In recent decades, highly heterogeneous literary and artistic articulations harking back to China's classical past have gained increasing currency in the global Sinophone space and cyberspace. Instead of dismissing them as “fetishisms” or authenticating them as “Chinese traditions,” I propose “Sinophone classicism” as a new critical expression for conceptualizing this diverse array of articulations. It refers to the appropriation, redeployment, and reconfiguration of cultural memories evoking Chinese aesthetic and intellectual traditions for local, contemporary, and vernacular uses, by agents identified or self-identified as Chinese. This essay proposes a subjective, intimate, and reflexive way to experience an individual's culturally acquired “Chineseness” that is temporal, mnemonic, and often mediated by digital media. It joins recent scholarly efforts to dismantle the view of “Chinese modernity” as a monocentric and homogenous experience by refocusing on classicism as a kind of “antimodern modernism.” It also joins the post-Eurocentric turn in global academia by hinting at a future of “global classicisms.”

This article examines postwar housing in South Korea as a transnational project in the Cold War milieu. Privacy (p’ŭraibŏshi) became a central architectural concern in South Korea after the Korean War (1950–53), as Korean architects negotiated their understanding of good, modern housing in the midst of deepening interactions with American architectural knowledge. A call for the construction of independent children's rooms was linked to the belief that good housing should also ensure the sexual privacy of the married couple. This article argues that architects construed privacy to be a value that was attached to liberal democracies and that reflected postwar fantasies and desires for a democratic living in contradistinction to its North Korean counterpart. In this way, housing became a site of transnational anti-communism, as architects and aspiring homeowners invested much energy in the ideological and material construction of privacy as a salient feature of modern housing.

The worship of Vishwakarma, a god long associated with India's hereditary artisans and their tools, has achieved new relevance with the rise of industrial capitalism in South Asia. No longer moored solely to artisanal caste interests, worship of the god heralds a range of publics in which technē (crafting, fabricating, or making) is an exalted activity and public concern. Using “technophany” as a conceptual framework, we argue that deifications of technology and technicity sit at the core of Vishwakarma worship. Rather than treat religion and technology as ontologically distinct modalities of being-in-the-world, we use this framework to show how artisans, technicians, mechanics, and engineers use Vishwakarma worship to bring industrial technologies into alignment with the cosmos. Drawing on historical and ethnographic materials, we push beyond earlier scholarship that has treated Vishwakarma worship as a holdover from peasant culture or as a set of practices pitted against industrial capitalism.

This article analyzes questions of literary production and literary value in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) using quantitative methods and data sets covering a significant part of the country's literary and intellectual output over forty years (1977–2016). The first part of the article adopts a thematic approach, using topic modeling and time series, to map the DPRK's literary output and investigate the influence of genre on literary consecration. The second part looks at questions of style and literary quality in the DPRK through a comparative analysis of multiple novels grouped by degree of literary prestige. It introduces a method to evaluate the originality of an author's writing style using a masked language model (BERT) and uses it to assess the role of conformity and originality in the DPRK's literary field. Even though writers consecrated by the state display a high level of stylistic conformity when writing mandated biographies of the ruling family, their independent output ranks higher in originality than nonconsecrated writers.

When the famously nationalistic Japanese author Hyakuta Naoki published his best-selling novel A Man Called Pirate (Kaizoku to yobareta otoko) in 2012, which subsequently became both a manga and a major film, he renewed interest in the midcentury oil baron Idemitsu Sazō, using him as the model for the novel's lead character. Hyakuta claims to have aimed to inspire the country, reeling from decades of slow growth as well as the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster, by featuring a visionary Japanese leader motivated primarily by love for his employees and his country. This article traces the efforts across these media to render Idemitsu as a credible character, particularly in dealing with his real-life family as well as his “family” of employees. It argues that the partial disappearance of the “real” Idemitsu in these versions of Hyakuta's novel allowed the production of a more believable one—made believable in part because of the essential Japanese values that he ostensibly represents, even as the constraints on these representations hint at fissures and tensions in contemporary political use of biographical fiction and film.

This article rethinks the history of Chinese script reforms and proposes a new genealogy for the Chinese Latin Alphabet (CLA), invented in 1931 by Chinese and Russian revolutionaries in the Soviet Union. Situating script reforms within a global information age that emerged out of the nineteenth-century communications revolution, the article historicizes the CLA within a technologically and ideologically contrived Sino-Soviet space. In particular, it shows the intimate links between the CLA and the Unified New Turkic Alphabet (UNTA), which grew out of a latinization movement based in Baku, Azerbaijan. The primary purpose of the UNTA was to latinize the Arabic script of the Turkic people living in Soviet Central Asia, but it was immediately exported to the non-Turkic world as well in an effort to latinize languages across Eurasia and ignite revolutionary internationalism. This article investigates the forgotten figures involved in carrying the Latin alphabet from Baku to Shanghai and offers a new framework to scrutinize the history of language, scripts, and knowledge production across Eurasia.

