positions: east asia cultures critique current issue

The Obscene, Violent Supplement of State Power: Korean Welfare and Class Warfare in Interwar Japan

Kawashima, K. C. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:02:14 PST

This article reconsiders the concept of the state apparatus by looking at the micropolitics and history surrounding the largest "Korean welfare organization" in interwar Japan, the Sôaikai ( ), or Mutual Love Association. As a welfare organization of Korean workers in Japan, the Sôaikai not only operated as the largest institutional supplier of Korean day workers to the construction industry; it was also considered as a "preventive police organization" by the Japanese police. This connection to the police revealed a bloody history that has yet to be accounted for fully in historical studies of Korean workers in Japan.

My thesis is that the history of the Sôaikai teaches us that the concept of the state apparatus must be considered in terms of its internal splitting, between a publicly avowed appearance and its publicly disavowed, spectral, or supplemental forms of organization. The stakes of understanding this splitting of state power, however, is that it compels us to reconsider the concept of the social "margin," for the Sôaikai did not simply police Koreans in the "margin" of Japanese society. Rather, its work marked the division of Korean surplus populations in Japan as the ground for commodification and political repression. I call this the "divided margin." The divided margin represented a larger colonial and policing strategy of dividing and conquering Korean proletarian movements and working-class identification by promoting and supporting ethnic identity instead—but only to the point where the ethnic consciousness did not become radicalized to the point of promoting national liberation. The problem of political repression has to be considered in light of the failings of this effort to neutralize proletarian identification through the promotion of ethnic identity.

I then analyze anti-Sôaikai political movements by Korean workers, movements that coincided with the rise to parliamentary fame of the Sôaikai's cofounder, Pak Ch'um-gum, who became the first colonial subject elected into the Japanese National Diet in 1932. The inimitable and not quite indomitable Pak Ch'um-gum was arguably Japan's most famous colonial opportunist, and he failed consistently and miserably as a parliamentarian. As I discuss in the last pages of the article, Pak's failings as a parliamentarian reveal important aspects of how the Japanese empire tried to govern and represent its colonial populations in Korea and in Japan.

A Taste of Class: Manuals for Becoming Woman

Donald, S. H., Zheng, Y. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:02:14 PST

This discussion addresses the making of woman as postsocialist class-object, developing our core notions of class-making and spiritual homelessness through an exploration of the forms of the feminine in the taste structures in contemporary urban China. The key observation is that beautification, sexual styling, and spiritual/cultural cultivation are consistently linked in narratives of "becoming-woman" in a newly successful genre of aspirational literature, which we are calling "manuals of elite civility." We argue that these narratives may be understood in reference to catachresis (Tani Barlow, 2005), in the sense that we engage it as a descriptor both to the underlying term of analysis middle-class (which has several translations but no absolute referent) and to the middle-class nuren (feminine person) of our attention here. The second, related point is that the construction of the "new" modern woman in China, as made-to-be-looked-at in these manuals, betrays a fascination with class that responds to the emerging masses who aspire to, or have achieved, middle-class levels of wealth. Such fascination reinscribes women with a sexual ontology (as in nuxing) as well as an evacuated, reformed historicity (as in the exit of funu and the reentry of nuren). These manuals of elite civility on bookshop shelves hint at the effort of becoming that characterizes contemporary Chinese identity. Place, gender, beauty, consumption, and memory are brought into a relation with one another as they service the emergence of a self-identifying middle class. Becoming woman and becoming class is possibly twee in these coffee-table iterations but is never ultimately a cozy story. Performative female narcissism will conflict with the agency of women in Reform China as they go about the business of making class work for them in their everyday lives. The market is itself an ambivalent master, complicated yet further under the encouraging gaze of the Party-State. While the books perform a perfected loop of timely nostalgia and aspiration, the boundaries of class and taste will remain contentious in practice, and the search for distinctive femininity with its more unabashed dreams and longings may well exceed the "safe cool.'"

Cultivating Citizens: Suzhi (Quality) Discourse in the PRC

Jacka, T. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:02:14 PST

In contemporary China, concerns about the suzhi, or "quality," of individuals, groups, and populations pervade the social imagination and inform a wide spectrum of discourses and debates. Suzhi is of critical importance to contemporary China's booming, globally oriented market economy, to new, "postsocialist" forms of state governance and social control, and to contemporary processes of citizenship. This essay first provides some background discussion of the historical development and contemporary significance of suzhi discourse in China and briefly reviews existing literature relating to it. It then introduces each of the subsequent essays in this special issue on suzhi and explains the connections between them.

