique, they “borrow your watch to tell you the time.” They are often at a loss of describing what they do and what constitutes their field of expertise. Some can be very cynical about it: “Management consultancy is a scam,” says one consultant. Others insist on the intangible value they create by standardizing business processes and promoting the diffusion of best practice. A seasoned consultant can often devote time and expertise to a project that staff employees would be unable to implement on their own. They can also help bring new life to organizations that are stuck, or shift resources to help companies grow or move in a different direction. Kimberley Chong describes her socialization into the profession: “I became proficient in their jargon of acronyms and buzzwords, and could quickly put together a PowerPoint presentation, complete with animation.” But she kept her critical distance and did not adhere to the ideology of the profession. For her, “the power of management consultants, who continue to be hired in spite of their failure to deliver on their promises, derives from their capacity to naturalize the moral actions of restructuring and other forms of intervention as purely economic or technocratic.”

The culture of performance

But global consulting firms do not operate in a vacuum. Context matters, and the purportedly “global” managerial concepts of efficiency and productivity are interpreted and negotiated by Chinese employees in very distinctive ways. Chinese consultants who failed to adhere to the tenets of performance management were said to put the enterprise at risk for failing to inculcate the required mind-set among their Chinese clientele. Observations suggested that knowledge-based industries in China were afflicted by a problem of insufficient corporate professionalism, and that Chinese employees lacked the social norms and dispositions of global work. How else to explain the high turnover rate, the opportunistic behavior, the lack of personal accountability, the attempts to game the system of managing by numbers, and the inapplicability of performance management tools that plagued the consultancy’s inner workings in China? Many assumed the problem was with “Chinese culture” or with the inheritance of a socialist work ethos. As Kimberly Chong notes, “culture in this setting is a far cry from the conceptions of culture familiar to anthropologists. Here it is something that can be managed and controlled.” Culture is deployed as a tool for producing financial value and for shaping Chinese workers into good corporate subjects who will think and behave in accordance with global business norms. But Chinese employees’ conception of culture tended to differ from the one dictated by the management consultancy. Their stated ideal was the development of suzhi, a term often translated as “human quality” that describes a person’s moral characteristics and its capacity to contribute to the nation as a whole. Particularly in state-owned enterprises, consulting was sold as a means of increasing the quality of employees rather than reducing the number of staff on payroll—even if the unavowed goal was to downsize and lay off redundant staff.

IT-enabled outsourcing and downsizing was one of the ways in which consultants sought to improve organizational performance. By decomposing tasks, formalizing processes, and measuring results, consultants were able to measure each employee’s contribution to the firm’s financial results and to divest the activities that did not contribute sufficiently to the company’s bottom line. But the rules of management by results, financial metrics, and the integrated IT solutions that consultants brought to performance extended far beyond outsourcing and offshoring. Kimberley Chong was able to observe the use of management tools at several stages of the business process. Most of her observations relate to human resource management and the optimization of employees’ performance. The evaluation of each individual’s performance, and the setting of yearly goals and targets, consumed a lot of time and energy. But she also describes staff training in “crafting value propositions” (selling consultancy work to clients) and the deployment of CRM and ERP software—respectively, consumer relationship management tools and enterprise resource planning systems designed to monitor real-time productivity. In doing so, she notes three surprising facts. First, new measures and management systems were all tied to total shareholder return or TSR: the maximization of shareholder value (the company’s share price) was the overarching goal espoused by all consultants, and the single-minded focus of the consulting company was to improve financial performance. Second, the management tools on which the consulting firm relied were not proprietary: they were bought off-the-shelf from other consultancies or adapted from recent management fads, from the Balanced Scorecard to the Change Tracking Map or the Employee Engagement Dial. The use of acronyms tended to obfuscate the trivial notions on which these standard tools were based and that formed the bread-and-butter of consultancy work. Third, key notions or metrics were left undefined or were conspicuously absent from the firm’s official literature. All consultants knew their evaluation rested on their “billability,” or ability to generate cash-flow, but the notion, like the amount of the overall compensation package, was never publicly discussed. Despite all the talk over employee engagement and motivation, turnover figures or satisfaction rates were never disclosed.

Performative management

Performance is a key concept in Best Practice, and consultancy work was performative in at least three distinct meanings of the word. As in performance evaluation or the design of high-performance organizations, performance is used as a synonym of financial results and the creation of shareholder value. The focus on performance is exclusive of any other form of personal commitment or collective endeavor: even charity activities—under the label of corporate social responsibility—have as a stated goal the strengthening of commitment and engagement of employees, which is measured by their contribution to the firm’s financial results. Performance is also a show, a game that people play or a story that a group of actors tell on the stage. “Appearing more efficient” is the reason why SOEs undertook the considerable investment of installing ERP systems to signal to investors that they had the managerial equipment identified with a modern corporation. This embodied performance depends heavily on context: among private clients, consultants had to look always busy and motivated by profit, while in state-owned enterprises they could be more lax and take long naps or give each other neck and shoulder massage. The performance of consultants reflects not only profit maximization and global norms of efficiency, but also cultural values and a shared sense of morality. But the expertise of management consultants is performative in another meaning: it “has the power to make its theories and descriptions of the world come alive in new built form, new machines and new bodies.” Management concepts and tools don’t just reflect particular ways of thinking; they also create ways of thinking, and make the world imagined by management consultants come true. This is the thesis that Karen Ho developed in her book Liquidated: financial assets and people were made liquid and tradeable, which meant, in the end, dispensable or constantly running the risk of being liquidated. Kimberly Chong uses a related concept: management consulting develops cultures of conmensuration, through which new economic imperatives, forms of value, and power relations are legitimized and naturalized. The job of management consultants is to make corporate culture commensurate with profit maximization. Likewise, financial capitalism is made commensurate with existing logics of Chinese development and post-Mao modernity. Through commensuration, consultants create a structural relation between two different entities.

In the Chinese context, did management consulting succeed in making the world of financial capitalism come true? Yes and no. As with socialism, capitalism in China comes up with Chinese characteristics. As the author reminds us, “the state remains a dominant market actor and guiding force for capitalism in China.” Financial results and profitability are not seen as exclusive of state goals, but rather as a means of advancing the public good and of shaping “quality people” with high suzhi. Chinese consultants embody this mix between private corporate ethics and public nationalist values. Most of them are haigui or “sea turtles,” which designates people who go overseas for educational and professional purposes but then return to China as entrepreneurs or to work in waiqi, or foreign companies. They are fully westernized in terms of personal habits and work ethos, drinking coffee rather than tea and sending their kids to international schools, but are also motivated by strong sentiments of love and fidelity toward the Chinese nation. Even if they weren’t, the heavy hand of the state is never far away to remind them of their liminal position. Kimberly Chong notices a senior executive who conspicuously displays a poster with all the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in his office. She does not seem to be aware that all companies, including waiqi, have to accommodate within themselves the functioning of a cell of the CCP. The state apparatus, controlled by the Party, has to decide on the contracting to a foreign consulting company the task of preparing state-owned enterprises for public listings on overseas stock exchange. As mentioned above, this task is largely performative: becoming a listed company requires not only a focus on profits and the share price, but also the appearance of transparency, accountability, and efficiency that will convince foreign investors to join the game. But the Party’s leadership can always put an end to the performance of foreign consultants, and change the rules by which the game has to be played.

Maximizing suzhi

Such change was slowly emerging when Kimberly Chong was doing her fieldwork, and is now fully apparent. The goal of the party-state is not to maximize profits or to create value for shareholders. An alternative goal would be to maximize suzhi or “human quality”–as defined by the state, and based on the instruments of social control and collective discipline. Other corporate goals might include assuming world leadership in key economic sectors, developing self-reliance and minimizing dependence on Western technologies, or achieving post-Mao visions of “building a paradise” and achieving socialist modernization. These state goals are only partly compatible with the maximization of shareholder value, and are particularly detrimental to minority shareholders’ rights—the metric by which the efficiency of a financial system is evaluated in the academic literature on law and finance. The Chinese state has proven its readiness to sacrifice economic efficiency when its core interests were at stake, and to destroy shareholder value on a grand scale in order to regain control of vast swathes of the economy. The time since Kimberly Chong completed her research has also seen a sharp increase in the use of data to develop new forms of state surveillance and social control. Foreign consulting companies were originally allowed to enter the Chinese market in order to spread the use of information technology systems and data management tools. The corporatization of state-owned enterprises required a radical overhaul of managerial practices, while new firms in the private sector benefited from the influx on best practices and cutting-edge technologies. As the author notes, ERP systems and human resource management tools are designed to standardize working practices and act as a system of surveillance, documenting where, when, and how long each employee spends on any one task. But the rise of artificial intelligence and data mining technologies have vastly increased the possibilities of managing by data. Due to the size of the population, the lack of protection of privacy rights, and the innovative spirit of a new breed of entrepreneurs, Chinese companies like Huawei, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi have become world leaders in information technologies, competing head-to-head with the American GAFA formed by Google, Amazon, Facebook (now Meta), and Apple. Under the strong monitoring of the party-state, new forms of data management and surveillance capitalism with Chinese characteristics might play the role formerly devoted to foreign consultants and Western IT leaders.

Chinese Movie Stars Are Beautiful and Vulgar

11 Jun 2022 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium, Mila Zuo, Duke University Press, 2022.**

Vulgar Beauty Everything has been written about the “male gaze” and the fetishization of Asian bodies on cinema screens. As film studies and feminist scholarship make it clear, white male heterosexuals fantasize about oriental ladies and make the exotic rhyme with the erotic. But Mila Zuo is not interested in white male cinema viewers: her focus is on the close-up faces of Chinese movie stars on the screen, which she finds both beautiful and vulgar in a sense that she elaborates upon in her book Vulgar Beauty. As a film scholar with a knack for philosophy and critical studies, she builds film theory and cinema critique based on her own experience as an Asian American who grew up in the Midwest feeling the only Asian girl in town and who had to rely on movie screens to find kindred faces and spirits. As she recalls, “When on rare occasion I did see an Asian woman’s face on television, a blush of shame and fascination blanketed me.” True to her own experience, she begins each chapter with a short recollection of her personal encounter with Chinese movies or Asian movie stars. The films that she selects in Vulgar Beauty, and the film theory that she develops, are not about them (American white males): they are about us (Chinese-identifying female spectators and actresses) and even about me (as an individual with her own subjectivity and life history). Her project is to “theorize vulgar Chinese feminity from the purview of a diasporic Chinese/Asian/American woman spectator.” She is “acting Chinese” in her effort to build film theory based on Chinese forms of knowledge and sense-making: the five medicinal flavors (bitter, salty, pungent, sweet, and sour); the practice of face reading or mian xiang; the role of blandness (dan) in the Chinese aesthetic tradition; the materialist cosmogony of traditional Chinese medicine; etc. Her conviction is that Chinese (or Asian American) film studies should not reproduce established patterns of normative knowledge production, but should be truly innovative and challenging even if it runs the risk of being vulgar.

