Books by Franck Billé
Punctum Books, 2024
When it comes to the political, acts of redaction, erasure, and blacking out sit in awkward tensi... more When it comes to the political, acts of redaction, erasure, and blacking out sit in awkward tension with the myth of transparent governance, borderless access, and frictionless communication. But should there be more than this brute juxtaposition of truth and secrecy?
Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State brings together essays, poems, artwork, and memes – a bricolage of media that conveys the experience of living in state-inflected worlds in flux. Critically and poetically engaging with redaction in politically charged contexts (from the United States and Denmark to Russia, China, and North Korea), the volume closely examines and turns loose this disquieting mark of state power, aiming to trouble the liberal imaginaries that configure the political as a left–right spectrum, as populism and nationalism versus global and transnational cosmopolitanism, as east versus west, authoritarianism versus democracy, good versus evil, or the state versus the people – age-old coordinates that no longer make sense. Because we know from the upheavals of the past decade that these relations are being reconfigured in novel, recursive, and unrecognizable ways, the consequences of which are perplexing and ever evolving.
This book takes up redaction as a vital form in this new political reality. Contributors both critically engage with statist redaction practices and also explore its alluring and ambivalent forms, as experimental practices that open up new dialogic possibilities in navigating and conveying the stakes of political encounters.
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
The Maritime Silk Road foregrounds the numerous networks that have been woven across oceanic geog... more The Maritime Silk Road foregrounds the numerous networks that have been woven across oceanic geographies, tying world regions together often far more extensively than land-based routes. On the strength of the new data which has emerged in the last two decades in the form of archaeological findings, as well as new techniques such as GIS modeling, the authors collectively demonstrate the existence of a very early global maritime trade. From architecture to cuisine, and language to clothing, evidence points to early connections both within Asia and between Asia and other continents—well before European explorations of the Global South. The human stories presented here offer insights into both the extent and limits of this global exchange, showing how goods and people traveled vast distances, how they were embedded in regional networks, and how local cultures were shaped as a result.
Harvard University Press, 2021
The border between Russia and China winds for 2,600 miles through rivers, swamps, and vast taiga ... more The border between Russia and China winds for 2,600 miles through rivers, swamps, and vast taiga forests. It’s a thin line of direct engagement, extraordinary contrasts, frequent tension, and occasional war between two of the world’s political giants. Franck Billé and Caroline Humphrey have spent years traveling through and studying this important yet forgotten region. Drawing on pioneering fieldwork, they introduce readers to the lifeways, politics, and history of one of the world’s most consequential and enigmatic borderlands.
It is telling that, along a border consisting mainly of rivers, there is not a single operating passenger bridge. Two different worlds have emerged. On the Russian side, in territory seized from China in the nineteenth century, defense is prioritized over economy, leaving dilapidated villages slumbering amid the forests. For its part, the Chinese side is heavily settled and increasingly prosperous and dynamic. Moscow worries about the imbalance, and both governments discourage citizens from interacting. But as Billé and Humphrey show, cross-border connection is a fact of life, whatever distant authorities say. There are marriages, friendships, and sexual encounters. There are joint businesses and underground deals, including no shortage of smuggling. Meanwhile some indigenous peoples, formerly persecuted on both sides, seek to “revive” their own alternative social groupings that span the border.
Surprising and rigorously researched, On the Edge testifies to the rich diversity of an extraordinary world haunted by history and divided by remote political decisions but connected by the ordinary imperatives of daily life.
Duke University Press, 2020
From the Arctic to the South China Sea, states are vying to secure sovereign rights over vast mar... more From the Arctic to the South China Sea, states are vying to secure sovereign rights over vast maritime stretches, undersea continental plates, shifting ice flows, airspace, and the subsoil. Conceiving of sovereign space as volume rather than area, the contributors to Voluminous States explore how such a conception reveals and underscores the three-dimensional nature of modern territorial governance. In case studies ranging from the United States, Europe, and the Himalayas to Hong Kong, Korea, and Bangladesh, the contributors outline how states are using airspace surveillance, maritime patrols, and subterranean monitoring to gain and exercise sovereignty over three-dimensional space. Whether examining how militaries are digging tunnels to create new theaters of operations, the impacts of climate change on borders, or the relation between borders and nonhuman ecologies, they demonstrate that a three-dimensional approach to studying borders is imperative for gaining a fuller understanding of sovereignty.
Contributors. Debbora Battaglia, Franck Billé, Wayne Chambliss, Jason Cons, Hilary Cunningham (Scharper), Klaus Dodds, Elizabeth Cullen Dunn, Gastón Gordillo, Sarah Green, Tina Harris, Caroline Humphrey, Marcel LaFlamme, Lisa Sang Mi Min, Aihwa Ong, Clancy Wilmott, Jerry Zee
University of Hawai'i Press, 2018
China’s meteoric rise and ever expanding economic and cultural footprint have been accompanied by... more China’s meteoric rise and ever expanding economic and cultural footprint have been accompanied by widespread global disquiet. Whether admiring or alarmist, media discourse and representations of China often tap into the myths and prejudices that emerged through specific historical encounters. These deeply embedded anxieties have shown great resilience, as in recent media treatments of SARS and the H5N1 virus, which echoed past beliefs connecting China and disease. Popular perceptions of Asia, too, continue to be framed by entrenched racial stereotypes: its people are unfathomable, exploitative, cunning, or excessively hardworking. This interdisciplinary collection of original essays offers a broad view of the mechanics that underlie Yellow Peril discourse by looking at its cultural deployment and repercussions worldwide.
