Margaret Hillenbrand

Communitarianism, or, how to build East Asian theory

At a recent conference, I gave a paper which began with the question: ‘What does it mean to think ‘‘theoretically’’ in contemporary East Asian studies?’ In theory, the answer to this question seems quite straightforward. It means thinking metaphysically rather than just empirically; it means scrutinizing why and how East Asianists till their fields in the manner that they do; and it means writing about the region in ways that, rather like the Peters Projection world map, challenge the very cartography of global knowledge. My particular focus in this essay is the creative humanities*by which I mean literary, cinematic, philosophical, and cultural studies*and it is surely fair to say that theoretical thinking has reconfigured the terrain of these disciplines in the East Asian field over the last couple of decades, largely to their enrichment. Yet to move back to maps and their metaphors*to take an aerial rather than a worm’s eye view, in other words*it would be very moot indeed to claim that theoretical thinking in East Asian studies has had a decisive cartographic impact. The reason for this, too, seems reasonably plain, and one might think it has been rehearsed stringently enough already. Leaf through the key journals of the field, attend its major conferences, name-check its seminal monographs, and the message is clear: scholarship that strives to think theoretically continues to take many of its key cues from Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, and Benedict Anderson*to name an especially popular quartet. The result is a curiously composed epistemological picture. Its foreground is busy with all the lively details of local cultural life, often scrupulously sketched: Chinese writers, Korean filmmakers, Japanese philosophers, Taiwanese performance artists. But it is the ‘old masters’ of Western theory who continue to describe the broad contours and grand features of the intellectual landscape, and whose influence is writ large all over the canvas. Indeed, many of the basic terms of reckoning and address which frame the study of contemporary East Asian culture*keywords like power, metropolis, postmodernism, nation*are routinely glossed via reference, and thus deference, to their Euro-American ‘originals’. The fact that only a small proportion of these Western writings refer to East Asia in any consistent way themselves makes this indebtedness all the more intriguing. It is, of course, well understood now that scholars who work in and on East Asia will regularly avail themselves of Western theory. At the very least, there is an element of ‘if the cap fits, wear it’ to these borrowings: if Freud or

Nostalgia, place, and making peace with modernity in East Asia

This essay sets out to theorize the nostalgia boom that has held East Asia in thrall to the past for some years now. It begins by noting that this nostalgic sentiment often has an ersatz cast, not least since much of it harks back to epochs—Showa-era Japan, 1930s Hong Kong, colonial Taiwan—of which the ‘remembering’ subject has no bodily recollection. This strange vogue for the unremembered past is typically interpreted as a flight from time, and from a troubled particular present in particular: Japans oil shocks, the looming Hong Kong handover, KMT rule in Taiwan, and so on. The present essay argues, however, that this scene realigns its component parts into a different picture when we view it through the comparative lens. Seen not contextually, but intertextually across the region, this yearning for yesteryear expresses not just a flight from time, but from place, too, and from one locale in particular. This abandoned site is the city of lived memory, a psycho-physical topos to which nostalgia has quite obstinately refused to stick. Underlying this reticence is the notion that the ‘really remembered’ city is not a proper ‘place’: earthy, gemütlich, and thus worthy of nostalgia. This notion persists across East Asia, and most especially in its literature and cinema, despite the plain fact that cities are ever more the regions primary site of dwelling. And behind this refusal to reconcile with the city as a place of home and hearth lies, unsurprisingly, the same queasy trepidation about modernity that has both plagued and sustained cultural practice both in East Asia and abroad. The essay concludes, however, by looking at two recent films—by Miike Takashi and Wong Kar-wai—which articulate an alternative aesthetic of nostalgia, and thus bring about something of a rapprochement between ‘place’ and the city-we-know.