From the male gaze to the female stare

In her endeavor, Mila Zuo does not start from zero. She enters a field rich in intellectual contributions, reflexive theorizing, and disciplinary specificities. The hallmark of Anglo-American cinema studies, and what sets it apart in a field previously dominated by European male theoretical thinkers, is its focus on identity politics and feminist critique. To the concept of the “male gaze,” first introduced by Laura Mulvey in 1975, Asian American feminist scholars have added a rich area of conceptual notions and propositions: the hyper-sexualization of petite Asian bodies; the inscrutability and artifice of the Asian face; the infantilization of actresses through notions of cuteness, perverse innocence, and capricious behavior; the masculinist ideology of Asian virtues such as submissiveness, modesty, and self-restraint; the idealization of filial piety and sentimental attachments. The corpus of theoretical references has been extended to include Lacanian psychoanalysis, Black feminism, and new materialism, all of which are discussed in Mila Zuo’s book. Efforts have been made to break off disciplinary barriers and academic compartmentalization: Vulgar Beauty does not limit itself to cinema from mainland China and includes discussions about blockbuster movies from Hollywood, art films from France, and non-movies such as Youtube videos of stand-up comedy actors. It remains within the paradigm of identity politics, with its emphasis on representing nation, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. But in focusing on female beauty, it raises a question that earlier feminist scholars had deliberately side-stepped. Indeed, in her seminal essay on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” that introduced the notion of the gaze, Laura Mulvey stated provocatively: “It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article.” Mila Zuo’s intention is not to destroy beauty, but to reveal it and to connect it to the basic sensations of taste, smell, and body touch.

In the decades since Mulvey’s essay was first published, film and cultural critics have been extending the implications of her work. The paradigm of the male gaze is subject to a law of diminishing returns and has now reached a dead end. Synonym with male voyeurism and domination, it equates lust with caution and defines beauty according to a narrow ideological agenda shaped by the drives of the actively-looking male heterosexual subject. On the other hand, Asian American scholarship is experiencing a renaissance of sorts, a new birth fueled by the insights of critical studies that focus on differences in class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ableism, animacy, materiality, and affect. It is from these new strands of inquiry that Mila Zuo draws her theoretical apparatus. To the notion of the gaze, which presupposes a male heterosexual spectator, she substitutes the concept of staring, which leaves open the sexual identity and ethnicity of the viewer. “It would be more apt to say that stardom, an amplification of the actor as mythic and exceptional, engage the eye through an incitement to stare.” The gaze connotes mastery and possession on the side of the male viewer and a passive, submissive role, for the woman on the screen. The stare responds to an interpellation and is always in waiting of an impossible returning glance: “movie stars appear to invite staring.” In particular, Chinese stars hail Chinese-identifying spectators into feeling Chinese. Chineseness is used here as a notion that is supposed to be “performative, contingent, and nonessentializing.” As Rey Chow first proposed, Chineseness is about seeing and being seen: “the jouissance of this experience lies in the elusiveness of seeing the act of seeing oneself, as well as fantasizing about others seeing us seeing ourselves as a validating act.”

Adding spice to a bland recipe

Racial beauties can elicit such staring and generate a form of perverse enjoyment. Several chapters focus on movies where there is only one Asian character (as in Hannibal Rising, Irma Vep, Twin Peaks, and The Crow). Ethnicity so conceived borders on racial appropriation: as bell hooks observed, it adds “a spice, a seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.” In Hannibal Rising, this spice has a bitter taste: Gong Li plays the role of a Japanese lady who trains the young Nazi-escaping Hannibal Lecter in the soft and hard arts of ikebana and swordsmanship. As one viewer commented, “Hannibal Rising puts the blame for a legendary serial killer where it belongs: with the Nazis. And the Communists. And the Japanese.” In Irma Vep and Twin Peaks, Maggie Cheung and Joan Chen add a salty and cool flavor to an otherwise predominantly white cast. Cheung, playing the role of an underworld criminal in a film-within-the-film, wears a tight latex costume modeled after Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman outfit and finds it cool. “Like the latex encasing her body, Maggie’s racial body becomes a formal property through which the elasticity of French identity is tested.” Irma Vep became an “infatuation film” for the director Olivier Assayas and his lead actress, as the two fell in love on set and subsequently married. Twin Peaks was the first American TV show to cast an Asian actress with a leading role, as the pilot episode opens with a closeup on Joan Chen’s cold makeup face. But she disappears midway in season two as her soul (or at least her face) becomes trapped inside a desk drawer knob (or whatever). In The Crow, the atmosphere becomes pungent: actress Bai Ling, herself a hot mess and a regular on TV talk shows, embodies the limits of liberal openness and multiculturalism in a “fascistic-gothic” film that legitimizes spectacular forms of punishment against racial others.

Mila Zuo has assimilated the lessons of Asian American scholarship from the past two decades and applies it to cinema studies. She replaces Asian Americans, and in particular Chinese immigrants, in a long history of victimization and racial segregation. She mentions the Los Angeles Chinatown mob lynching of eighteen Chinese immigrants in 1871, the lethal gas execution of a Chinese convict by the state of Nevada in 1921, and the ethnic tensions between Asian and African American communities during the 1992 riots in South Central Los Angeles. She does not develop the trope of the model minority, but gives voice to Asian-American standup comedians who are able to transform racial alienation into sour jokes and laughter. Charlene Yi and Ali Wong are anything but expressions of the model minority myth. The first, whose offbeat improvisations appear on Youtube videos and who self-identifies as a nonbinary “they”, deconstructs the myth of romantic love in a road movie where they set out to interview random people about love. The second develops a form of bawdy humor and off-color cynicism, as when she comments on her abundant vaginal secretions at age eighteen: “Oh, my god, it was so juicy. You could just blow bubble wand with it, just… ‘I slime you, I slime you. Ghostbusters!’” The model minority Asian in America is supposed to be obedient, hardworking, and self-effacing. By contrast, these comedians elicit laughter by turning their social awkwardness into transgressions that evoke the flavorful aesthetic of sourness. Think of a baby eating a lemon for the first time: as Mila Zuo notes, “the sour is capricious and unexpected; it gets off rhythm, off clock.” Likewise, “racial sour” follows “another tempo, pace, and beat that is out of step and misaligned with dominant demands of time.”

Bitter and sweet

The first Chinese movies consumed by international audiences left a bitter taste to the spectators. In the post-Mao era, bitterness emerged as a structure of feeling, a way to reckon with a traumatic past by “recalling bitterness” during China’s feudal and communist periods and exalting nationalist resilience. Actress Gong Li emerged as the sensual embodiment of China’s bitter flavor, participating in the process of national wound healing while making the aesthetic of “eating bitterness” (chiku) suitable for worldwide consumption. Through a close reading of Red Sorghum, Mila Zuo shows how Gong became the suffering embodiment of China-as-woman, generating libidinal attraction and nationalist longings for reparative justice. As the Chinese saying goes, ”you can’t really know sweetness until you eat bitterness.” But the tastes dictated by Chinese authorities and the flavors favored by cosmopolitan audiences do not always align. The pungent atmosphere of Lust, Caution directed by Ang Lee and starring Tang Wei created a violent backlash among Chinese communities in China and abroad for its vivid sex scenes and moral ambiguity. Recent saccharine comedies like The Knot and If You Are the One imagine Taiwan’s reunification with the mainland through cross-strait romantic stories and are conceived as a channel for Chinese soft power propaganda. They cast Taiwan as “a female partner who, even if she hesitates, ultimately defers to a benevolent, masculine China.” But a close reading of how Taiwanese stars Vivian Hsu and Shu Qi are “acting Chinese” in these movies tells a different story. Hsu’s over-the-top performance in The Knot, where her display of excessive sweetness turns mushy and cheesy, betrays the desperation of soft power’s cloying and calculating tendencies. Noting the frequent use of fade-to-blacks and story cuts, Mila Zuo notes that “the film’s stammering fades gesture to its rheumatic problem—it has a joint issue, in both formal and politico-ideological terms.” As for Shu Qi’s performance in If You Are the One (a film that gave birth to a sequel and a TV show), it is characterized by the same excess of saccharine and glucose. Commenting on the heroine’s remark that “soft persimmons taste the best,” Mila Zuo notes that “persimmons, like kiwis, should be eaten when they are a little overripe, that is, when their flesh begins to soften and bloat.” Unbeknownst to the propaganda apparatus, the soft-sweetness of overripe fruits can act as an antidote of nationalist poison.

Mila Zuo’s book is structured around the five tastes of bitter, salty, pungent, sweet, and sour. These flavors or weidao are more than descriptions of culinary savor: they are aesthetic, sensorial, and affective categories that play a prominent role in traditional Chinese medicine and in Eastern epistemologies. They express a vision of the world that engages the whole cosmos: for example, “a bitter taste in the mouth denotes a disturbance of the element wood in the body, which is internally related to nerves and locomotion, and externally related to the season of spring, the direction of east, and the period of dawn.” Flavors not only make for a good dish but also an ordered cosmos: as Sun Tzu wrote, “Harmony is like soup. The salt flavoring is the other to the bitter, and the bitter is the other to the salt. With these two ‘others’ combining in due proportions and a new flavor emerging, this is what is expressed in ‘harmony.’” What flavors do to the body, how they are internally processed and digested by bodily organs and the fluids or scents they generate, is a reflection of the cosmic balance between the various elements. Material ingredients and spices also combine with affects: for example, salty coldness and sour anger are two ways to cope with aggression and xenophobia. Using epistemologies that are relevant to the formations of China, Mila Zuo brings a new perspective on cinema studies that otherwise rely on western theorizations and abstract categories. In particular, tasting and eating provide foundational understandings of beauty: a woman can be described as tender (nennü) or as ripe (shunü), and the weidao (sensory essence) of charm includes the scent of her skin, the softness of her body, and the sweetness of her smile as well as the bitterness of her tears and the saltiness of her perspiration.

Vulgar is not vulgar

I had trouble understanding what the author of Vulgar Beauty meant by “vulgar.” Applying it to Gong Li (an actress I tend to idolize and fetishize) seemed to me not only wrong, but also blasphemous. Even if I now get it, I am not sure I agree with the use of the term as characterized by Mila Zuo. As she explains, vulgar does not always imply vulgarity, just like sexy does not always relate to sex. “Vulgar senses” designate the bodily faculties of tasting, smelling and touching, in opposition to the more noble sensory abilities of seeing and hearing. It also refers to the “bad tastes” of the bitter, salty, pungent, and sour, as opposed to more pleasant savors of sweet and bland. Mila Zuo opposes “a paradigm of visuality and aurality, on which cinema is predicated, to an affective structure based on the lower sensorium”: one can taste and smell a movie as much as one can appreciate its visual scenes and sonic atmosphere. She also implies that her analysis is vulgar—not because she uses the word f*** several times, but due to her materialist orientation and use of “bad ideas” borrowed from Chinese cosmology. She deploys vulgarity as a critical methodology to reinscribe the Chinese body into the core of media studies. Her film commentary is sensitive to the material aspects of beauty—the “minor acts” of “eye tearing, skin perspiring, smiles cracking, fingers pointing, legs waddling.” Chinese actresses and Asian American comedians can be vulgar in a more common sense—lacking distinction and poise as defined in a white Anglo-Saxon context. The book opens with a scene starring Zhang Ziyi performing sajiao, or childish behavior directed toward a male partner, and there is certainly a lack of class and decorum in this display of self-infantilization. The same can be said of the book cover in which Joan Chen from Twin Peaks applies makeup facing a mirror in a scene that usually remains off stage. “Acting Chinese” means displacing the Western canon of beauty by including the lower senses and material elements that make vulgar beauty generative and beautiful.

