The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Reader

Kuan-Hsing Chen, Beng Huat Chua

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415431347
• eBook ISBN: 9781134083961
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Asian Cultural Studies or Cultural Studies in Asia is a new and burgeoning field, and the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Journal is at its cutting edge. Committed to bringing Asian Cultural Studies scholarship to the international English speaking world and constantly challenging existing conceptions of cultural studies, the journal has emerged as the leading publication in Cultural Studies in Asia.

The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Reader brings together the best of the ground breaking papers published in the journal and includes a new introduction by the editors, Chen Kuan-Hsing and Chua Beng Huat. Essays are grouped in thematic sections, including issues which are important across the region, such as State violence and social movements and work produced by IACS sub-groups, such as feminism, queer studies, cinema studies and popular culture studies.

The Reader provides useful alternative case studies and challenging perspectives, which will be invaluable for both students and scholars in media and cultural studies.

Part I

Setting the agenda

Chapter 1

How does Asia mean?

Sun Ge

(Translated by Hui Shiu-Lun and Lau Kinchi)

Introduction

The question of Asia, like the question of modernity, resists any attempt to provide a clear explanation partly because it is loaded with interconnected issues from many facets. Asia is not only a political concept, but also a cultural concept; it is not only a geographical location, but also a measure of value judgement. The Asia question itself does not bear any necessary relation to the question of hegemony and counter-hegemony, although the attempts to tackle this question have brought into play considerations of hegemony of the East and the West. The question itself does not entail nationalism, although the theme of nationalism has been conjured in the course of discussing this question. Another reason why the question of Asia is difficult to explicate is that it is hardly a question of substantialization, namely, by way of ascribing to it unequivocal geographical attributes. Quite contrarily, it is often invoked in the discussion of questions that bear no direct relation, or are even in stark opposition, to any geographical considerations. For a long historical period, Asia has not been treated as a self-contained geographical concept, but has only been put forward ideologically in opposition to Europe. The discussion of Asia involved not only the question of Eurocentrism, but also the question of hegemony within the East. As difficult as it is to sort out the question of Asia, it remains an underlying thread running through the intellectual history in the modern world. Hence, we still have to grapple with the question of Asia as one that constitutes a totality in itself.

The fact that, in the history of the academic world, ‘Asia’ as a singular term has emerged to name collectively a plurality of countries and regions deserves our attention. As Edward Said has pointed out in his book Orientalism: ‘To speak of scholarly specialization as a geographical “field” is, in the case of Orientalism, fairly revealing since no one is likely to imagine a field symmetrical to it called Occidentalism. Already the special, perhaps even eccentric attitude of Orientalism becomes apparent. For there is no real analogy for taking a fixed, more or less total geographical position towards a wide variety of social, linguistic, political, and historical realities.’ (Said 1985: 50) However, what Said fails to understand is that there is another side to this problem. That is, for the Asians engaged in the discussion of the Asia question, though one cannot say there is precisely something called ‘Occidentalism’ worked out by them, there indeed exists, and not without reason, in abstraction an ambiguous single entity named the ‘West’. Although it is no longer meaningful today to consider the ‘West’ as a single entity, Occidentalism had, at least in the modern history of East Asia, once played a key role in mediating the self-knowledge of the nations within the East with important questions being stirred up in the process.¹ Said’s study has shown us the political and ideological nature of the object of Orientalism. He has also shown us the Eurocentrism concealed in Orientalism. Thanks to this understanding, we can begin our discussion on a higher level. In view of the recent efforts of the Western intellectuals in deconstructing the myth of colonialism, we do not need to pursue any specialist research before we can accept as common knowledge the question of ‘the right to discourse’ of the West over the East, implicit in both Orientalism and the Asia question. At the same time, if we turn our attention to the history of the East, we can also find that its question of Asia is involved in similarly complicated ideological positions. However, in the hands of the Asians, Orientalism becomes different from that which Said criticizes, for it is directed against the Asian Occidentalism. To a large extent, it is not positioned against the Western world from the perspective of the East, but rather against an image of the West constructed in Asia. Therefore, it not only involves the question of reclaiming the right from the West, but importantly, it reveals complicated historical relations within the Asian nations. Thus, the question of Asia must not merely be pursued within the framework defined by the dichotomy of East versus West, but also should be considered as dealing with internal problems in the Asian region. In turn, the contextual exploration of the Asia question will echo, and respond to, the Saidian question posed by Western intellectuals.

