In a scene in the genre-bending documentary film The Act of Killing (2012), a journalist, Soaduon Siregar, claims to have a sudden insight while standing in a film studio. Having just watched two executioners reenact their deeds of 1965–66 before a camera, he realizes why he had never known that they had garroted hundreds of detainees when he was working with them in the same building. His old friends had been so “smooth” (he used the English word) that he had not noticed them running a human abattoir upstairs. One of the executioners standing in the studio with crude makeup plastered on his face, Adi Zulkardy, is incredulous and insists Siregar must have known since even the neighbors heard the screams of the victims: “It was an open secret (rahasia umum).” When the director of the film, Joshua Oppenheimer, interjects, noting that Siregar's longtime boss at the local newspaper had already admitted to being an interrogator who decided which detainees were to die, Siregar becomes only more adamant in denying any knowledge of the killing.

On May 20, 2014, the Royal Army imposed martial law on Thailand, with the declared purpose of restoring peace to the people. Allegedly, the military intervened to put an end to seven months of political turmoil that had begun when the PDRC—the English acronym for the Thai People's Committee for Absolute Democracy with the King as Head of State—occupied key street intersections and government offices in Bangkok. The conservative mobilization had demanded the deposition of elected Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and the complete dismissal of “the Thaksin system”—a network that had dominated electoral politics in the previous thirteen years, in the PDRC's view through corruption and vote-buying. To fight this injustice, the PDRC had called for deep constitutional reforms before the next elections could be held.

Labor scholars have highlighted the predicament of “precarization” besetting the working class everywhere in the twenty-first century. Beneath the “proletariat” now stands the “precariat,” for whom exploitation seems like a privilege compared to constant exclusion from the labor market. Amidst worldwide employment informalization and decimation of workers’ collective capacity, media reports and academic writings on Chinese workers in the past several years have singularly sustained a curious discourse of worker empowerment. Strikes in some foreign-invested factories have inspired claims of rising working-class power. Finding little empirical support for the empowerment thesis, this article spotlights the Chinese peculiarity of the global phenomenon of precarization and the dynamics of recent strikes, suggesting the need for Chinese labor studies to rebalance its prevailing voluntarism and optimism with more attention to institutional and political-economic conditions.

This article examines different patterns of “cosmopolitan capitalism” in three paired localities in China and India: (1) Zhejiang/Gujarat, (2) Zhongguancun/Bangalore, and (3) Guangdong/Kerala. The paired cases illustrate the attentiveness of the local state to transnational society and present varied expressions of the local developmental impact of remittances and return migration. Analytically, this article departs from conventional usages of both state and society by focusing on the local state in combination with a less territorial conception of society. The rationale for this dual definitional stretch—both downwards (local state) and outwards (transnational society)—has an empirical basis. First, the local government represents the day-to-day point of contact with “the state” for most people. Second, limiting the scope of “society” to populations currently residing within national borders unnecessarily excludes temporary migrants and diasporic communities who continue to identify with a locality. Theoretically, this article extends Albert Hirschman's classic categorical troika of “exit, voice, and loyalty” to the literature on new transnationalism.

Representations of dancing minorities have often been viewed in contemporary Chinese studies as examples of a broader discursive practice of “internal Orientalism,” a concept developed by anthropologists in the mid-1990s, based on fieldwork conducted in the 1980s and early 1990s. A historical examination of state-sponsored minority dance in the early PRC (1949–54) suggests that internal Orientalism may not be a generalizable explanatory framework for minority dance and its relationship to PRC nationality discourse. During a time when external military threats to the nascent PRC loomed large, long-standing ethnic stereotypes were perceived as a vulnerability to national security and targeted for reform through new policies of state multiculturalism. Thus, rather than portraying minorities as exotic, erotic, and primitive, early PRC dance constructed minorities as models of cultural sophistication, civility, and respectability. Likewise, rather than envisioning a developmental hierarchy between Han and minority dance, national performing arts institutions established during this period constructed Han and minority dance as parallel modes of ethnic performance categorized together as a new genre, “Chinese folk dance.”

Since 2000, a number of performing troupes have been established in South Korea, made up largely of musicians and dancers who were professionally trained in North Korea prior to their migration and presenting a range of music and dances related to both the North and South. Combining ethnographic data with performance analysis of one such troupe, the Pyŏngyang Minsok Yesultan, I show how the nation and the state intersect in the space of performing arts as the troupe's creative culture reflects the settlement experiences of North Koreans in the South. While the troupe's organization, membership, and performance culture delineate migrant adaptation and understanding of their new citizenship, the performance of these Koreans is a complex terrain in which the two Koreas converge and are contested as the performers enact a constant negotiation between “being” and “negating” North Korean-ness, expressing their cultural hybridity as emergent citizens of the South.

This essay attempts an exploration of the historical and historiographical implications of the interplay of individual, local, “national,” and global forms of memory in the music of Rabindranath Tagore. Produced at a time of crises in the Indian postcolonial subjectivity, this music offers a critique of the Eurocentric discourses of “World-history” and nationalism, by invoking alternative Indian discourses of “Itihāsa” and “samāj”. At the same time, Tagore departs from the contemporary Hindu cultural nationalist revivalist approach of the tradition of North Indian (Hindustani) classical music and subjects it to a creative regenerative endeavor by reconnecting the tradition with its original subaltern roots. Skeptical of several kinds of homogeneous impulses, this music offers an alternative idea of universalism that is as much human as a specific civilizational concept. Tagore's musical program thus offers an aesthetic blueprint of a more inclusive indigenous modernity in the subcontinent.

After Vietnam's August Revolution in 1945, Hồ Chí Minh was venerated as the center of a newly created political religion that eventually became part of the Vietnamese religious landscape. This article traces the origins of Hồ Chí Minh's veneration and his own role in cementing his image not only as the leader of the nation but as the Uncle, the head of the Vietnamese national family. Through an examination of Hồ Chí Minh's first (auto)biography, it explores some of the means employed to achieve these results. Hồ Chí Minh's cult transformed the nation and altered Vietnamese cultural traditions. It served to acquaint people with the new order and to create and perpetuate people's loyalty to the newly formed state entities. This article looks at how Hồ Chí Minh went from being the master of his own cult to losing control over it and becoming its employee.

This article explores Robert Bellah's engagement with Japan in formulating his communitarian critique of American individualism. Bellah's early contribution to post–World War II modernization studies, Tokugawa Religion: The Cultural Roots of Modern Japan, embraced the Weberian framework of social development, but it also described a system that departed from Weber's narrative of liberalization and rationalization in important ways. Bellah argued that in early modern Japan, the profit motive was contained by social obligations and ethical rules. Through his explorations of Japan, Bellah articulated a critique of liberal individualism, drawing on Japanese cultural nationalism in his search for a modern, capitalist system that could be contained by overarching cultural and moral values. One finds a surprising resonance between Bellah's ideal of American “civil religion” and the ideas of interwar philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō and Watsuji's own critique of liberalism and popular democracy as lacking cultural foundations. Bellah's engagement with Watsuji reveals the tensions within Bellah's thought and in his subsequent call for community in America as a means of overcoming the excesses of American individualism. This article considers both the contributions and the limits of Bellah's attempt to invoke Japan as an alternative modernity in Japan studies.