The Artistic Avant-Garde in 1960s Japan

28 May 202228 May 2022 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan, William Marotti, Duke University Press, 2013.**

Money Trains Guillotines “Dada” exists in the Japanese language as a category outside the realm of aesthetics and art history. The word “dada”, as in the expression dada wo koneru, is used to describe selfish behavior that lacks sense. It is also an idiom for “spoiling.” A kid throwing a tantrum can be called “dada”, or a teenager’s prank, or an adult acting childish. A popular theory derives the expression from Dadaism, the avant-garde art movement born in Zürich in 1916, but real etymology and kanji characters actually connect it to the Japanese language. Perhaps the false etymology is not wrong after all. Dadaism always had a special affinity with Japan. In the German language as in Japanese, the term may have derived from baby talk or child’s speak. Tristan Tzara’s affirmation “Dada means nothing” echoes the teachings of Zen masters and the Japanese concept of mu, or nothingness. The Dada artistic movement entered Japan soon after its birth in Europe during the First World War: in 1923, Mavo, a Dada group founded by Japanese artists Murayama Tomoyoshi, Yanase Masamu and others, held its first exhibition at the Sensō-ji temple in Tokyo. Japanese Dada may have been even more explosive than its European versions: the art review Mavo originally came with a firecracker attached to its cover. The poets Tsuji Jun and Takahashi Shinkichi were also pionneers of Dadaism in Japan, blending it with Taoism and Zen Buddhism. Dadaism then disappeared from the scene, only to resurface in the late 1950s as the Neo-Dada Group, an art collective featuring Akasegawa Genpei, Arakawa Shūsaku, Ariyoshi Arata, and a dozen other artists. Dada’s influence in Japan can be observed in a variety of cultural expressions such as surrealism, pop art, Fluxus, noise music, and even a monster figure in the popular TV series “Ultraman.” The kaiju character “Dada”, with distinctive cubist features, was created as an extension of Dadaism and avant-garde art and became a recurrent feature in the series.

Dada’s Not Dead

Many artistic acts and performances reviewed in Money, Trains, and Guillotines may fall under the umbrella of Dadaism, although only a minority of artists covered in this book were affiliated to the short-lived Neo-Dada movement. Printing giant 1,000-yen banknotes and getting sued for it; plotting to install a guillotine in front of the compound of the Imperial Palace; or performing art actions along the Yamanote train line: these are some of the disruptive performances that William Marotti reviews in his book, recasting a period alive with student movements, political clashes, labor struggles, and radical theorizing. More than “dada,” a moniker that characterized the period was hantai or han-, meaning “anti-.” Students demonstrated against the renewal of the US-Japan security treaty under the slogan Anpo hantai, or “down with the security treaty.” Neo-Dada artists joined them in their protests, covering their bodies with tracts and slogans, while sometimes shouting the rallying cry Anfo hantai, or “down with informal art.” The expression han-geijutsu, or “anti-art,” was coined at the time to characterize these various artistic movements. In 1960, the art critic Tōno Yoshiaki used it to describe the sculpture-object of artist Kūdo Tetsumi titled Zōshokusei rensa hannō, or “Proliferation chain reaction.” Inspired by anti-theater and anti-novel, the expression of “anti-art” led to a lively debate between art historians Miyakawa Atsushi and Takashina Shūji. Some critics, such as Kawakita Rinmei, defending the tradition of Japanese art, characterized anti-art artworks or performances as the production of demented rockabilly fans. Others, such as the surrealist poet and art critic Takiguchi Shūzō, who held a monthly column in the Yomiuri newspaper, encouraged young artists to push the limits of artistic expression and experiment with new art forms.

The Yomiuri newspaper played a key role in the emergence of this “anti-art” art scene. Newspapers in Japan are more than newspapers: they also sponsor art exhibitions, organize conferences, finance their own professional sport teams, and publish books written by their staff, among other activities. The Yomiuri, situated at the center-right of the political spectrum, was nothing but progressive and anti-establishment in its art choices during the period. Starting in 1949, it sponsored a yearly event modeled on nineteenth-century France’s Salon des indépendants, later labelled the Yomiuri Indépendant, first held at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in Ueno Park. Competing at first with the Nihon Indépendant organized by the Japan Fine Art Association in the same location, it took on a new identity in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the participation of a new generation of artists proposing increasingly puzzling and provocative objets, installations, and performance elements. In April 1961, a major exhibition titled Gendai bijutsu no jikken (“Experimentations in contemporary art”), held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and sponsored by the Yomiuri, displayed the works of sixteen new artists, among which Arakawa Shusaku, Kudō Tetsumi, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, Kikuhata Mokuma, Ochi Osamu, Yoshinaka Taizō, Motonaga Sadamasa, Tanaka Atsuko, etc. A predilection for art incorporating junk or transforming junk into increasingly enigmatic objets drew the attention of the outside world. Facing criticism, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, the site of the Yomiuri Indépendant, issued new regulations regarding the type of works that could be displayed. Were to be forbidden “works including a mechanism producing loud or unpleasant noise, works emitting a stinking odor or using perishable material, works using sharp objects that could cause injuries, works that leave the public with an unpleasant sensation and that violate the rules of public hygiene, works using sand or gravel that could damage the floor and walls of the museum, works directly hanging from the ceiling, etc.” Faced with such restrictions, artists prepared to stage a boycott, and the Yomiuri group finally put an end to the yearly exhibition in 1964.

A crucible for artistic creativity

William Marotti devotes two chapters to the history of the Yomiuri Indépendant. Its beginnings in 1949 were unappealing: fresh out of wartime collaboration and a long labor strike, the managers of the Yomiuri Shimbun wanted to whitewash their conservative image by sponsoring the arts and encouraging democratization. The creation of the yearly exhibition in 1949 occasioned both protests and a fair degree of confusion: it bore the same name as the Nihon Indépendant organized by the Nihon bijutsukai (Japan Fine Art Association), and was far less prestigious than the official Nitten exhibition (Nihon bijutsu tenrankai), divided into its five sections of Japanese Style and Western Style Painting, Sculpture, Craft as Art, and Calligraphy. First displaying a motley crew of professional artists and amateurs, it gradually became the center of a constellation of interconnected artists and art groups. It was, according to Akasegawa Genpei, a “crucible” in which the work of young artists, including his own, could combine and coalesce to acquire a certain degree of cohesion, intensity, and purpose. The Yomiuri Anpan, as the exhibition was also known, fulfilled the original goal of its creators in fostering a vigorous, critical, and anti-conformist art scene. Avant-garde art spilled out of the museum, as in Takamatsu Jirō’s Cord series (Himo) extending out of the museum and in Ueno Park, or was expelled from in precinct when Kazakura Shō engaged in nude performances in front of onlookers. Many of the exhibits were not artworks in the traditional sense: they were created for the space and duration of the exhibition and were simply abandoned afterwards. Performance pieces were by nature time- and space-specific. The Yomiuri Indépendant nonetheless featured seminal works and performances that were memorialized and displayed in retrospective exhibitions, such as The 1960’s : a decade of change in contemporary Japanese art (1960 nendai: gendai bijutsu no tenkanki) held in 1981 at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, or Japon des avant-gardes 1910-1970 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1988.

The early 1960s witnessed the blossoming of many art collectives. Some of them developed an art scene outside of Tokyo, with few contacts to the avant-garde mainstream but a radical impulse that acted as a harbinger of things to come. The Gutai collective, founded in 1954 in Osaka and animated by Yoshihara Jirō, was a fascinating attempt to conflate art and performance, staging its first happenings before and independently from the New York avant-garde. Considering the fact that Life magazine devoted a photo reportage to the activities of Gutai in 1956, it is well possible that the Japanese avant-garde group influenced the New York experimental art scene and not the other way around. But Gutai remained a provincial affair, and it is only in the early 1960s that its destructive impulse was picked up by young artists in Tokyo. In addition to the Neo Dada Group, avant-garde art collectives included the Time School (jikanha) of Nakazawa Ushio, Nagano Shōzō, and Tanaka Fuji, the Music Group of Tone Yasunao, Kosugi Takehisa, and Mizuno Shūkō, and the group Zero jigen (Zero Dimension) with Katō Yoshihiro. The High Red Center, formed in 1963, was composed of Takamatsu Jirō, Akasegawa Genpei, and Nakanishi Natsuyuki. The first character of each name (Taka or high, Aka=red, Naka=center) led to the name of the collective, who took as its symbol a big exclamation mark. The group weighed the publication of an aborted plan to raise a giant guillotine in the Imperial Plaza, drawing proposals for two possible alternative configurations for the guillotine. In the context of the times, this was not only empty provocation: a writer, Fukuzawa Shichirō, had been the target of a deadly right-wing attack in 1960 for publishing a short story in which the imperial family was beheaded amid joyous festivity.

Counterfeit art

But perhaps the most radical act plotted by one of these conspiratory artists emerged out of artistic banality. Akasegawa’s 1,000-yen project was a classic attempt to make enlarged copies of the Japanese banknote featuring Prince Shōtoku using crude reproduction techniques and to display the monochrome works in various formats: as work in progress, framed pictures, or wrapping material for readymade objets. First exhibited at the 1963 Yomiuri Indépendant, the art project fell under the radar screen of Japanese authorities until the arrest of a Waseda University student prompted police to search the apartment of a magazine editor, leading to the discovery of Akasegawa Genpei’s 1,000-yen series. Akasegawa’s works—monochrome, single-sided, prepared on a range of qualities of paper, and often enlarged—could hardly have been intended to pass as currency. But according to public prosecutors, the act of reproducing banknotes fell under a 1895 law controlling the imitation of currency, establishing provision for prosecuting mozō (creating something confusable with currency) and gizō (counterfeiting). What followed was a protracted judicial trial that sometimes turned the Tokyo High Court into a scene of happenings. In several articles and literary works, Akasegawa articulated a complex critique of the pseudo-reality of money, identifying it as an agent of hidden forms of domination supported by state authority and by the policing of commonsense understandings of crime, of art, and of public welfare. In a parallel case regarding the abridged translation of a Marquis de Sade novel, the court asserted the state’s right to criminalize any form of artistic expression if it was found to be injurious to the public welfare, unlimited by constitutional restrictions and based on statuses dating back to the Meiji era.

The fact that the police state and the judicial system were mobilized in a defense of the reality of money points to the potency of artistic attacks on symbolic authority. The apparent anomaly of the trial in Courtroom 701 of the Tokyo District Court, a venue for the most serious criminal cases, and the appeals up to the Supreme Court, all testify to the weigh placed on this contest. According to William Marotti, “the gap between artists’ investigations and dreams of revolution, and the state policing of art and thought, reveals the politics of culture as confrontation.” He refers to Henri Lefebvre and Jacques Rancière to articulate a critique of the everyday, based on Japanese artists’ discovery of hidden forms of domination in daily life and their attempts to expose and challenge official forms of politics and hegemony. Avant-garde artists from the early 1960s were actively engaged in transgressing boundaries of thought and social practice. Their practices appear to have arisen out of a particular local, playful art practice that used theYomiuri Indépendant as a playground for bringing artistic experimentation into direct interaction with the everyday world. The exhibition’s cancelation in 1964, the year of the Tokyo Olympics, had the effect of pushing avant-garde art into the underground and radicalizing it further. Revolutionary forms of activism and critique emerged to challenge state institutions ranging from the museum gallery to the courthouse. Art and political activism converged in the use of a common vocabulary such as “direct action” or chokusetsu kōdō. Indeed, the transliterated English term favored by Japanese artists, akushon, often synonymous with pafōmansu, was progressively replaced by the more directly palatable kōi or kōdō, evoking direct political action ranging from general strike to terrorism.

