This article takes up the short work of fiction Salam, written in Japanese in 2006 by Shirin Nezammafi, and deploys it as a primary source in the history of the Japanese present. Salam tells the tale of Layla, an Afghan migrant detained in and then expelled from Japan in 2001. The article argues that Salam exposes the unmaking of postcolonial Japan: if postcolonial Japan meant a territorial, sovereign nation-state built on hegemonic national myths, then now it is unsustainable. Salam calls to an inevitable if uncharted post-national, post-territorial future. To advance this argument, the article focuses on Nezammafi's treatment of three humanistic categories tied up with geopolitical territoriality: language, art, and gender. These categories, when associated with the nation-state, generate irony in Salam. That irony stems from the anachronism of nations: territorial nations, Japanese or otherwise, appear as past entities that have outlived their possibility.

This article examines the work of Korean writer Chu Yosŏp, originally written in Korean taking the guise of a Korean translation of a Chinese-language story (born-translated literature). Chu's audience was steeped in Sinophobia orchestrated by the colonizing Japanese empire. His unprecedented genre recounts the lesser-known, lived experiences of the Chinese lower class that Korean-language news media failed to report. My analysis of Chu's work demonstrates, first, that the feigned Chinese voices of this genre illuminate transnational Sino-Korean affinities that were forcibly suppressed by colonial policies and discourses. Second, born-translated literature upends and reconfigures the colonial structure of surrogate feeling, in which the colonized emote in the service of the colonizer. Third, Chu's aesthetic strategy of deconstructing colonial affect attends to and redirects evershifting cultural processes, rather than tackling discrete entities, to surmount the active–passive divide. In so doing, his literature seeks to refashion a politico-aesthetic ecosystem encompassing the Sino-Korean clash, rather than confounding specific ideologies. Finally, the aesthetic for the lower-class Chinese people in Chu's born-translated stories is predicated on metaphysical ethics in which antithetical others mutate into inviolable others, and in which the practice of saving others dovetails with transforming ourselves.

When do smaller states defer to and when do they defy stronger powers? How and why? This article traces and explains the changing patterns of deference and defiance in Malaysia's China policy. There are three findings. First, deference and defiance are essential elements in all inter-state relations, especially asymmetric ones. The greater the power asymmetry, the greater the inclination to defer and defy. Second, states often pursue defiance and deference concurrently and selectively, with approaches adapted in accordance with changing external and internal conditions. The concurrent adoption of the two behaviors often manifest in hedging, an insurance-seeking policy aimed at offsetting multiple risks by counteracting the effects of the other behavior: deference without defiance risks subservience and dependency; defiance without deference invites hostility and confrontation. Third, the specific patterns and proportions of the deference–defiance mix are attributable more to domestic than external determinants, i.e., the needs to balance security, prosperity, and autonomy, as necessitated by the prevailing pathways of elite legitimation. This explains why Malaysia's open deference vis-à-vis China has been accompanied by an indirect and quiet defiance especially in recent years, as best evidenced by the second Mahathir administration's dualistic approaches toward the Belt and Road, South China Sea, and Xinjiang.

This article examines the extent to which overseas Chinese educators at Confucius Institutes (CIs) in Thailand act as representatives and practitioners of Chinese national identity. Though working for the state, CI teachers promote Chinese language and culture according to their own perceptions. In this paper, participatory observation and in-depth interviews were employed to assess how CI teachers in Thailand articulate their Chineseness and national identity. The findings show that (1) banal national sentiment was an important expression of the CI teachers' national identity, in terms of psychological attachment and ingrained behaviors; (2) pragmatic identity politics are used to distinguish various contributors to the CI; (3) the materialization of Chinese national identity recontextualizes the country via national symbols and cultural activities. The intricacy of the everyday activities of CI teachers illuminates the trans-nationalization and localization of Chinese national identity, which constitute the “doing” of the nation that the imaginary Chinese community in Thailand represents not just a government-endorsed national identity but also the CI teachers' creation of tradition.