Recent colonial compensation lawsuits reflect the metamorphosis of historical grievances in collective public memory into tort claims in private law. This article provides a synthetic view of the nexus of colonial law and history in South Korea–Japan relations, focusing on cross-border litigation brought by former forced laborers and victims of sexual servitude known as “comfort women” during World War II. The concept of public policy (ordre public) in Korea, which has colonial origins, has long served law courts as the standard for deciding the validity of a juristic act. But of late heavy reliance on the general clauses of law in legal proceedings has risked turning history and law into handmaids of national spirit, muddling historical accountability and legal liability. Improvement of South Korea–Japan ties should start from a more accurate understanding of colonial laws and a rounded appreciation of their shared legal history.

As existing scholarship demonstrates, although the Chosŏn state (1392–1910) aimed to be a society “without litigation,” people understood the use of law and employed it to resolve various disputes in the local community. At the same time, a plethora of legal cases reveal that many parties chose alternative ways of airing their grievances rather than going directly to the local court. Centered on the eighteenth-century litigation over a case of attempted rape, this article examines the complex, multifaceted factors that influenced people's use of different strategies to appeal their justice at the local level. It asks what resources ordinary people in the late Chosŏn had in navigating legal conflicts, how they strategized over the choices they had, and why they finally exercised particular options when trying to win their cases. Investigating these questions, this article not only offers insights into the meaning of litigation that entailed strenuous document preparation to inscribe grievance, but also probes the impulses of individual actors in the legal terrain when attempting to achieve their goals through the dynamics of social interactions and existing resources in eighteenth-century Korea.

What is the legal source of legitimacy in political authority? This pressing question made a striking appearance on the South Korean scene when, since its inception in 1948, a popular backlash against a liberal democracy perceived as foreign and unjuridical erupted in the forms of terror, insurgency, mutiny, and putsch. Park Chung Hee's successful assumption of power through his 1961 coup d’état provided an implicit response, recasting the Korean concepts of legality and legitimacy. Han T'ae Yŏn was a key figure in this national dispute. Armed with Carl Schmitt's canon, Han gave a decisive verdict on how Korean liberal democracy had been eclipsed under the two spuriously liberal governments of Syngman Rhee and Chang Myŏn. His legal apology for Park's authoritarian constitutional regime echoed Schmitt's defense of the Führer by invoking the president as an incarnation of the will of the people as a whole. This article intends to revisit Schmitt's accusation of judicial positivism for its failure to deliver a genuine voice of the people in the case of a non-Western society.

Lala Lajpat Rai is increasingly viewed in historiography as a “Hindu nationalist” with a strong affinity with Savarkarite Hindutva. This article demonstrates that during the Khilafat movement, Lajpat Rai articulated a secular Indian nationalism that was sensitive to Muslim religiosity and Indian Muslims’ extraterritorial sympathies toward the caliphate and the Muslim world. Pigeonholing the entire thought of Lajpat Rai as “Hindu nationalism” obscures a historical-intellectual juncture when a Hindu political figure like him enthusiastically supported pan-Islamism as necessary for Indian nationalism. This article complicates scholarship that portrays Hindu responses to the Khilafat movement as consisting solely of fear and counter-consolidation. More importantly, by unveiling Rai's Khilafat-era nationalism, it uncovers the intellectual and political possibility of firmly holding a Hindu identity and articulating conceptions of Indian nationhood that are at ease with Islam and the wider Muslim world.

The current political crisis in Hong Kong is characterized by a level of social unrest that the city has not seen since the riots of 1966–67. After that earlier round of turmoil, the British colonial regime secured legitimacy through socioeconomic improvement in Hong Kong. “Prosperity and Stability” became the hallmark of Hong Kong's success, which extended into the period of political uncertainty in the 1980s. Transcending the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, this catchphrase was adopted as the slogan of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government in its bid for legitimacy through socioeconomic appeals. Against this perennial state rhetoric, grassroots protesters began to demand “Democracy and Freedom” around June Fourth. These public demands have escalated since the Umbrella Movement in an environment of socioeconomic regression. Examining these two pairs of keywords—prosperity/stability and democracy/freedom—this article underscores the contention in the legitimacy of governance in Hong Kong since the closing decades of British rule. This analysis indicates that it would be unproductive for the governing authorities or the protesters to deny the earnestness of either the political or socioeconomic assertions in the ongoing contention of legitimacy to govern Hong Kong.