From avant-garde to angura

Artistic vocabulary also testifies of an evolution of loan words from the French to the English language. The avant-garde artists at the Yomiuri Indépendant exhibited collages and ready-made objets influenced by Marcel Duchamp and the art informel movement. The cultural cachet of French words and idiomatic expressions inspired a generation of painters and plasticiens who still dreamed of Paris as a Mecca for the arts. In a way, the worldwide reputation of the Japanese avant-garde was made in France. The art critic Michel Tapié visited Japan from August to October 1957 and wrote lavish praise about Kudō Tetsumi’s entries at the Yomiuri exhibition. His encounter with the Gutai group predated Allan Kaprow’s apology of the Osaka collective by a few months. But soon English expressions such as abstract expressionism, action painting, art performances, happenings, and angura (a contraction of “underground”) took the place of French loan words. The early 1960s was definitely a period when Japan felt the gravity center of the art world move from Paris to New York. Whereas a previous generation of artists such as Imai Toshimitsu and Dōmoto Hisao chose Paris as the base for their artistic career, Arakawa Shūsaku and Kawara On settled in New York where they contributed to the birth of conceptual art. Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Cage visited Japan in 1964, and their works and performances had a huge influence on young artists. The time of the avant-garde was over, and with it the possibility of revolution through art, the classical goal of an avant-garde, receded into oblivion.

The Creative City, From Providence, Rhode Island, to Hanoi, Vietnam

7 May 20227 May 2022 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of The Creative Underclass: Youth, Race, and the Gentrifying City, Tyler Denmead, Duke University Press, 2019.**

The Creative Underclass I want to use Tyler Denmead’s book as an opportunity to reflect on my past experience as director of Institut Français du Vietnam, a network of four cultural centers supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Danang, and Hue. On the face of it, our situations could not have been more different. I was a mid-career diplomat posted as cultural counsellor at the French Embassy in Hanoi for a four-year assignment. My roadmap for managing the culture centers was simple and laid down in a few words: engage youth, be creative, and balance your budget. Tyler Denmead was the founder and director of New Urban Arts, an arts and humanities studio primarily for your people of color from working-class and low-income backgrounds in Providence, Rhode Island. Coming back to the arts studio as a PhD student doing participatory observation, he comes to realize he has been a mere instrument in the city’s program of revitalization through culture, unwittingly supporting a process of gentrification and eviction of the ethnic minorities he was supposed to empower through cultural activities and economic opportunities in the creative economy. No two cities can be further apart than Hanoi, Vietnam, and Providence, Rhode Island. And yet there are some commonalities between the two. They were both labelled “Creative Cities” and implemented strategies of economic revitalization through cultural activities. They both faced the forces of gentrification, land speculation, urban renewal, and the challenge of dealing with former industrial facilities and brownfields. New Urban Arts and the Institute Français in Hanoi were both tasked with the same missions of engaging youth, expanding access to culture, building skills, and securing public and private support. And, as directors of cultural institutions, we were both entangled in contradictions and dilemma that put our class position and ethnic privilege into question.

Revitalization through culture

Richard Florida is the urban theorist who is credited with coining the term “the creative class”. Visiting Providence in Rhode Island in 2003, he celebrated the city’s future as a creative hub. Successive mayors embarked on a program of urban renewal, rebranding Providence as a “Renaissance City” or a “Creative Capital”. Revitalizing post-industrial cities through arts, culture, and creativity has been a standard script since the 1990s. The conventional strategy includes a marketing and public relation campaign to rebrand the city’s image; supporting and promoting cultural assets including arts organizations, festivals, and cultural events; reshaping abandoned factories and warehouses into cultural spaces; and providing tax incentives to redevelop property into locations of historical, aesthetic, and economic value. According to Florida, Providence exported too much of its college-educated talent from Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design, or RISD. He thus advocated for strategies to retain young creatives from these highly selective and private universities by offering incentives to launch dynamic start-ups and host cultural events, thus attracting inward investment, tourism, and additional creative workers. In retrospect, the strategy has been a failure. In his reassessment of Providence’s future as a creative city, Florida recognized that these programs have only exacerbated urban inequalities without creating lasting economic or social value. He noted that technology has been the region weak spot and has failed to provide “real jobs” for young people in local industries. Providence’s new growth strategy now focuses on technology startups, business incubators, and quality of life. Providence now ranks as number 15 in the list of “Best Cities to Found a Startup Outside Silicon Valley and New York” and also boasts itself as one of the “10 Best Cities to Raise Kids in America.”

Tyler Denmead uses critical race theory to show that the color blindness of “creativity” dissimulates the ways in which the creative city reproduces and reinforces racial and class inequality. There is a long tradition of criticizing urban policies by exposing their racial underpinnings. James Baldwin in the 1960s described “urban renewal” as just another word for state-sponsored “negro removal” as he examined change in San Francisco at the time. And bell hooks, writing in the 1990s, described these urban renewal projects as “state-orchestrated, racialized class warfare (which) is taking place all around the United States.” Denmead’s expression, the “creative underclass”, is meant as a bridge between Florida’s “creative class” and the term “underclass”, which in the American context has often been used to explain poverty through cultural deprivation. His mission in New Urban Arts was to transform Providence’s “troubled youth,” meaning young people from ethnic minorities and low-income backgrounds, into “creative youth” equipped with the skills and talent to seize job opportunities in the creative economy. He leveraged public support for engaging teenagers and young adults in cultural activities such as art mentoring and poetry writing, even while arts education was being suppressed from the curriculum of Providence’s public schools and welfare support to poor families was being eroded. Most of the state subsidies under the creative city program were channelled toward real estate development and the restoration of old industrial buildings, fueling land speculation and gentrification. Through the promotion of a bohemian lifestyle, young people from the creative underclass were encouraged to choose to live in poverty, inhabiting abandoned warehouses and taking low-wage service jobs in the hope of gaining popularity and recognition in the white hipster scene. But there were very few “real job” opportunities for those who did not want to become “starving artists,” and public efforts to attract media companies or high-tech business activities proved ineffective. In the end, according to the author, the creative city only supports “a brand of capitalism that has legitimized the erosion of support for those who are poor.”

The Creative City

Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, also stakes its future development on culture and the creative economy. It has been admitted in 2019 in UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network, and has identified creativity as a strategic element for sustainable urban development. Home to 7.9 million people, the political capital of Vietnam has gone through several attempts to rebrand itself. It was granted the “City of Peace” title by UNESCO in 1999, and has built on this image to position itself as a hub for international political events, such as the APEC Summit in 2006, the East Asia Summit in 2010, the World Economic Forum on ASEAN in 2018, and the second DPRK-US Summit in February 2019. The thousandth anniversary of the foundation of the capital (then named Thang Long) by the emperor Ly Thai To was the occasion of major celebrations in 2010, insisting on the city’s long history and its tradition of resistance against foreign aggression. Faced with the economic might of Ho Chi Minh City (former Saigon) in the south and the entrepreneurial spirit of Danang in central Vietnam, Hanoi can play on its distinctiveness as an ancient capital of culture, national politics, and higher education. The Creative City strategy insists on several dimensions: architecture and urban heritage, handicraft and craft villages, traditional cuisine and gastronomy, and ancient arts preserved and performed with new style. The main French cultural center in Vietnam was located in Hanoi. The French institutes in Danang and Hue were of smaller scale and focused mostly on teaching French, while the French institute in Ho Chi Minh City operated from the precinct of the French Consulate General, using outside facilities (including a residence for artists, Villa Saigon) to stage cultural events and festivals.

L’Espace, the flagship building of the French cultural presence in Hanoi, was located in the historic central district that was at the core of the city’s urban renewal strategy. Only one block away from the early twentieth century’s opera house, next to the five-star Hôtel Métropole that attracted rich tourists through a cultivated image of colonial chic, the French cultural center was a landmark location in Hanoi’s cultural life. Artists remembered having given their first concert on its stage or displayed their first solo exhibition in its art gallery. They also kept a fond memory of the lectures and intellectual debates organized in its book library, or of the French language classes that offered a window to the outside world and a prized ticket for studying abroad. When I became cultural counsellor at the French Embassy, the Hanoi center was still very active: its language classes were fully packed, its concerts and cultural events well frequented, and its aura as a showcase of French culture and lifestyle still intact. New activities such as pop concerts, hip-hop tournaments, street art exhibitions, or technology displays attracted a younger generation and encouraged collaborations between French and Vietnamese artists. But its finance were in dire straits: the yearly rental charge was regularly adjusted upward to keep pace with the rise in the property market; advertising events through Facebook and other communication channels cost money; and salaries had to be paid to the dedicated local staff and the native teachers of French. A vast public of middle-class families coming to the central district for their weekend stroll just passed us by, with little interest for French culture and low budgets to devote to cultural or educational activities. For L’Espace, the Covid epidemic was the coup de grâce: priced out of the real estate market, the center was forced to relocate its French language classes and student orientation offices in a less prestigious location, and lost its ability to host cultural events on its own stage or gallery.

France’s cultural policy in Vietnam

We campaigned hard to convince local authorities and private sponsors that subsidizing cultural activities was in their best interest. We found a sympathetic ear in the person of the city mayor, who offered the district’s central plaza for a two-day outdoor festival of French culture and gastronomy. French culture still has a good image in Vietnam: France is seen as a romantic location for tourism, a country with a rich heritage and glamorous lifestyle, and a prime destination for studying abroad. French food and wine obtain high rankings, and French luxury brands dominate the market. But only a small minority of Vietnamese people have the financial means and educated tastes to indulge in such proclivities. For younger generations with lower budgets and more familiar longings, South Korea and its culture proves the most attractive. The Korean wave has hit Vietnam in full swing, and young Vietnamese are passionate about K-pop, Korean drama, kimchi, and K-fashion and cosmetics. France simply cannot compete with this attractiveness primarily led by private actors and mediated by the digital economy. Instead, France’s main selling point is to be found in cultural heritage. French colonial history has left a deep imprint in Vietnam, from city planning and architecture to baguette bread and loanwords taken from the French language. Vietnamese leaders are eager to solicit French expertise to help them reclaim and showcase their own cultural heritage, from the recent past to ancient history. City-to-city cooperation and French government’s support have helped preserve and promote Hanoi’s Old Quarter and its Thang Long Citadel, building on France’s long experience in heritage preservation. The same goes with the city of Hue, Vietnam’s ancient capital and the cradle of Vietnamese culture, that has been a partner of French cultural cooperation for more than thirty years. The Hue Festival, a major cultural event with an international audience, was first called the Vietnamese-French Festival and celebrated in 1992.