This article uses local history approaches to reconstruct the early lives of the Soong sisters at Wesleyan Female College in Macon, Georgia at the beginning of the twentieth century. The sisters' experiences as Chinese overseas students were situated in the histories of American South and of Asian Americans. By examining the sisters' transition to Wesleyan, their everyday lives on campus, and their occasional off-campus encounters with Maconites, the article argues that the “Southernness” of Wesleyan and Macon distinguished the sisters' experiences from other Chinese overseas students that are more familiar to Chinese historians. Because of the relative absence of Chinese residents in this small Southern town, the girls were rarely categorized with Chinese laborers and hardly felt the strong anti-Chinese sentiments that were experienced by students who went to Western states and large cities. Similarly, the slow adoption of new utilitarian courses at this elite Southern female college also meant the sisters were neither trained as qualified homemakers nor as career women like many other American-educated Chinese women in their generation. They were taught to become housewives that played important, unpaid social roles – a path that they would later follow.

Universalism, as a historical category, played an important ideological role in forging political solidarities beyond national boundaries in the modern period. The paper traces this idea in modern Asia through the sartorial styles of two intellectuals, Okakura Kakuzō and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Clothing as a medium of inquiry offers a unique scholarly perspective to articulate the role of universalism vis-à-vis nationalism in colonial India and modern Japan. Since dress politics existed in Eastern and Western societies, it allows us to study lived experiences through a transregional dialog. Both men recognized clothing as an effective political lexicon to fashion the self and creatively include others within the ideological space. Due to their early exposure to various cultures, the clothing style adopted by Okakura and Gandhi was founded on notions of plurality and belonging to multiple places and people. Their positionality enabled them to establish a dialog with both national and imperial politics and dress in a style that was self-made and world-aware. The paper uses their photographs and writings from a period that engendered the practice of universalism and challenged the narratives of nationalism.

The assassination of the dictator Park Chung Hee by his intelligence chief Kim Chae-gyu was a momentous events in South Korean history, which garnered two feature-length filmic depictions released fifteen years apart in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The President's Last Bang, released in 2005, was an irreverent black comedy in which all those involved that fateful evening were villains in their own right. The Man Standing Next, from 2020, took a much different tack. Kim gained a righteousness and revolutionary motivation that had been absent in the portrayal in the earlier film, in which Kim's intentions remained open to interpretation. This article analyzes the changes in Kim's depiction in the context of shifting respective political contexts, particularly the impeachment of Park's daughter Park Geun-hye in 2016, and the shadow cast by the legacies of authoritarianism, the specter of which seemed to loom over Korea again during the younger Park's administration. Consequently, the outpouring of public fervor in the ensuing candlelight vigils reaffirmed societal support for democracy and consequently elevated Kim Chae-gyu, Park's bane, to the role of champion of Korean democracy when it seemed under threat once again.

In a single serving of boba tea, the non-human actors of the tall plastic cups, plastic dome lids, and the giant plastic straws dominate, but receive little attention. This article uses recent theories and discussions of new materialism to bring together cultural analysis of the boba tea consumption phenomenon that could be relevant for reflecting on a sustainable future. The article contributes to social research of waste by focusing on the mediating functions of plastic before it becomes waste. My central argument is that plastic is not merely a physical and impartial container in the contemporary food and beverage industry. It plays an indispensable role in the visualization, mass mediation, and consumption of the boba tea beverage. While current waste research often focuses on the “afterlife” of plastic waste as it relates to underclass waste workers, recycling economy and global waste trade, this article highlights the performative function of plastic as it changes the way we imagine time, gender, and waste. I show it is the plastic cup that enables boba tea to be so visually and gastronomically satisfying in an age when the photogenicity and “Instagrammability” of food and beverage have become more relevant to taste and distinctions.

Contemporary cinema and media studies are marked by a materialist turn that highlights material elements, such as objects, non-human agencies, the environment and places on and off screen, as well as the materiality of media productions and consumption. This article expands on the important scholarship of “materialist” media studies as well as existing ecocinema scholarship by stressing the materiality of digital landscapes in contemporary Chinese fantasy (or qihuan and xuanhuan) film and television works that have gained significant popularity in China and Hong Kong. Specifically, this article examines the animist landscape in film and television adaptions of Eternal Love, a fantasy romance television serial that loosely draws on Daoist mythology. Focusing on the material aspects of digital landscapes of Chinese fantasy cinema, the article develops the notion of the “cinema–ecology complex” to address the materiality of digital landscapes, the cinematic footprint of digitally enhanced landscapes through location shooting and the consumption of landscapes as scenic spots, including daka practices, in film studio cities and related film-induced tourism. Ultimately, this article calls for a textual–infrastructural approach in cinema and media studies, which tends to reorient to the infrastructural aspects of media production, distribution and consumption.

