By assembling more than fifty hours of interviews with eleven former Uyghur students and teachers, alongside an array of published and unpublished textual documents, this article offers the most complete history of the Uyghur student movements of the 1980s—in the face of considerable neglect and confusion. It argues, first, that the university functioned as a social, intellectual, and political space that allowed Uyghurs to develop their ethno-national identity, build shared grievances, and mobilize politically. Second, it argues that the December 1985 Uyghur student movement was a foundational turning point in the erosion of Hu Yaobang's accommodationist ethnicity policies of the early 1980s, changing how the Party-state diagnosed the reasons for Xinjiang's instability and delimited Uyghur political participation in the People's Republic of China. This article further unsettles later attempts by Chinese scholars to retroactively characterize the student movement as essentially separatist and the work of behind-the-scenes plotters.

Over a hundred thousand US servicemen were stationed in post–World War II China, resulting in the largest grassroots interactions in Sino-US history. Reexamining this unprecedented encounter in the context of American global military empire, this article investigates the sociocultural tensions caused by GIs’ sexual relations with Chinese women between 1945 and 1949. While conservatives maligned “Jeep girls” out of racial and sexual anxieties, liberals and self-identified Jeep girls invoked the language of modernity and patriotism. However, in the wake of the Peking Rape incident in 1946, the once diverse debate quickly ended as nationwide protests raged against American imperialism. In contrast with previous studies highlighting how Communist propaganda led to new anti-American sentiments, this research, by uncovering the complexities of Chinese women's experiences and their stories—which have been muffled or filtered through patriarchal agendas—foregrounds the key role of gendered nationalism in Sino-US relations.

This article offers a revisionist perspective on the relationship between 1960s North and South Korean literature by showing how writers in the North engaged with and creatively rewrote works from the South. Contextualizing such practices within a longer history of cross-border reading in the North, the article highlights how North Korean poetry and drama from the immediate aftermath of South Korea's April Revolution of 1960 took up South Korean literature's image of the volcano and reimagined it as a symbol of North-South dialogue. The article then turns to Kim Myŏngsu's Mother of the South (1965), showing how the play rewrites the South Korean novelist An Tongnim's short story “Hope” (1963) in such a way as to engineer a convergence with a line of literary representations then being produced in the North about its own colonial-era “revolutionary heritage.” Finally, the article suggests that this convergence ended up reshaping such visions of North Korea's own revolutionary past and the figure of the militant mother that emerged within them.

This article analyzes stereotypes of Muslims that have recurred in Sinhala literature over the past seven centuries. This temporal span includes (1) a precolonial time when Muslims were a curiosity in Sinhala poetry as rich traders, wild men, and seductive women; (2) an early colonial time when the Portuguese and Dutch displaced more Muslims into the island interior, and Sinhala authors increasingly wrote of them as religious others akin to Tamils; and (3) a late colonial time when British policies forged religo-racial political categories in the decades leading up to the anti-Muslim pogroms of 1915. Each case is also connected to postcolonial instantiations or transformations of these typecasts. This history therefore eschews linear narratives of change to show the recurrent tendencies of social reasoning through stereotyping, past and present.

This essay supplies brief historical context on the Candlelight Protest movement in South Korea (2016–17) and provides the thematic and theoretical framing for the forum “The South Korean Candlelight Protest Movement and Its Discontents.” It lays the groundwork for approaching the study of the protests and assessing their historical and contemporary value for the push for political change, challenging economic norms and social renewal in Korea. In particular, this essay helps frame the forum as a platform for interrogating the connections between revolution, democracy, and capitalism and the limits of and potential for political change within the political economy of Korea and elsewhere.

This study examines the revolution of ideas surrounding the body in 1950s Japan from the perspective of two women dancers, Noh dancer Tsumura Kimiko (1902–74) and butoh dancer Motofuji Akiko (1928–2003). By contrasting one mid-twentieth-century view—that the postwar era offered a chance to “liberate” individual bodies—with the backdrop of continued control over bodies exercised by large institutions, I first show that this perceived rupture was not as stark as it initially appears. Moreover, I show how Tsumura and Motofuji rejected popular ideas about the body's purpose to forge their own. This allowed them to critique and confront the issues that popular views presented, particularly for disabled or gendered bodies. These issues involved increasing urbanization and the treatment of bodies based upon their desirability. This article argues that Tsumura's and Motofuji's conceptions of “body” challenged gender norms and presented new ideas about how to live.

The making of regional and national imaginaries in colonial South Asia and indigenous elites’ role in this process are well documented. Less clearly understood are the cultural and social elements that were subordinated to the regional formations that prevailed. By focusing on the travel writings of Jhaverchand Meghani (1896–1947), a prominent intellectual and litterateur from western India, this article illustrates the internal configurations and contestations that underpinned the imaginings of regions in South Asia. Notably, Meghani saw the cultural preservation of Saurashtra as his life's mission. This article is the first to engage in a close reading of his travelogues, situating them in the wider context of emergent ideas of Gujarat in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It argues that by showcasing Saurashtra's particular folk and oral traditions, Meghani distinguished himself from the other regionalists and thus also sought to prevent Saurashtra's complete subsumption within the modern state of Gujarat.

This essay examines the crisis of solidarity affecting workers who protest labor precarity under South Korea's capitalist democracy. Once considered foundational to the struggle for national democratization, the dramatic protests of aggrieved workers are frequently depicted as out of place and out of sync. Drawing upon ethnographic research on workers’ protest repertoires, this essay challenges prevailing explanations and instead argues that heightened forms of drama, ritual, and suffering in workers’ protests enact a willful politics of refusal. Moving beyond resistance as an all-encompassing frame, the labor of refusal foregrounds ways of being and becoming that are not rooted in the contractual fallacies of liberal capitalist democracy, but in the spaces of solidarity produced by social movement networks and grassroots communities of care. The labor of refusal may not always generate robust solidarity, but it challenges the structures of organized abandonment that treat workers as disposable under neoliberal capitalist rule.

This article discusses queer and transgender voices that took part in the South Korean Candlelight Protests of 2016–17 but became sidelined during the special election that followed Park Geun-hye's impeachment. Drawing from theories of queer temporality and feminist critiques of homogenous time, the article argues that idioms of postponement (najunge) and prematurity (sigisangjo) have significantly shaped liberal political discourses regarding the timing and timeliness of social change and minority politics in South Korea. These normative idioms of temporality articulate the stakes of being out of place in time.

The vanishing critique of capitalism within the Sewŏl movement for truth finding has revealed the bare face of the current democratic order and its rule of law. This article presents the Sewŏl movement as the bellwether, in a synchronic sense, of the Candlelight Protests that have become a modality of direct action in South Korea. I seek to contribute to our understanding of the life politics that has become a key marker of struggles against the state-capital network since the 2000s. I ascribe the antinomies of truth finding and mourning and of massacre and accident in the Sewŏl movement to the democratic collective unconscious that regards the 1987 moment in South Korea as an irrevocable rupture from dictatorship to democracy. The Sewŏl movement illuminates how the axes of organization and spontaneity and of reformism and revolution in the Candlelight Protest movement are not so much binaries, or oppositions, as hieroglyphic signs of the democratic unconscious and its excesses that contest the temporalizations of the capitalist present.