As a French intellectual versed in cultural studies and post-colonial theory, I was fully aware of the ambiguities and contradictions involved in promoting French culture in Vietnam. For post-colonial scholars, imperialism manifests itself not only through physical domination of geographic entities, but also through the colonization of the imaginary. But contemporary Vietnam is very forthcoming with its colonial past, and harbors no complex towards former imperial powers. After all, it has won two major wars against two dominant world powers, and has resisted more than a thousand years of Chinese imperialism. Still, the terms of cultural trade between France and Vietnam were premised on unequal exchange and an imbalance between center and periphery. As much as we sought to foster collaboration and joint projects between artists from the two countries, Vietnam was always on the receiving end, and France was always the initiator. We faced many practical dilemma in our daily activities. Could we, for instance, display the photographs of Vietnamese women from various ethnicities taken by a French artist who sold mostly to rich tourists and foreign collectors? Or should we promote the emergence of a local art scene through photography workshops and cross-exhibitions? Could we invite French intellectuals to ponder about the risks posed by Facebook and other social networks in a country where Facebook represented one rare window of free expression? How could Vietnamese historians debate with their French counterparts about the battle of Dien Bien Phu, and could they develop a common understanding of history? And how to explain the enduring success among Vietnamese audiences of the films Indochine and L’Amant that we showed repeatedly in our cinema-club? The image of colonial chic that I perceived as an expression of imperial nostalgia and ethnic prejudice among French nationals proved to be equally attractive among young Vietnamese, who had no memory of the Indochinese past but found its modern expressions romantic and glamorous.

White privilege?

For us, the ethnic question was raised in different terms than for Tyler Denmead. He denounces the myth of the “good white savior” who is supposed to transform “troubled youth” of color into “creative youth.” Well aware of his white privilege, he is careful to avoid “performative wokeness” and “virtue signaling” and to distinguish his auto-ethnography from a quest for redemption. He concludes his book with a series of recommendations based on the very words used by young people who hung around in the arts studio: troublemaking (or “fucking up white notions of what it means to be black or brown”), creating a hot mess (a place where they can be random, irrational, and disrespectful of authority), and chillaxing (temporarily opting out of the system). Our goal in Vietnam was not to encourage youth resistance and rebellion. And we did not understand “white privilege” in the way Tyler Denmead applies it to his own case. Still, it could be argued that our cultural policies and management practices were based on structural inequalities. Although our recruitment policy was open and nondiscriminatory, three of the four directors of the French culture centers in Vietnam were French, while their assistants were all Vietnamese. The presence of native French teachers was a major selling point for our language classes. Accordingly, most if not all full-time teachers were French nationals (of various ethnicities) while the part-time lecturers were Vietnamese. With very few exceptions, French managers and teachers could not speak Vietnamese, while all Vietnamese staff, including technicians, were required to have at least some mastery of the French language. Expat salaries exceeded the paycheck of locally hired staff by an order of magnitude. As for our public, we didn’t target the expat community for our cultural events. But France’s image was associated with elitism, and we were expected to keep a high profile and an upmarket brand image. Not unlike Tyler Denmead’s Urban Arts center in Providence, the French culture center in Hanoi was an instrument in a wider movement of gentrification, and was in the end forced to relocate due to the very forces it supported.

Taking Academic Books to the People

12 Apr 2022 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture, Jim Collins, Duke University Press, 2010.**

Bring on the Books I do not want to brag, but I am in a league of my own when it comes to reading habits. I am not a professional reader, teacher, academic, or publisher, and yet I achieved to read 365 books in 2020—the year of the great lockdown. What started out as a silly gambit on January 1st—my “one-book-a-day” challenge—turned out to be a transformative experience. If “frequent readers” are said to read twelve to forty-five books a year, and “avid readers” read fifty or more books a year, I propose to create the category of “voracious reader” for those who read more than a hundred books per year, and “gargantuan reader” for those who pass the two hundred mark. And yes, like frequent flyers accumulating miles on air travels, we should get bonuses and free books from online bookstores. To be fair, the type of books you put on the count matters. My daughter just read fifty volumes of Detective Conan during a full weekend of binge manga reading. I do not read comic books, and I have a certain aversion for novels and literature. My preference goes to nonfiction, and more specifically to academic books like the ones published by Duke University Press. They take more time to read and assimilate—this is why I did not write 365 book reviews in the year 2020. Reviewing a book requires time and effort: I am not a native English speaker, and I have long lost the habit of writing term papers and class assignments. But writing reviews, and posting them on the internet, makes me feel I am part of a community—a learned society of sorts, or a book club with a membership limited to one.

One-book-a-day challenge

Bring on the Books for Everybody (BoBE for short) focuses on books different from the ones I am usually reading: it deals with literary culture, and takes most of its examples from novels and literary fictions. Its central argument—that ordinary readers and media personalities have seized the means of literary taste production from the hands of the high priests of academia and literary criticism who once maintained the gold standard of literary currency—contradicts my personal infatuation with high theory and arcane academic books. I must confess I prefer to read comments on literature and literary analysis than literature per se. And yet BoBE’s message resonates with the reading practices I have developed. It argues that popular literary culture is now ubiquitous: it is to be found in Barnes & Noble superstores, Amazon reviews, blockbuster adaptations, and television book clubs, as much as in the hallowed grounds of public libraries and academic office shelves. Similarly, theory is not a category limited to academic scholars and is now making a dent in real life, nurturing new forms of activism and self-realization. Reading literature or nonfiction does not compete with other activities such as surfing the web, watching movies on Netflix, or posting messages on social networks: it feeds itself from such activities in a mutually reinforcing manner. Reading is not a solitary act but a social endeavor, enmeshed in webs of communication and commerce that are interpersonal, transnational, and technological. Reading theory or literature is a self-cultivation project that sometimes borders on self-help therapy. Books are a lucrative market and reading practices are shaped by market forces and economic factors.

New reading practices are challenging existing notions of literary authority. Asked which personality reads the most books in a year, the average American may come up with the name of Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, or Elon Musk. The academic scholar surrounded by his bookshelves and piling volumes on his desk has been replaced by the capitalist investor, the billionaire philanthropist, the founder of a corporate empire, or the serial entrepreneur. According to Wikipedia, Warren Buffett became America’s most successful investor because he used his voracious reading habit to learn everything there was to know about every industry. Microsoft founder Bill Gates posts his reading list of the past year along with his annual letter to investors. In 2015, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg vowed to read one book every other week “with an emphasis on learning about different cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies.” Young Elon Musk is said to have read for 10 hours each day before growing up to become Tesla CEO. These new reading heroes stand in stark contrast with the college dork, the science nerd, the bookworm, the librarian rat, the armchair theorist, who used to be identified as the most voracious readers. The message they convey is less on which books you should read, but that you should read a lot, and that book reading is somehow connected to economic success and a well-balanced lifestyle. Such individuals seem spectacular to us, almost superhuman. And yet, the apparent enigma in their ability to read a lot amid a very busy schedule spurs the curiosity in us about them even more. We want to know the secret behind their power.

Readers with charisma

Capitalist entrepreneurs and media celebrities have now become the taste arbiters of literary culture. They are challenging existing notions of literary authority and cultural legitimacy. As Jim Collins notes, documenting the rise of a new type of master curators such as Oprah Winfrey or Nancy Pearl, “By the late nineties, literary taste brokers outside the academy could present themselves as superior to an academy that could now simply be ignored.” Academics have painted themselves into a corner of irrelevance and ridicule by sticking to an outmoded model of exclusivity and distinction. The idea that genuine cultivation and proper taste could be secured only through proper instruction and acquired only within the academy didn’t resist the democratization of book guides, reader forums, and amateur circles. Readers were empowered to talk about literary books and form reading communities that didn’t feel intimidated by the traditional discourses of literary appreciation. The discrediting of the academy and the empowering of amateur readers have led to new forms of conversation about books. A new set of players, locations, rituals, and use values for reading literary fiction has emerged on the margins of literary culture. Within this radically secularized conversation, the new cast of curators and readers talk about books in ways that are meaningful to amateur readers, and they have the media technologies at their disposal to make their conversations into robust forms of popular entertainment.

Another central thesis of BoBE is that the literary experience has now become part of our visual culture. Books are a component of a media mix that includes a variety of texts and images: commentary, interviews, cover art, book club flyers, and cinematic adaptations, along with their spin-off products. “What used to be an exclusively print-based activity has become an increasingly image-based activity in which literary reading has been transformed into a variety of possible literary experiences.” Literary value is an important component of the success of high-concept adaptation movies and literary-inspired films: as Miramax producer Harvey Weinstein put it, “our special effects are words.” Within this predominantly visual culture, reading the book has become only one of a host of interlocking literary experiences. New reading practices are changing the public’s expectation concerning just what a literary experience should look like. It now usually comes with a Latte and a proper mise-en-scène. Reading is intertwined with tastes in music, clothing, and entertainment that come as a package: the choice of books, like the choice of wine, interior design, cosmetics, fashion accessories, and cooking utensils, attests to a set of shared values and rituals. A new kind of novels offers an exercise in self-cultivation, affirming the superiority of the reader’s taste culture and self-consciously reinventing the novel of manners for contemporary audiences. Even Jane Austen or Henry James can be read as self-help manuals for busy millennials: contemporary readers still use them as primers about the world, as introductory courses in graceful living.

From literature to theory

My reading practices are different from the ones surveyed in BoBE. I don’t take my cues on what to read from TV celebrities or corporate CEOs. Although I concentrate on scholarly books, I don’t follow an academic syllabus or a prescribed reading list. I don’t have a political agenda to document and sustain. I don’t need a caste of high priests to tell me what to read and how to read it. I make mine Martin Luther’s formula to trust only the scriptures, Sola Scriptura. My choice of books is serendipitous and owes much to the availability of second-hand books on internet platforms or discount bookstores. In concentrating on books published by Duke University Press and other academic publishers, I try to challenge not only the boundaries between the disciplines but, more importantly, the boundary between the academy and the world outside. I try to make academic books relevant for daily life and casual conversations. My reading of academic books is definitely non-academic. I do not skim volumes or skip chapters; I tend to read from the first to the last page. I don’t take notes, but I underscore important sentences or paragraphs with a pen and a ruler. It helps me process mentally the content of the book and to increase my retention rate. This way I can peruse the underscored parts in a second reading and get the gist of the book in a summary. Inscribing my mark on the pages of a book also makes it clear who is the boss. Some books are meant to be read as a struggle, and you definitively want to be on top. I feel perfectly comfortable taking on books that are supposed to be fully accessible only to professional readers. If I don’t understand the book’s content, I blame the author, not me.

New technologies have an influence on the way I read. I started to write book reviews on Amazon, developing on a writing habit I had picked up as a student. BoBE mentions the history of Amazon’s curatorial activities: reviews, articles, and interviews that were originally drafted by an editorial team have been progressively replaced by customer-generated content and algorithms linking customers sharing similar tastes (“Customers who bought this book also bought…”). The book also refers to new technologies of taste acquisition that empower amateur readers to assume the role of curators of their own archives. The website Goodreads (owned by Amazon) allows to track one’s readings, to set book lists and reading challenges for the upcoming year, and to arrange one’s library as an extension of one’s self. The solitary act of reading a book has been transformed by the advent of reader comments, star ratings, and customer evaluations. According to Jim Collins, “The desire to make those evaluations public demonstrates that the need to display one’s personal taste in terms of the books one chooses to read forms an essential part of the pleasures of reading.” People will greatly enjoy reading a whole lot more if they start telling people about what they have read. The author, who used to be a distant figure one approached reverently, now maintains a familiar presence on social networks. Nothing gives me more joy than getting positive feedback from an author on a book review I have advertised on Twitter.