This paper will inquire into the question of Asia within the historical context of East Asia. I will mainly deal with materials from the intellectual history of modern Japan. This focus is the result of my personal acquaintance with this particular field, and is also taken because the question of Asia does not assume a similar importance, and hence position, equally in the intellectual histories in East Asia. In other words, the awareness of the Asia question as being problematic was only sensed by those countries situated on the peripheries, as opposed to in the centre, which had undergone both struggles for survival and cultural crises. Hence, it is not at all a coincidence that we can learn more about the question of Asia from Japanese intellectual history than from China’s, and this basic fact prompts me to take a different perspective from that of Western intellectuals on the question of Asia – a question that deserves greater attention from intellectuals in both the East and West. In the course of thinking about this question, it occurs to me that the reflection on the Asia question has brought about a variegated process leading us to confront our own history. In the end, in thinking about the Asia question, we are not led to being absorbed in the question ‘What is Asia?’, but rather to reflect on ‘What sort of issues in fact are set forth in discussions with regard to Asia?’ In other words, Asia is merely a medium, through which we are effectively led to our history, and it is precisely because of this historical significance that it is important we keep asking ‘How does Asia mean?’

Two approaches: does Asia exist?

The question of Asia is tricky, simply because, as a subject matter, it carries a different content in different times, without any inherent connections between them. Therefore, if the question of Asia is pursued in terms of causal relations, we shall not be able to gain much from it. Yet there is indeed continuity with regard to a certain sense of direction underlying the question of Asia. Without a good grip on the historical contexts of the discourse on Asia, we would not be able to understand the mode of existence of the Asia question. In the context of Japanese intellectual history, the question of Asia is often associated with the following ‘accepted observation’: after the Meiji Ishin (Restoration), there are two lines of thinking among intellectuals in Japan regarding the question of Asia; one is represented by Fukuzawa Yukichi’s (1960) idea of ‘Disassociating from Asia and integrating with Europe’ (Datsu-A ron); and the other is represented by Okakura Tenshin’s advocation of ‘Asia is one’. The former upholds that Japan should forsake the ‘unmanageable allies’ in Asia so as quickly to join the ranks of the European and American powers. The latter stresses the commonality of Asia civilizations in the embodiment of the value of ‘love’ and ‘beauty’ which cannot be offered and superseded by the European civilizations.

The publication date of 1885 for Fukuzawa’s Datsu-A ron is important in understanding the work’s context. Okakura’s (1976a) ‘Ideals of the East with Special Reference to the Art of Japan’, written in English, was published in 1903, and is also a work of its time. The two ways of thinking embodied in these works were not intended to oppose each other. It was only when the Japanese intellectuals of later generations reconstructed Japan’s intellectual history that Fukuzawa and Okakura were turned into representatives of two opposing views of culture, both according with the need of later generations to position Japan vis-à-vis Western civilization in modern Japanese history.