The National Allegory Revisited: Writing Private and Public in Contemporary Taiwan

The idea for this article began some time ago when I gave a presentation on questions of national identity in contemporary Taiwanese fiction at an academic gathering. As soon as I had finished speaking, a well-known scholar of modern Chinese literature who was in the audience shot up his hand and asked in cool tones whether I was familiar with Fredric Jameson’s theory of the “third-world national allegory” — and if so, whether I was comfortable with the fact that the focus on national identities in my essay seemed to echo Jameson’s infamous paradigm and its “patronizing” take on the literary non-West. As it happens, Jameson’s essay, entitled “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (1986), was one of the very first things I read as a graduate student. It was mandatory reading, as was the brilliant polemic by Aijaz Ahmad — published in the following issue of Social Text — which ripped Jameson’s paradigm to shreds. At the time,

Murakami Haruki in Greater China: Creative Responses and the Quest for Cosmopolitanism

The relationship between popular culture and East Asian identity is now an established field of enquiry, with the products of Japans mass media industries—television series, pop stars, and manga—still providing much of the fuel for debate. This paper, however, moves away from the dominant notion of “culture as industry,” and explores animated personal responses to the fiction of Japanese writer Murakami Haruki in Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan through art house cinema, popular fiction, and online creative communities. The vogue for Murakami has swept across the region in recent years, and for many of those inspired by his work, it is Murakamis role as a conduit to cosmopolitan cultural citizenship that is so alluring. Yet rather than crude imitation, the filmmakers, writers, and Internet fans analyzed here misappropriate the “Murakami mood” in different ways, and in the process, they reveal the diverse meanings that attach to cosmopolitanism across contemporary East Asia.

Chromatic expressionism in contemporary Chinese-language cinema

Abstract This article begins by asking why colour has ignited only limited interest in the field of Chinese film studies, and it uses the critical reception of Chinas first colour film — Fei Mus Shengsi hen/Remorse at Death (1948) — as a condensed case study. An analysis of scholarly responses to Fei Mus film, the article argues, suggests that colour as a critical category in Chinese-language cinemas has vanished at the intersection of two persistent biases in the discipline: a certain reluctance to research Chinese film history in technological terms; and the early dominance of the cinema-as-realist-paradigm across the field, which led to a lengthy neglect of colour as an independent aesthetic property. The article goes on to argue that the vibrant use of colour in much recent Chinese-language auteur cinema — dubbed ‘chromatic expressionism’ here — merits more attention. In particular, the article suggests that colour can pose an intense provocation to the long-standing notion that the cinema-as-spectacle exists in a dichotomous relationship with the cinema-as-storytelling. The article explores this idea through a close reading of Fruit Chans Jiaozi/Dumplings (2004), focusing on the films vivid use of saturated complementary colours.

Remaking Tank Man, in China:

Tank Man, the image of the lone protestor who faced down the tanks near Tian’anmen Square in 1989, leads a vibrant afterlife in political cartoons, memes, and YouTube remixes. In an era when staying memorable increasingly means being searchable online, these digital remakes have helped to keep his image fresh – outside China anyway. In China itself, though, Tank Man is a famously verboten image, mostly policed out of online sight. The digital artists who have repurposed his image are typically so harried by the censors that their work cannot hope to endow Tank Man with mass viral visibility, let alone the iconic status he possesses abroad. But precisely because of their fugitive character – which produces audiences who are alert, amused, and on the qui vive – these repurposings ensure that Tank Man remains the grit in the clam of public secrecy about 1989.

Special issue on the colour of Chinese cinemas: Guest editor's introduction

After many decades of neglect, colour has returned as a critical force in cinema studies, as a flurry of recent studies shows (Price and Vacche 2006; Everett 2007; de Beauregard 2009; Street 2010). This special issue was sparked by the realization that Chinese cinemas have been almost entirely bypassed in the recuperation of colour that has occurred in Anglophone film criticism over the last half decade, despite the often extraordinary ways in which chromatism has been deployed across the different times and places of Chinese-language film. Significantly enough, the single real exception to this rule – and it breaks it only mildly – is China’s so-called Fifth Generation PRC film-making, which has inspired a small number of colour-based studies (Li 1989; Kwok Wah Lau 1994). When we stop to consider the simple matter of titles – Huang tudi/Yellow Earth (1985), Hong gaoliang/Red Sorghum (1987), Da hong denglong gaogao gua/Raise the Red Lantern (1991), Heipao shijian/Black Cannon Incident (1985), Lan fengzheng/The Blue Kite (1993) – it is rather less than surprising that Fifth Generation cinema has made it into the chromatic viewfinder of film scholars from time to time. Then there is the question of the kind of visual reading that the palette of certain Fifth Generation films seems to encourage. ‘Chineseness’ is arguably the desired look in several cases and