The Duke Reader

So why Duke University Press? This relatively obscure publishing house has recently attracted a fair share of media attention: its editor, Ken Wissoker, as well as two of its star authors, Lauren Berlant and Donna Haraway, have been chronicled in The New Yorker. As the author of the first portrait notes, “Duke has become known as a press that blends scholarly rigor with conceptual risk-taking, where high and low art boldly intermingle on principle.” The history of Duke University Press is, partly, the history of cultural studies in the United States. It is not attached to one discipline: as an example, it is difficult to categorize BoBE between literary criticism, film studies, and the sociology of reception. Duke publishes a steady stream of volumes anchored in the social science disciplines: sociology, anthropology, history, and literary criticism. It is also open to the new disciplines that have flourished in the margins of academia: media studies, sound studies, gender studies, queer theory, critical race studies, disability studies. It is not the preserve of tenured professors and established authors: its catalogue is open to junior faculty, adjuncts, and members of the intellectual proletariat. Part of the story of how Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement came to the academy goes through Duke Press. It is one of the few academic presses with crossover appeal: because its editorial line is so cutting-edge, it can make interventions in contemporary debates beyond the purview of American academy. Through The Duke Reader, I am happy to associate myself with its development.

Pipes, Plumbers, and Politicians in Mumbai

2 Apr 2022 Etienne RP1 Comment

**A review of Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai, Nikhil Anand, Duke University Press, 2017.**

Hydraulic City In his book Oriental Despotism, published in 1957, historian Karl Wittfogel introduced the notion of the hydraulic state as a social or government structure which maintains power and authority through exclusive control over access to water. He believed that Asian civilizations veered towards despotism because of the collective work needed for maintaining irrigation and flood-control systems. In Hydraulic City, anthropologist Nikhil Anand asks how water infrastructures and urban citizenship can be sustained in a country known for its messy democracy and bottom-up style of governance. The case of Mumbai’s water services exemplifies all that is wrong with Indian democracy: the failure to provide basic public services and carry out job-creating infrastructure projects; the inability to recover the costs of supplying water; and the politics of patronage and clientelist networks that tie impoverished residents to local power-brokers. And yet one is forced to acknowledge the resilience of the Indian system of governance in the face of chronic underinvestment and fledging democracy. The hydraulic city that emerges from this description is not a centralized formation of power, but rather a network or an assemblage of pipes, storage reservoirs, and valves, more or less controlled by a variety of residents, engineers, and administrators that move water in the city. Hydraulic City addresses the paradoxes of Indian cities where planned, improvised, intended and accidental mechanisms simultaneously shape the urban fabric. The” infrastructures of citizenship” that it describes combine the material infrastructure of leaking pipes and draining reservoirs, the market infrastructure that makes water demand meet supply, and the political economy of patronage relations around water provision.

A city built on water

Mumbai is a city built on water. The present-day city stretches on what was originally an archipelago of seven islands covered by marshlands and mangrove forests. Over the course of its history, embankments were built, hills were flattened, the rubble dumped into marsh, and land was reclaimed from the sea. Today, the capital of Maharashtra is the second-most populous city in the country after Delhi and the seventh-most populous city in the world with a population of roughly 20 million. But several times a year, the sea and the monsoon remind themselves to its inhabitants. Large parts of the city go under water, the trains stop, and so does Mumbai. Then comes a season with less rainfall, followed by a reduction in the supply of water to the metropolis, and life again comes to a standstill. The city is forced to keep to its basic water needs and control its more wasteful ways. With climate change and its accompanying cyclonic events, storm surges, and sea level rise, most of the city may be submerged in next hundred years. Or alternatively El Niño may change seasonal weather patterns and the monsoons might disappear, leaving the city to dry itself to death. The history of water provision in Mumbai is therefore a tale of scarcity amid plenty. As it grew in population and expanded geographically, the paucity of water was a major concern that the city faced. Before large reservoirs and piped supply schemes were undertaken, pious citizens from the Parsi and Gujarati communities constructed many tanks and wells for public good, and water flowed from the many springs, bore wells, and reservoirs. But, none of these early schemes of water provision and management could meet the needs of the citizens since there was a tremendous increase in water consumption. By the 1820s, Bombay had a population of more than 300,000, making it the world’s sixth largest city.

During the British Raj, colonial engineers used different technologies for different populations: while proper pipelines and reservoirs were installed in civil servants’ quarters and extended to wealthy native merchant communities, simple wells were dug out for indigenous masses. This discrimination was largely based on the belief that British colonial administrators and Indian subalterns had different natures, and therefore different needs. Nikhil Anand argues that this approach has not completely disappeared in independent India. That Bombay’s water infrastructure had its roots in the government of a colonial city continues to matter to this day. The delivery of basic service is often adjusted depending on the social status of concerned populations. Residents living in settlements, who account for 60 percent of the city’s total population, get far less water per day than upper-class residents in authorized buildings and residential areas. According to local engineers, there is more than enough water entering the city to meet the demands of every urban resident. And yet whole neighborhoods are regularly deprived of water, and their residents are dependent on a schedule of irregular water availability made by engineers and planners. Settlers are marginalized by city water rules that allocate them smaller pipes and water quotas. Water lines serving the settlements are allowed to remain leaky and go dry. The delivery of basic services is often adjusted depending on the social status of concerned populations. State agencies do not consider the poor as equal citizens. Settlements that are predominantly Muslim have the most severe water problems and have to draw water extensively through unauthorized connections. Those who do not obtain water from the legal network get it from the many bore wells that have been reactivated after decades of disuse, or from private trucks that bring water to low-income neighborhoods.

Scarcity amid plenty

As a result, the water infrastructure is full of contests and controversies. As Nikhil Anand remarks, “Every year, as the summer begins, for as long as I can remember, engineers and administrators have held press conferences to nervously announce the danger of failing monsoons and the likelihood of water cuts.” Engineers from the city’s water department are caught in a zero-sum game: to give one hydraulic zone more water is also to give another zone less. Installing pumps to boost water pressure uphill makes it more difficult for water to flow through the entire urban water system. Mumbai inhabitants are familiar with the sight of chaviwallas, municipal employees who turn street valves on and off and allow water to flow in a neighborhood for a limited time. Homes are equipped with water storage tanks sitting on the roof and connected to the water grid through a complex system of pipes. In Mumbai, wealthy and poor residents alike do not get individual household connections, but share their water connections with their neighbors. There are no individual meters or ways to measure water consumption with a certain degree of accuracy: as a result, residents are billed with water they did not consume, or escape payment and consider it normal. Residents often work with plumbers to redirect pipes without the permission of the water department. But for those who fall beyond the grid or receive irregular service from the public system, purchasing water as a private commodity is prohibitively expensive.

For Nikhil Anand, scarcity is not a given: “scarcity is made through discursive and material practices.” Discourses of scarcity efface and silence knowledge about the availability of other kinds of water in Mumbai. They also hide and make invisible the encroachment made by the city on water resources in its hinterland. The case for water scarcity is made by mobilizing numbers that are stabilized and received as objective facts, but that are based on fiction. Demand for water is vastly overestimated, adjusting to the fact that over a third to the city’s water leaks into the ground and through unauthorized connections, and supply does not take into account the vast resources in groundwater that the monsoon regularly replenishes. City engineers insist that subterranean water is polluted, contaminated, and dirty; but it is used by rich and poor alike through a complex system of pumps and wells (some of which are close to one hundred years old) that escape the control of the water administration. Emphasis on scarcity also permits the city’s water department to demand that more water be moved from proximate rural rivers and dam reservoirs to the city. Dams and river lakes as far as one hundred kilometers away collect and store water through the monsoon season and direct it into huge pipes to irrigate the city. The interests of the urban population are clearly prioritized over the life conditions of rural residents, who lack water to hydrate their fields and families during the dry season. Such imbalances are exacerbated in times of scarce rainfall. Droughts deprive farmers of their livelihood and uproot them from their lands, as they are forced to join the mass of migrants living in the city’s slums. In turn, city officials and nativist politicians clamp down on migration by making it extremely difficult for settlers who do not have the correct documents to establish legitimate water connections. Only in Mumbai do settlers require a panoply of documents to get a water connection, including a food ration card, as well as proof of habitation over the last twenty years. Through laws and polices, water is constituted as an entitlement that is “granted” by the city administration only when a person “belongs” to the city.

Governing through water

Hydraulic citizenship is, like water services, unequally distributed, intermittent, partial, and subject to constant negotiations. “Residents in Mumbai are only too aware of the ways that the promises of citizenship are only fitfully delivered, even to those who have all the necessary documents that establish their claims to the city.” They receive only a portion of all the promises and guarantees attached to citizenship. This is why legal water connections deliver more than water in Mumbai. Water bills and pipe connections demonstrate to various branches of the city government that their subjects are recognized citizens. They connect populations to particular places, and can be called upon by the courts to prove that settlers have lived in the structure with the knowledge of the state. Faced with the threat of evacuation, they offer protection from the periodic appearances of state bulldozers, officers, and their disciplinary actions. Proof of residence may include receipts, fines, voter identity cards, ration cards, bank account statements and, of course, water bills. Even if they get their daily water ration from the itinerant water truck or from unregulated bore wells, settlers also desire water through the public system because the documents it generates, printed on government stationary, allow them to claim and access other public urban services like housing, health, and education. To be recognized as formal residents, settlers mobilize personal relationships with city administrators, big men, and social workers, entering into networks of patronage, clientelism, and friendship. They also protest the living conditions to which they are submitted through liberal democratic means—voting, rallying, petitioning, and organizing protest marches in the city’s center. Concepts such as civil society, political life, and material infrastructure are insufficient to describe the complex assemblage of pipe circuits and social networks that hydraulic citizens navigate.

Ensuring that each individual household gets access to water is more than a matter of engineering: it is intrinsically linked to the political, social and cultural foundations of city life. Divided into different water supply zones, each neighborhood receives water for a fixed period of time. The intermittent water supply, its schedules and varying pressures, produces a particular time and tempo in the city. For settlers, water time is an active social event, requiring negotiations with the city’s engineers and councilors, and determining how gendered and classed identities are enacted. Women maintain their social status by using water at the right times of the day and in the right places. Washing clothes usually takes place outside in front of the door, while the floors in settlers’ homes are kept sparkling clean. Water time reproduces the gendered division of labor, requiring that someone will be at home and available to collect water during supply hours. Water also determines the organization of political life. Through water delivery and scarcity, hydraulic citizens assess the legitimacy of state officials and municipal institutions. In Mumbai, politicians eagerly compete for the political loyalties of their subjects through direct, known, and personal interventions. Local intermediaries and community leaders offer to fix people’s various problems by connecting them to the administrative bureaus and political patrons who can help them. Affiliation to a political party increases access to development projects, water lines, or lucrative city contracts. In exchange for this patronage, party workers are expected to mobilize their friends, neighbors, and associates whom they “helped” to support the party. But many citizens resent the reputation of corruption and cronyism that comes with party membership. Social movements and NGOs not affiliated with political parties are more respected by residents because of their independence from party machines.