Suzhi, the Body, and the Fortunes of Technoscientific Reasoning in Contemporary China

Sigley, G. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:02:14 PST

This essay examines how the human body has been variously imagined and acted upon in twentieth-century China. It does so by focusing on one particularly prominent feature of Chinese discourse concerned with the calculation, measurement, and shaping of the human body and human conduct: the notion of suzhi (quality). By examining the position of suzhi in a broader discourse concerning the population and its attributes (which also intersects with key notions of nation, class, ethnicity, gender, and citizenship) I shed light on the fortunes of what I refer to as "technoscientific reasoning" in contemporary China. The essay is divided into three sections. In the first section I ground the problem of suzhi and technoscientific reasoning in the emergence of population discourse in early modern China. The second section examines suzhi and its relation to subjectivity under the auspices of a socialist planning mentality, especially as it emerges after a hiatus of several decades toward the end of the 1970s. The final section then traces the subtle but important shifts in suzhi, technoscientific reasoning, and population discourse in China's move toward a "socialist market economy" in the 1990s. I conclude by arguing that the significance of research on suzhi lies in the way it supplements our understanding of Chinese political and social life.

Governing China's Children: Governmentality and "Education for Quality"

Woronov, T. E. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:02:14 PST

This article is a close study of the discourses and practices of suzhi jiaoyu or "Education for Quality" in contemporary Beijing. Through a study of efforts to raise the "quality" of the capital's children in order to raise the "quality" of the Chinese nation and its future, this article frames suzhi jiaoyu as a form of governmentality, dedicated to teaching children the "conduct of conduct" in postsocialist Beijing. Based on ethnographic research conducted in elementary schools, among families, and in public spaces in Beijing, the article focuses on how attempts to define and raise children's "moral quality" are linked to changing forms and practices of state power.

Of Quality, Harmony, and Community: Civilization and the Middle Class in Urban China

Tomba, L. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:02:14 PST

This article discusses the rhetoric and practices of China's middle-class "community building" (shequ jianshe, as the campaign to reorganize urban residential communities that started in the late 1990s is called), and the role of suzhi (quality) in building models of "harmonious" (hexie) coexistence through new forms of community governance. By investigating the official discourse on community and harmony and the self-representation of middle-class community activists, I will argue that assumptions about middle-class suzhi are essential to three governmental objectives associated with the new forms of community governance: (1) the making of new subjects who are autonomous enough to choose what to consume (and therefore stimulate the market) but also responsible enough not to challenge social order; (2) the creation of subjects who will govern themselves at the level of their residential communities without the need for government intervention; and (3) the benchmarking of social aspirations and behaviors, with the creation of models for individual self-improvement. This article is part of a larger project on community building in urban China and is based on materials and interviews collected over three years in Beijing, Chengdu, and Shenyang.

Suzhi on the Move: Body, Place, and Power

Sun, W. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:02:14 PST

Work on migration and gendered mobility has shown us that places are constituted not only by their location and physical features, but also by the specific, often regulated forms of bodies that inhabit them. In this essay, I want to call into question the process by which the connection between place, suzhi (quality), and the migrant body is made to appear logical and commonsensical. I consider a common discursive practice of branding the baomu (maid), namely identifying the domestic worker and comments on the service provided by the domestic worker according to her place of origin (e.g., "Sichuan baomu are more competent than Anhui baomu," or "local baomu (in Shanghai) are more reliable than waidi baomu" (maids from outside the city). By engaging with critiques of an array of suzhi discourses made by the state, media, and domestic service industry—including both employers of baomu and baomus themselves—to endorse or deplore the performance of domestic workers, I show that public statements about the quality of individuals increasingly take on an external, spatial, and geographic dimension. In other words, the possession or lack of suzhi by an individual or group seems increasingly attributable to place of origin. I argue that an understanding of the ways in which the mobile body is inscribed with difference is crucial to uncovering the variegated processes commodifying and objectifying the migrant body.