At the turn of the century, Meiji Japan was confronted by a seemingly simple, and yet complicated, problem. On the one hand, Japan was keen to shake off its centuries-long subordination to the centrality of Chinese culture, and also the traditional competition with Korea for a place closer to the centre, by becoming part of the Western and world civilization, and re-ordering the international relations in East Asia. Yet on the other hand, it had to face racial opposition in which the West had the upper hand. Being coloured, Japan could not really become the ally of Europe and America; it could not but present itself to the world theatre with its Asian face. Long before the founding of the modern state, the Japanese had already begun to challenge China as a cultural centre. And as Japan had to open itself to the West even before the Meiji Ishin, it became impossible merely to confine oneself to the region of East Asia when dealing with the relationships between the three East Asian countries. We must rethink the whole in the global context or, to be more precise, in the context of the international political configuration among Europe, America and East Asia. Hence, in the field of intellectual history, Fukuzawa’s (1995) Bummeiron no gairyaku (An Outline of a Theory of Civilization) formulated a unilinear evolutionary perspective on the progression of history to justify predatory states of affairs in the process and the Western civilization as the culmination of that particular evolutionary process. On the other hand, scepticism was also incurred about the evolutionary view of history. Intellectuals with a different mindset from those clinging to evolutionary views were committed to developing a critique of the material civilization of the West, while digging at the same time into the tradition of the East so as to uncover principles that transcend the predatory logic. The cultural positions of the latter are more aesthetic. However, no matter how different the two approaches were, in the context of the Meiji era, the apparent opposition between them was derived from the same sense of crisis, with regard to the question of confronting the Western civilization. Both sides were aware that, in order to fight and prevail over the encroaching Western powers, it was necessary to count on Asia as the counterpoising sphere against Europe and America, and to count on building an alliance among the three East Asian countries, and even among other coloured races. It was only after the Second World War, after Japan had seen the pernicious extension of pan-Asianism into the Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere, that reflections on history constructed Fukuzawa and Okakura as representatives of two different views of civilization. Postwar Japan was left with the twin legacies of identification with, and criticism of, the Western civilization. It was in the attempt to reconcile these tensions that Fukuzawa and Okakura were turned into two pivotal points on which the essential structure of pan-Asianism hinges.

Before writing Datsu-A ron, Fukuzawa, in fact, advocated ‘The solidarity of East Asia’ (Toyo rentai ron). For him, this idea had a double structure, i.e. it stresses that each East Asian country must push for revolutionary reform of the old regime and overthrow the power of the conservatives within the country, and only then can it be rid of the pressure from the Western powers. In other words, Fukuzawa’s conception of ‘solidarity’ does not regard national boundaries as its precondition, but rather predicates upon the criterion of ‘civilization’. He does not believe that the coloured races can join hands to resist the Western powers simply because they are coloured. He also, therefore, advocates that actual support should be given to the progressives of neighbouring countries in helping them with their coup to overthrow their own conservative regimes, so as to export ‘civilization’.

During Fukuzawa’s time, the so-called ‘pan-Asianism’ was not a theoretical proposition, but a cry for action, for which the vehicle could be roughly grouped together under the title ‘aspiring activists’ (ronin or shishi) – radical elements engaged in subversive activities in neighbouring East Asian countries. The Japanese ronins were deeply involved in the 1884 coup in Korea. Similarly, for the 1911 revolution of China, persons with Japanese names were also intensely implicated.² At the turn of the 20th century, Japan’s Asianism contained, in a paradoxical relationship, both a sense of solidarity and a desire to expand. It also harboured a genuine sense of crisis and an antagonism against the presence of the European and American powers. In connection with this, we can list a number of political activists and intellectuals connected to pan-Asianism: Konoe Atsumaro (the chairman of the House of Peers and the founder of the East Asia Common Culture Society) advocated strongly, on the grounds of racial differentiation, intervention into the affairs of China to save it from the fate of colonization by the white people. Tarui Tokichi (a frustrated political activist of the popular movement), in the first edition of Daito gapporon (The Great East Federation) published in 1893, strongly proposed the integration of Japan and Korea in the struggle against the European powers. Miyazaki Toten (1970) (an activist who gave life-long support to the revolution in China) wrote Sanjusannen no yume (My Thirty-three Years’ Dream), which expressed his aspirations for and feelings about the Chinese revolution. Kita Ikki (an activist holding ultra-nationalist views, who was very ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors and translators
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Movements project
• PART I Setting the agenda
• PART II State violence
• PART III Americanism
• PART IV Feminism
• PART V Sexuality
• PART VI Cinema
• PART VII Other popular cultures
• PART VIII Movements
• Index