Privatization schemes

The author’s fieldwork in Mumbai coincided with a time water privatization was discussed. Although Hydraulic City is not a case against privatization, it gives many arguments to explain why settlers and city engineers are attached to the public provision of water services. World Bank-supported water privatization projects in Delhi and Bangalore have met with fierce opposition from the population. Private firms, overwhelmed by the proliferation of illegal connections and inhibited by the reluctance of citizens to pay more, have been unable to find a financial equilibrium. In Mumbai, World Bank consultants and city officials were careful to frame their Water Distribution Improvement Project not as a privatization scheme, but as a “study” to help improve service delivery to the inhabitants. They tried to lure consumers with promises to provide not intermittent but continuous water supply, ending the punctuated time schedule of waiting for water. But as Nikhil Anand notes, no one aside from the management consultants were demanding 24/7 water supply. Instead, women in the settlements demand the right amount of water at the right time, and with the right pressure. This is a more modest demand, one that recognizes that for people of their class position, a scheduled water supply might be cheaper than one regulated by market tariffs. Residents were only too familiar with the problems of escalating rates that accompanied the privatization of electricity and were concerned about the same thing happening with water. Through documenting the Water Rights Campaign that local activists waged against the World Bank project, Nikhil Anand shows that discourses of rights, justice, and entitlements do not come from “outside” but are grounded in social and material infrastructures that legitimate people’s right to the city.

Animation Studies and Cartoon Science

6 Mar 2022 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of Animating Film Theory, edited by Karen Beckman, Duke University Press, 2014.**

I must confess I am averse to film theory. The little I have read in this field confirms me in my opinion: film theory is empirically useless, epistemologically weak, and aesthetically unappealing. Nothing of substance has been written about the topic since Plato’s Cave, the allegory that has people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. The books and articles that are collated to form the discipline’s canon are a mixed bag of philosophical references, journalistic musings, and academic jabber. In my opinion, Deleuze’s two-volume work on film, The Movement-Image and The Time-Image, are among his weakest books. They do not amount to a philosophy of cinema, or a theory of film: at best, they are reflections on time and space that take cinema as a pretext and Bergson as an interlocutor. In textbooks and introductory chapters, film theory is a collage of quotations by cultural critics, mostly from the early twentieth century, who have commented on the birth of cinema in the context of mass culture and reproduction technologies. Remarks written in passing by Walter Benjamin or Theodor Adorno are elevated to the rank of high theory and revered as sacred scriptures by a discipline desperately in need of founding fathers. The French contributors to the Cahiers du Cinéma dabbled in film critique as a hobby and did not think of themselves as serious thinkers: they were puzzled to see cinema studies emerge as an academic discipline, and they certainly would have disapproved the emergence of a canon of officially approved texts that includes their own. When film theory tries to build a firmer intellectual grounding, it mobilizes thinkers who have written outside the purview of cinema studies and have never commented on films: Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, Lacan, or Baudrillard. Gilles Deleuze for the French domain and Stanley Cavell in America stand as the two exceptions: they have devoted whole books to cinema as part of a program of applied philosophy. My preference goes to Cavell over Deleuze.

Animated films and live-action movies

My biases against film theory were compounded by this volume on animation film theory. If a theory of films rests on shaky ground, what about a theory that takes animated movies as its object and proposes to build an autonomous discourse on this subset of film media? A discipline is not defined by its empirical topic, but by its methods and the way it builds a scientific object as a matter of scholarly investigation. The existence of animated movies and frame-by-frame films—which predate the birth of cinema—is in itself no justification to devote an academic discipline to their study and to engage them theoretically. I do not mean to say that animation movies should be forever marginalized and ignored by cinema specialists and cultural critics. They can provide food for thought for many disciplines and, in some instances, are valuable sources of theoretical engagement. But a discourse on animation does not a theory make. Building an animation theory has more to do with intellectual posturing and academic differentiation than with scientific rigor and sound scholarship. A caricature of the attitude that I have in mind is provided by Alan Cholodenko’s contribution to this volume. An American-Australian scholar who retired in 2001 from the University of Sidney, Cholodenko describes himself as the godfather of animation theory: “theorizing of and through animation has been my project for the last twenty-three years.” His claim of having come first to lay the “first principles” of the discipline doubles the proposition that “historically as well as theoretically, film is the ‘stepchild’ of animation, not the other way around.” Drawing inspiration from the work of Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, and postulating animation as the mother of all disciplines, his contribution to this volume amounts to little more than self-promotion and personal aggrandizement.

What came first, film or animation? And who can claim the privilege of having “invented” animation cinema, in theory and in practice? A central tenet of the fledgling discipline is that animation represents the past and the future of all cinema. Lev Manovich, an author of books on digital culture and new media, made that claim in 2001: “Born from animation, cinema pushed animation to its periphery, only in the end to become one particular case of animation.” The division of cinema into live action and animation has been recently blurred by the digital turn: through CGI and pixel-by-pixel editing, live-action movies are merging with animation in a way that makes them undistinguishable. The cartoonization of live-action movies is propelled by special effects and computer graphics that makes whatever the mind can conceive achievable on screen. Some actors, Jim Carrey for instance (but the same could have been said of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton), have built a whole career acting like cartoon characters. Contributors to Animating Film Theory show that the dividing line between film and animation has never been clear-cut. Photographs and moving pictures have always been mixed with drawings and text editing, such as in Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda (Film Truth) experimental newsreel series in 1922-25, or in cartoons in which drawings “come to life” or live scenes are inserted in graphic sketches, a common practice since the silent movies era down to Robert Zemeckis’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). The incorporation of animated beings into real-world settings is only one example of the blurring of distinctions between animation and film. Whole movies, like Disney’s 2019 version of The Lion King, are photorealistic renderings of live action scenes in which each detail of character and scenery is animated step-by-step by computer graphics (the sole non-animated shot in the entire film is the sunrise in the opening scene.)

The French did it first

The history of animation intersects with movie history but they do not necessarily move at the same pace. The Lost World (1925) was the first feature-length film made in the United States, possibly the world, to feature model animation as the primary special effect, or stop motion animation in general. The Enchanted Drawing is a 1900 silent film best known for containing the first animated sequences recorded on standard picture film, which has led its director J. Stuart Blackton to be considered the father of American animation. As for the first animated cartoon, it is attributed (by the French) to Emile Cohl, who produced the short movie Fantasmagorie in 1908. Others point to the French inventor Charles-Emile Reynaud and his 1877 patent of the praxinoscope, an animation projection device that predated the invention of the cinématographe by Louis Lumière in 1895. Other optical toys from the nineteenth century or earlier go by the names of zoetrope, thaumatrope, phenakistoscope, and camera obscura. Likewise, animation film theory has many fathers and the competing quest for precursors, pioneers, and key figures oppose various nations, periods, and individuals. One (French) contributor to this volume casts a Frenchman named André Martin as “the inventor of animation cinema” and 1953 as the date when his invention was recorded. Another (Japan specialist) author exhibits another figure, Imamura Taihei, as the first critic to devote a whole book on animation, A Theory of Cartoon Film, first published in 1941. It turns out André Martin used the expression “cinéma d’animation” in the body of a Cahier du Cinéma article about the Cannes festival, thereby donning prestige and dignity to a genre situated at the intersection between “le septième art” (French jargon for movies) and “le neuvième art” (graphic novels and comic strips). As for Imamura Taihei, he confirms the fact that Japan stands as a key site for animation and for theory. His genealogy of cartoons and comic strips goes back to the twelfth century’s emaki picture scrolls, and also includes acting techniques found in the Nō theater and folding screen paintings from the Edo period.

To build a theory of animation, Karen Beckman, the editor of this volume, has mined systematically the writings of film theory specialists to search for references to animation. As she states in the opening chapter, “animation’s persistent yet elusive presence within film theory’s key writings make it both easy to overlook and essential to engage.” These key writings include texts by Norman McLaren, Peter Kubelka, Vachel Lindsay, Jean Epstein, Béla Balázs, Germaine Dulac, Miriam Hansen, and André Bazin, none of which I was familiar with. Throughout the book, the rare mentions of cartoons and animation movies in the writings of cultural critics and philosophers are treated as precious discoveries. Theorists of film and mass culture such as Sergei Eisenstein, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno repeatedly turned to Disney cartoons and Looney Tunes characters in articulating their reflections on aesthetics and politics. Eisenstein devised a category of “plasmaticness” that he evoked in order to stress the originary shape-shifting potential of the animated movie, the way an object or image can potentially adopt any form. For Benjamin, “Mickey Mouse proves that a creature can still survive even when it has thrown off all resemblance to a human being. He disrupts the entire hierarchy of creatures that is supposed to culminate in mankind.” Adorno and Horkheimer found nothing funny about cartoons and argued that Donald Duck actively participated in the violent oppression of the proletariat by the forces of capitalism. Writing later in the century, Stanley Cavell mulled over the “abrogation of gravity” in cartoons where Sylvester the Cat or Wil E. Coyote run over the edge of a cliff and continue their course in midair. This allows the author of the last chapter in the volume to enunciate the “first theorem of cartoon physics”: “Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation” (the second theorem states that “Any body passing through solid matter (usually at high velocity) will leave a perforation conforming to its perimeter”.)

Cartoon physics

Animation theory is not necessarily tied to film theory: indeed, many contributions to this volume do not start from the pantheon of film theory authors or the key concepts of the discipline. Animation can be engaged with and theorized from other perspectives: as a strand of critical thought that focuses on subaltern cultures, as in Japan, or within an epistemology of scientific objectivity and experimental representation, or from the point of view of graphic art history and media art. Several chapters focus on the link between scientific visualization practices and the history of animation. The scientific experiment plays a central role in the history of cinematography. Animation itself rests on a scientific fact: by presenting a sequence of still images in quick enough succession, the viewer interprets them as a continuous moving image. This persistence of retinal perception was exploited by the early devices of animation that used a series of drawn images portrayed in stages in motion to create a moving picture. One contributor even sees the origins of 3D animation in a 1860 invention by French entrepreneur François Willème. A glass dome, housing a perimeter ring of twenty-four cameras directed inward at a central subject, allowed camera shutters to open simultaneously to produce a “photosculpture” that was not unlike the bullet-time sequence in the film The Matrix. The experiment of film allows the viewer to experience the world in a novel way: animation, like the scientific experiment itself, becomes the way to think at the limit of understanding in an attempt to get past that limit. Scientific uses of animation include medical anatomy and health education, dimensional modeling in biology or in physics, mathematical abstraction, and all kinds of pedagogical materials. Animated images do not only illustrate: they are instrumental in the process of discovery. Climate science would be less potent without the time-lapse images of shrinking glaciers and melting polar ice caps.