Seventeenth-century Chinese literature thematizes market segmentation, the idea that functionally similar but different objects can be produced for and marketed to different ranks of people. A 1671 collection of classical essays, Xianqing ouji 閑情偶寄 by Li Yu 李漁 (1611–80), has generally been understood to be the most influential of lifestyle guides, containing essays about the theater, everyday life, and material culture. This article argues that price and quality differentiation when it comes to a variety of consumer goods forms a central organizing principle for the volume and provides a prism through which Xianqing ouji discusses social inequity and hierarchy.

This article discusses the Habermasian public sphere as a realm constructed through communication and offers a critique of Jürgen Habermas's concept of an intersubjectively shared lifeworld among the participants as a fundamental prerequisite for communicative rationality in the discursive field. The article contends that the emergence of communicative rationality in the public sphere is unlikely to be facilitated by a singular and unitary modern public whose participants have commensurable languages and worlds. This argument is elaborated through an analysis of a public debate that occurred on August 10, 1888, between the Mahajan (headman) of the Modh Baniya caste council and Mohandas K. Gandhi, a Modh Baniya himself. Even though the discussion involved two people with an intersubjectively shared lifeworld, who were engaged in the deliberation as equals, the dialogue broke down, deepening divides. This article argues that the need to protect the spiritual domain from the polluting touch of the material domain led to the breakdown of communicative rationality.

The military victories of the Northern Expedition (1926–28) ended nearly two decades of political fragmentation and ushered in a new era of centralized government in China. A key concern of the Nationalist government, based in Nanjing, was bringing the haphazard array of private schools that had emerged since the republic's founding in 1911 in line with the Nationalists’ political agenda. The Nationalist leadership also hoped to use their educational reforms to bring the frontier regions, many of which were only tenuously allied with Nanjing, more formally under their control. Thus, the new regime set out to achieve the twin goals of regulating private schools and cultivating ties among the frontier region's population. These two goals became entangled in an unexpected manner at the private Muslim Chengda Teachers School. Although the Nationalists banned private teachers schools in 1933, they deliberately exempted Chengda from such regulations to further their frontier agenda. Later, when the central government's frontier political calculations changed, the Nationalists rescinded such protection and forced Chengda to abide by the original regulations.

This article examines the New Taiwan Series (NTS), a journal published between 1947 and 1948 in Hong Kong by Taiwanese socialists who fled the island following the 228 Uprising. It does so to intervene in ongoing debates in the field of Sinophone studies. While two major theorizations of the Sinophone exist—one that sees the field as a network of minoritized sites that operate against China-centrism, and the other grounding the Sinophone in a lyrical negotiation with cultural China—neither framework is sufficient for understanding the complex subject positions taken by Taiwanese socialists during these years. For the NTS, social activism was not a flattened binary of either ethnic identification with or resistance to a “China” articulated in terms devoid of political-economic analysis. Rather, politics had to dialectically integrate minoritarian aspirations (Taiwanese sovereignty) with majoritarian projects (the Chinese Revolution). The NTS thus encourages us to reimagine the Sinophone in socialist terms, where two analytical lenses—one grounded in the endogenous local and the other in the exogenous revolutionary center—are dialectically intertwined. The NTS navigated the resulting tensions of such a dialectical stance, making it a critical archive of Taiwanese socialist thought before the 1949 rupture.

Why does Mao's embalmed corpse continue to arouse powerful religious feelings among contemporary Chinese writers after the end of his rule, from fantasies of resurrection to yearnings for redemption? While extant scholarship focuses on the sociopolitical aspects of Mao's posthumous cult, this essay reveals the crucial role that literary narrative plays in the (un)making of Mao's quasi-religious appeal. Drawing on literary genres such as diary, memoir, science fantasy, and satirical fiction, I argue that the political theology of Mao can be read as a grand “political fiction” that linked the doubling of Mao's immortal body with the perpetual sovereignty of the Chinese Communist Party. However, even as literary narrative authorizes the political mythology of Mao, contemporary Chinese literature also demonstrates its capacity for ideological critique. My narrative begins with the party's controversial effort to sacralize Mao's biological remains, from the ritualized display of political sovereignty to the ambiguous allusion to religious miracle. Then I look at the bizarre resurrection of Mao's flesh in Liu Cixin's 劉慈欣 1989 science fiction novel China 2185. The story features a cybernetic uprising in the distant future, when a computer engineer breaks into the Mao mausoleum and “uploads” Mao's mind into cyberspace. Lastly, I draw on the satirical fictions of Yan Lianke 閻連科 and Chan Koonchung 陳冠中 to reveal the desacralizing impacts of neoliberal capitalism on the Maoist political religiosity.