The Manchurian Candidate myth that Americans could be psychologically manipulated and turned into secret agents of a foreign power emerged in the early Cold War. The belief combined fears that Soviet/Chinese mind manipulators were so adept that they could transform honorable American soldiers into turncoats. However, while disquiet about the efficacy of communist brainwashing remained palpable in the aftermath of World War II, the result of China's communist treatment of prisoners of war did not create, as was greatly feared, actual Manchurian candidates capable of misleading their native publics once repatriated. If brainwashing in the American understanding of the term did not occur, what was the actual outcome and what sort of processes were used on Asians who were not part of the communist masses? We need to unravel the PRC's take on the processes of “thought reform” to understand why it kept returning to a policy designed to “re-educate” prisoners of war, often doubly labeled as war criminals. These policies not only reveal how the CCP aimed to render justice beyond the conclusion of its war with Japan but also demonstrate how this practice then grew into a later catalyst for unification plans in PRC-ROC relations during the 1970s.

This is an introduction essay to the IJAS special issue “Materialism and Materiality in Asia,” which is devoted to the intersections between Marxist historical materialism and the more recent new materialisms in different Asian contexts. The two materialisms correspond to two pressing social problems we are facing: the social inequality and alienations created by capitalism on the one hand and the environmental crises happening under the Anthropocene on the other. Bringing the two strains of thought together, we hope to explore ways to reconnect with the material world, and to develop theorizations that are more responsible to humans and non-humans.

This article examines the incident of a “revolt” in the Ockenden Tibetan refugee school in the early 1960s. By analyzing this previously unknown incident of “revolt” in the Tibetan refugee school within the broader historical context of early years in exile, this article aims to underline the contested and contingent process of nation-building in exile. I argue that the Ockenden incident, as forgotten fragments of the Tibetan past, provides us a rare glimpse into the early history of contestation over the production of national history and discourse on Tibet, where exiled Bonpos, a non-Buddhist minority, attempted to renegotiate their marginality by producing alternative history and discourse on Tibet. By focusing on the history of the Ockenden incident as a forgotten fragment from the exile Tibetan past, this article aims to decenter the teleology of Tibetan nationalism by bringing to light one of the unrealized alternative future agendas different groups of exiled Tibetans had in those early moments of discursive formation.

The recent surge in materialist thought, namely New Materialism, has significant implications for political theory. They challenge the fundamental dichotomy upheld in the modern West between human agency and inert nature by revealing the affective quality of nature and granting it the status of the agency. However, does the non-West face risks if it attempts to overcome the modern Western notion of inert nature? If so, is there any way to avoid these risks? To pursue these questions, I take up the writings of political thinker Maruyama Masao (丸山眞男) and literary critic Kobayashi Hideo (小林秀雄) on the political implications of materiality. Maruyama ascribes Kobayashi's alleged collaboration with Japan's World War II policy to his passive acceptance of the felt reality. Regarding such passive acceptance as endemic to Japanese thought, Maruyama traces it back to the notion of an early-modern Kokugaku thinker Motoori Norinaga, “the way to things.” Against Maruyama's criticism, I argue (1) that Kobayashi's interpretation of Motoori's “way to things” resonates with the current New Materialism, and (2) that Kobayashi's materialism does not necessarily lead to passive acceptance of the external world, but rather can be pursued in a more productive way.

To date, the research on Chinese figures residing or settling abroad and their residential settlements has mainly focused on trade merchants. Merchants frequently traveled abroad due to the characteristics of their occupation and were therefore more likely to reside in foreign countries for varying periods of time in the process. Song-era records that document figures staying overseas, however, largely center around intellectuals and bureaucrats who were trained in the Chinese systems of knowledge or administration, as opposed to merchants. Examining the records concerned, it is difficult to conclude that merchants accounted for the majority of overseas Chinese citizens at that time. This paper strived to focus on the emergence of people who looked for opportunities overseas as the background for the formation of Chinese communities in the Song period, as opposed to trade voyages by merchants. This situation is clearly revealed through the Song's ban on overseas travel for those with different traits from merchants. This indicates that the emergence of people who sought to journey abroad for new opportunities had begun even before 1078. As Chinese citizens sailed abroad to look for new opportunities, Chinese communities began to form in foreign countries around the twelfth century.

Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a commercial network of Chinese Hui Muslims emerged in China's mid and lower Yangzi River region. Through this commercial network, Muslim merchants achieved economic success and positioned themselves as Muslim community leaders and leading reformers of Chinese society. Past scholarship on Chinese Hui Muslims has focused on intellectuals or warlords and missed this important group of Muslim leaders – a group that, with the rising prominence and influence of entrepreneurs in the early twentieth century, had growing political clout. Chen Jingyu, a Muslim merchant from Nanjing, symbolized the culmination of the Muslim commercial network. Indeed, Chen's economic achievements were the direct result of the coordinated effort of Muslim merchants. With sufficient financial backing, Chen then invested in charitable activities and gained unprecedented influence in Muslim communities and Chinese society at large.

This article is a case study on the Yunnanese scholar Li Yuanyang under the background of the Ming's incorporating and sinicizing Yunnan, exploring how he views the Ming's actions and writes Yunnan's becoming a part of China. First, it retells Li's life experiences and examines the Yunnan native things and Chinese traditions in his writings. Then, after noting his emphasis of Yunnan's belonging to China, it concentrates on his comments on the Ming's military campaigns. As it analyzes, on the one hand, he justifies these campaigns against indigenous rebellions, on the other hand, he also criticizes unnecessary wars and some imperial officials' selfish deeds. Besides, he considers the constructing and reconstructing projects as a symbol of the central state's righteous governance, which should also bring benefit and benevolence to the indigenes. In a word, Li's case reflects the deep impact of the Ming's invasion on the local elites, as well as how they react to this.

Vietnam has tried to maintain a delicate balance between the United States and China by pursuing a hedging strategy. In a shifting strategic environment marked by structural uncertainty caused by the rise of China, weaker Southeast Asian states like Vietnam are projecting a non-alignment posture. However, this rational behavior is not the product of systemic factors alone but also certain domestic political dynamics. We argue that regime legitimation – how the Vietnam Communist Party seeks to generate and sustain internal and external legitimacy – weighs heavily on Vietnam's strategy toward US–China competition. In particular, three legitimation strategies employed by the Vietnam Communist Party – performance-based legitimation, nationalism-based legitimation vis-à-vis China, and defensive legitimation vis-à-vis “hostile forces” – produce dynamics that ensure Hanoi does not get inadvertently pulled into the orbit of either Beijing or Washington. Theoretically, this article contributes to the literature on domestic determinants of foreign policy with a focus on regime legitimation. Empirically, we seek to supplement the discussion on the salience and relevance of domestic politics in informing Southeast Asian states' strategic calculation amid great-power competition.

When the global material reality has already been reshaped and determined by western modernity, Gandhism and Maoism stand for attempts to discover a material world other than the existing one. I examine the ways in which the theory and practice of the body in Mao and Gandhi resonates with new materialisms' views of the body and matter as dynamic multitude and anti-dualistic open system. Gandhi and Mao share the concerns of new materialism in terms of seeing human bodies, environments, (in)organic matters and systems as configurations of multiple influences and dependencies. To put Maoism and Gandhism in the perspective of today's new materialism, the entanglement of human, nature and matter in their ideas also functions as a kind of agency in connection to other socio-political forces (instead of deploying ethics, as current new materialist ontologies have done) to enact changes. The ways in which the two formidable Asian thinkers grasp materials sound more like an abstraction, revealing that materialisms – either old or new – may be something other than what they define themselves as.

This paper aims to provide a new constitutional perspective on the Egyptian political process from the end of World War I to its independence in 1922. Egyptian historical research on the same period has been conducted mainly from a nationalist perspective. However, as Egypt had a long history of constitutionalism that had developed in unison with nationalism since the 1870s, Egyptian nationalists simultaneously desired to establish a constitutional system after achieving independence. Eventually, Britain unilaterally declared the independence of Egypt in 1922, which, despite its concern, included the introduction of a constitutional system into the country. The declaration was the product of secret negotiations between the British Special High Commissioner Allenby and Tharwat, an Egyptian nationalist politician. However, the idea of introducing the constitutional system was first publicly proposed in the preceding negotiations between Colonial Minister Milner and Zaghlūl, which facilitated Tharwat's negotiations with Allenby on this subject. While Zaghlūl, the leader of the Wafd, and the group including ‘Adlī and Tharwat were increasingly antagonistic, the establishment of a constitutional system had long been a common desire of all Egyptian nationalists who transcended their differences.