Japan is in a league of its own when it comes to animation theory. As mentioned, a book on the theory of anime, Manga eiga-ron, was written as early as 1941, with subsequent editions in 1965 and in 2005. In Japanese, eiga-ron has a different meaning from “film theory”, and a different history as well. Contributions to Animating Film Theory show how animation needs to be thought in relation to media beyond film to account for the singular place of animated images in Japan. One author explores how experimental Japanese Xerox artists in the 1960s operated a crossover between animation and graphic design that sheds light on the specific context within which the issue of technological reproduction and duplication was discussed. The first translation in Japanese of Walter Benjamin’s essay “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” was published and discussed in Graphication, Fuji Xerox’s corporate PR magazine that presented itself as a cutting-edge publication venue for graphic art and media criticism. More generally, the great divide between commercial and academic publications that marks the intellectual landscape in America does not exist in Japan, where the bulk of critical theories are translated, published and disseminated through non-academic journals as well as mass-market books and “mooks” (a magazine in book format.) Two of Japan’s main animation critics and public intellectuals, Otsuka Eiji and Azuma Hiroki, have organized part of their critical work outside the circuit of academia and write for a broad public readership consisting of hardcore fans of media subcultures. They invite a re-reading of the question of realism in animation: beyond photographic realism and a drawing style inherited from manga comics, anime films hint toward a new style of transmedia realism without any real-world referent. The vibrant worlds of Japanese anime, manga, and video games form the basis of an alternative sphere of expression that popular Japanese critics theorize from outside the realm of film studies.

Whither animation theory?

For Gilles Deleuze, the primary operation of philosophy is problematization, the cultivation of problems such that philosophy can then go about the task of fabricating concepts. What is the problem of animation that it requires a theory? What are the key concepts that may allow animation theory to make sense and generate meaning? Film studies, in their classical form, evolved from questions of ontology, to questions of reception, to questions of context. What is film and its relationship with reality? How does film have an effect on its viewers? What is the social and political context in which film is made and received? Starting from a different set of questions, animation theory must take its own course and develop its own methodological tools. Animating Film Theory only points toward that goal, and merely sketches out the challenges that theory-makers and philosophers of the moving image might have to grapple with. The first question, already pointed out by Sergei Eisenstein and Jean Epstein, has to do with the quality of “animism” that turns people into objects and objects into animate creatures: what makes a world animated and imbued with a life of its own? A second set of questions could coalesce around the issue of self-reflexivity: animation movies are aware of themselves as works of imaginary creation, and the hand of the drawer is never far from the drawn picture. What separates us from the world of fiction, and how can we inhabit it by breaking the fourth wall that separates screen characters from the audience? The third indication we might learn from animated movies is not to take life too seriously: as the last chapter on “cartoon physics” indicates, we will always enjoy a good Tom-and-Jerry cartoon and the hilarity that courses ending in midair and cat-shaped holes might provoke.

War Is Interested in You

2 Mar 2022 Etienne RPLeave a comment

**A review of An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management, Randy Martin, Duke University Press, 2007.**

In An Empire of Indifference, Randy Martin makes the argument that a financial logic of risk management underwrites US foreign policy and domestic governance. Securitization, derivatives, hedging, arbitrage, risk, multiplier effect, leverage: these keywords of finance can be applied to the field of war-making and empire-building. The war on terror has created an empire of indifference that distances itself from any particular situation, just like the high finance of Wall Street is unconcerned about the travails of the real economy in Main Street. Finance can help us understand how foreign policy decisions are made, military interventions are planned, and scarce resources are allocated for maximum leverage. As a diplomat trained in economics, I find this angle very stimulating. However, the author approaches it from the perspective of the cultural critic, not as an economist or a political scientist. His book is written on the spur of the moment and oscillates between a denunciation of the war on terror and a conventional analysis of mounting risks in the financial sector. His logic is sloppy at best and his references to finance and economics are unsystematic and clumsy. Even his Marxism is of the literary type: he treats Marx as a shibboleth and a source of metaphors, not as an analytical toolbox or a conceptual guide. In the following lines, I would like to reclaim the impetus of mixing economics, war studies, and finance. But first, let me try to summarize Randy Martin’s argument.

Theories of imperialism

The link between the logic of capital and the expansion of Western power was first articulated in the theory of imperialism. For Marxists, imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism. Marx himself did not use the word “imperialism”, nor is there anything in his work that corresponds exactly to the concepts of imperialism advanced by later Marxist writers. He did, of course, have a theory of capitalism, and his work contains extensive, if rather scattered, coverage of the impact of capitalism on non-European societies. Unlike many of his successors, Marx saw the relative backwardness of the non-European world, and its subjection to European empires, as a transient stage in the formation of a capitalist world economy. The conceptualizing and theorizing of imperialism by Marxists has evolved over time in response to developments in the global capitalist economy and in international politics. For Rudolf Hilferding, finance capital is marked by the highest level of concentration of economic and political power. State power breeds international conflicts, while internal conflicts increase with the concentration of capital. Nikolai Bukharin transformed Hilferding’s analysis by setting it in the context of a world economy in which two tendencies were at work. The tendency to monopoly and the formation of groups of finance capital is one, and the other is an acceleration of the geographical spread of capitalism and its integration into a single world capitalist economy. Vladimir Illich Lenin also considered Hilferding’s thesis “a very valuable theoretical analysis” and complemented it with the view that rich capitalist nations were able to delay their final crisis by keeping the poorer nations underdeveloped and deep in debt, and dependent on them for manufactured goods, jobs, and financial resources. Rosa Luxemburg wrote the most comprehensive theory of imperialism, and her conclusion that the limits of the capitalist system drive it to imperialism and war led her to a lifetime of campaigning against militarism and colonialism.

Randy Martin only mentions these early contributions in passing. He devotes more time to contemporary critiques of imperialism articulated by Giovanni Arrighi, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, David Harvey, and others. Earlier Marxists saw the expansion of empires as the sign of capitalism’s imminent demise. By contrast, for their modern epigones, the empire is here to last. They analyze the constitution of global imperial formations as the extension of neoliberalism to all sectors of social life. Empire is the new logic and structure of rule that has emerged with the globalization of economic and financial exchanges. Although capital’s expansion inevitably involves proliferating economic and financial crises, these shocks to the system are not signs of imminent collapse but, instead, mechanisms of adaptation and adjustment. Under neoliberalism, war and empire-making are privatized and generate in response insurgencies and resistance of the multitudes from below. As Slavoz Zizek observed about the Iraq war, “there were too many reasons for the war”: the American decision to invade Iraq in March 2003 was overdetermined and justified by a long list of arguments, from bringing democracy to asserting hegemony and securing oil. President Eisenhower’s greatest fears about the expansion of the military-industrial complex have not only been realized, they have been surpassed due to the symbiotic relationship it has with the neoliberal agenda.

Asset-Backed Security

Works penned by critics of empire are usually reactive: they come after the facts and often react to geopolitical events such as the launch of a preemptive war by the US in response to the September 11 attacks, the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and the extension of counter-insurgency, or the vilification of presidential power brought forth by Donald Trump. Randy Martin’s book was published in 2007, shortly before the start of the subprime crisis that ushered a sharp decline in economic activity known as the Great Recession. He achieves a certain degree of prescience by pointing out the imbalances building in the subprime loan market and the excessive leverage of government-sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But his main contribution is to assess what the recent ascent of finance has meant for the conduct of military interventions and foreign policy. “Simply put, finance divides the world between those able to avail themselves of wealth opportunities through risk taking and those who are considered ‘at risk’.” Populations become the target of portfolio management at home and abroad. The logic of finance by which the United States manages its human assets and social liabilities now guides its foreign policy. The ability of an individual or a nation to sustain debt is portrayed as a sign of strength and rewarded with access to additional capital and good credit rating. Those citizens or countries deemed to being bad risks are cut short and left out to loan sharks and debt collectors.

Martin devoted one full book to The Financialization of Daily Life, analyzing the mechanisms by which finance permeates and orients the activities of markets and social life. An Empire of Indifference focuses on what finance does to foreign policy and war-making. War today takes on a financial logic in the way it is organized and prosecuted. America applies a utilitarian frame to war and peace, and seeks tradeoffs between security and risk. Security gives way to securitization, war-making follows the same rules as financial products such as options and derivatives, and Wall Street’s indifference to Main Street now extends to the empire’s carelessness about the lands and populations that become the target of foreign interventions. More specifically, the author sees a strong parallel between monetary policy and the Bush doctrine of preemptive strikes. Inflationary pressures have to be nipped in the bud before they affect the overall economy; likewise, enemies are to be defeated before they can make their antagonism manifest. By converting potential threats into actual conflicts, the war on terror transfers future uncertainty into present risk. Bridging the future into the present has been the guiding principle for monetary policy since the late 1970s. The same logic of rational expectations and backward induction now applies to military operations abroad and to homeland security: controlling risk necessitates constant interventions and is necessarily preemptive. For risks to be reliably calculable, the future must look like the present.

Security and securitization

Randy Martin sees other parallels between circuits of finance and the military. Both seek to leverage narrowly focused interventions and investments to more global effects. This is the logic of arbitrage, coupled with financial derivatives, that exploits small differences in market value and leverages it on a large scale. New battlefield tactics rely on concentrated, relatively small deployment of soldiers to achieve strategic results. Special Forces are meant to eliminate targets before a formal battle is joined; air strikes and armed drones use high-frequency information to maximize return. The intervention in Iraq was supposed to usher a new era of peace and democracy in the Middle East, solving the Palestinian question and giving lasting guarantees of security to Israel along the way. The outcome could have been predicted by pursuing the parallel with market forces and financial intermediation. The war on terror creates what it seeks to destroy; likewise, derivatives create the volatility they were meant to manage. Despite the rhetoric, preemptive wars and forward deployments do not necessarily attempt to deter enemy action, to ward off an undesirable future, but are as likely to prove provocative, to increase the likelihood of conflict, to precipitate that future. American imperium now oscillates between invasion and isolation and remains geared toward short-term gains and high risk, high rewards investments. In this new empire of indifference, people are left to manage the mess that the occupiers deposited before taking flight.

My main issue with Randy Martin’s Empire of Indifference is that the author is not an economist: he literally does not know what he is talking about. Finance is for him a play of words and a source of metaphors, not a rigorous method of allocating risk and maximizing return. Even his Marxism is literary and evocative as opposed to rational and analytical. The book is tied to a particular moment in recent history, associated with the doctrine of preemptive war and the marriage of convenience between neoliberalism and neoconservatism. Its chapters read more like newspaper columns or opinion essays meant to put the news in perspective and to influence public opinion toward desired goals. And yet, Martin’s proposition to look at imperial ambitions in the context of the powers of finance is highly relevant in our day and age. Since Keynes’ Economic Consequences of the Peace, economists have been brought to the negotiating table; it is now time to bring them to the war room as well. Finance is doubly performative: it impacts a nation’s ability to declare and sustain war, and it affects the way war is conducted. Financial markets are often seen as reacting to political events. They are the biggest consumers of country risk analysis and geopolitical futures, and they absorb information in real time. But finance also shapes our vision of possible futures and produces affects and expectations that impact the results of foreign engagements.

You may not be interested in war, but…

Maybe it is time for finance to become weaponized, and for corporate strategy and military tactics to cross-pollinate each other. The US military has a National Guard and Reserve component of more than 1.1 million members. I wonder how many of them work in the financial sector, or how many West Point graduates are employed by Wall Street firms. There has always been a revolving door between investment banking and the DoD. The generation that laid the ground of the post-WWII international order, known collectively as the Wise Men, all had military experience. Finance as an academic discipline grew out of war-financed research in decision science and optimization. Operation research and game theory were the brain children of the Cold War, and had military as well as economic applications. DARPA has pioneered the use of prediction markets and futures exchanges based on possible political developments in various countries and regions, including violent events such as assassinations or terror attacks. To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, economists and financial market operators may not be interested in war, but war is interested in them.