In the Realm of the Indigenous: Local, National, and Global Articulations in Fishing Luck

Chang, A. W.-S. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:02:14 PST

Marking a notable achievement in Taiwanese cinema, Fishing Luck (Deng dai fei yu), the first feature narrative film set on Taiwan's Orchid Island, home to the Tao Aborigines, premiered in 2005 at the Twelfth Women Make Waves film festival in Taipei. It was also the first feature film directed by award-winning Taiwanese woman director Tseng Wen-Chen. While contributing to the slowly growing canon of Taiwanese cinema, an industry historically dwarfed by the Hollywood machine, this essay examines how the film perpetuates notions of primitivism in cinema in its effort to build bridges of communication between Taiwanese Han and Aborigines. What is needed instead is a sincere commitment to supporting the expression of a multiplicity of evolving voices and experiences, which must include Taiwan's indigenous peoples. This essay calls for a sustainable training and funding infrastructure to nurture Aborigine talent in Taiwan's film industry, however vulnerable the industry may be.

Surrogate Military, Subimperialism, and Masculinity: South Korea in the Vietnam War, 1965-73

Lee, J.-k. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:02:14 PST

In reconsidering South Korean military involvement in the Vietnam War between 1965 and 1973, this essay focuses on the multivalent relationship between military labor and masculine sexuality in the overlapping contexts of class stratification, nationalist economic development under the military dictatorship of Park Chung Hee, the rising transnational anticommunism, and the U.S.-led neocolonizing capitalization of the greater Asian region. I argue that South Korean military labor in Vietnam was a type of sexual proletarianization, a process I define as mobilizing respectively gendered sexualities into working-class service labors, such as male/female prostitution, other sexualized service work, and military labor. South Korean military proletarian labor, reconstituted as a supraclass, ethnonational masculinity, functioned simultaneously as an intranational class surrogate labor and as a transnational racialized surrogate labor in the U.S. war in Vietnam. The essay first examines the ways in which military labor is elevated into military service/duty by a complex of (supra)ideological causes such as ethnonationalism, masculinism, racism, and transnational anticommunism. By delinking the economic dimension of military labor from the causes it was supposed to serve and obfuscating national commodification of working-class masculinity, state representations of the South Korean military venture in Vietnam exceptionalized military labor during the war and then obliterated it after the war. The second part of the essay explores South Korean critical literary representations of military labor that deexceptionalize military labor by situating military labor back in the broader continuum of sexual proletarianization, that is, in the context of production of other developmentalist sexual-labor commodities that were less visible, such as female prostitution and other masculine (a)sexualized service labors.

Memory and Music in Okinawa: The Cultural Politics of War and Peace

Roberson, J. E. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:02:14 PST

This paper maps Okinawan songs from both pre- and postwar periods that have narrated Okinawan experiences of war and prayers for peace, arguing that these songs may be heard as sites of memory that trace Okinawa's conflicted positions within the Japanese empire and state, and between the United States and Japan. Especially in the long postwar period, these songs have invoked memories of the past and dreams for the future in making politically significant present-day claims.

Residual Selves: Trauma and Forgetting in Park Chan-wook's Oldboy

Jeon, J. J. — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:02:14 PST

This article situates Park Chan-wook's Oldboy (2003) in the wake of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis in South Korea and argues that the film's particular emphasis on forgetting signals a turn away both from traditional, Freudian theorizations of trauma and from the deployment of these models as a primary means of conceptualizing modern Korean history. The article reads the film's protagonist, O Dae-su, as an embodiment of the anxieties and vexations of the salary men working for the chaebôls at a time of economic collapse. The salary man is a pivotal figure not only because he figures financial hardship but also, and more importantly, because he indexes a profound ideological crisis in which the sustaining fictions of the chaebôl, often referred to as "Confucian capitalism," reveal themselves as always already unraveled. Because of the nationalist orientation of South Korean corporate enterprise, this unraveling has broader consequences for the national imaginary. The article thus draws a parallel between the film's residual selves and Derridean ghosts as discussed in the Specters of Marx (1994), which are less the expressions of a repressed past returning and more the disembodied embodiments of a failed inheritance and disjointed temporality. The discontinuity between traditional past and modernized present was once obscured by the fantasy of corporate paternalism; and when this discontinuity is exposed, a disconcerting vacuum opens up, leaving the present troubling and illegible.

Contributors

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:02:14 PST