Building on the richly detailed historical studies already published in the context of the United States and Europe, contributors to Yellow Perils confront the phenomenon in Italy, Australia, South Africa, Nigeria, Mongolia, Hong Kong, and China itself. With chapters based on archival material and interviews, the collection supplements and often challenges superficial journalistic accounts and top-down studies by economists and political scientists. Yellow Peril narratives, contributors find, constitute cultural vectors of multiple kinds of anxieties, spanning the cultural, racial, political, and economic. Indeed, the emergence of the term “Yellow Peril” in such disparate contexts cannot be assumed to be singular, to refer to the same fears, or to revolve around the same stereotypes. The discourse, even when used in reference to a single country like China, is therefore inherently fractured and multiple.
The term “Yellow Peril” may feel unpalatable and dated today, but the ethnographic, geographic, and historical breadth of this collection—experiences of Chinese migration and diaspora, historical reflections on the discourse of the Yellow Peril in China, and contemporary analyses of the global reverberations of China’s economic rise—offers a unique overview of the ways in which anti-Chinese narratives continue to play out in today’s world. This timely and provocative book will appeal to Chinese and Asian Studies scholars, but will also be highly relevant to historians and anthropologists working on diasporic communities and on ethnic formations both within and beyond Asia.
University of Hawai'i Press, 2015
Sinophobia is a timely and groundbreaking study of the anti-Chinese sentiments currently widespre... more Sinophobia is a timely and groundbreaking study of the anti-Chinese sentiments currently widespread in Mongolia. Graffiti calling for the removal of Chinese dot the urban landscape, songs about killing the Chinese are played in public spaces, and rumors concerning Chinese plans to take over the country and exterminate the Mongols are rife. Such violent anti-Chinese feelings are frequently explained as a consequence of China’s meteoric economic development, a cause of much anxiety for her immediate neighbors and particularly for Mongolia, a large but sparsely populated country that is rich in mineral resources. Other analysts point to deeply entrenched antagonisms and to centuries of hostility between the two groups, implying unbridgeable cultural differences.
Franck Billé challenges these reductive explanations. Drawing on extended fieldwork, interviews, and a wide range of sources in Mongolian, Chinese, and Russian, he argues that anti-Chinese sentiments are not a new phenomenon but go back to the late socialist period (1960–1990) when Mongolia’s political and cultural life was deeply intertwined with Russia’s. Through an in-depth analysis of media discourses, Billé shows how stereotypes of the Chinese emerged through an internalization of Russian ideas of Asia, and how they can easily extend to other Asian groups such as Koreans or Vietnamese. He argues that the anti-Chinese attitudes of Mongols reflect an essential desire to distance themselves from Asia overall and to reject their own Asianness. The spectral presence of China, imagined to be everywhere and potentially in everyone, thus produces a pervasive climate of mistrust, suspicion, and paranoia.
Through its detailed ethnography and innovative approach, Sinophobia makes a critical intervention in racial and ethnic studies by foregrounding Sinophobic narratives and by integrating psychoanalytical insights into its analysis. In addition to making a useful contribution to the study of Mongolia, it will be essential reading for anthropologists, sociologists, and historians interested in ethnicity, nationalism, and xenophobia.
Open Book Publishers, Jun 2012
China and Russia are rising economic and political powers that share thousands of miles of border... more China and Russia are rising economic and political powers that share thousands of miles of border. Yet, despite their proximity, their practical, local interactions with each other — and with their third neighbour Mongolia— are rarely discussed. The three countries share a boundary, but their traditions, languages and worldviews are remarkably different.
Frontier Encounters presents a wide range of views on how the borders between these unique countries are enacted, produced, and crossed. It sheds light on global uncertainties: China’s search for energy resources and the employment of its huge population, Russia’s fear of Chinese migration, and the precarious economic independence of Mongolia as its neighbours negotiate to extract its plentiful resources.
Special issues by Franck Billé
Inner Asia, 2024
Few terms used in scholarly texts are as contested as ‘Silk Road’. Coined by the German geographe... more Few terms used in scholarly texts are as contested as ‘Silk Road’. Coined by the German geographer and traveller Ferdinand von Richthofen at the end of the nineteenth century, the term primarily denoted the routes along which Chinese silk moved from the Han Empire to Central Asia. It has long been denigrated by academics as a romantic and orientalist construct poorly suited to scholarly discussion (Billé et al. 2022: 11). Its recent political reactivation by China in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative to frame and underlie China’s global economic clout has further entangled it in political narratives, making the term even more problematic.
Counterintuitively, these very imprecisions can make it a useful and fer- tile organising concept, fostering transnational, transregional, cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary approaches to research. It allows an embrace of the amorphous nature of Eurasia astride Europe and Asia, and of its many social, cultural and linguistic entanglements (Smith 2019: 20). Ultimately, as Susan Whitfield has recently noted (2018: 252), the fact that the term was coined nar- rowly around an exchange focused on silk between China and Rome should not distract from more productive investigations of the interregional networks trading in commodities other than silk (see also Frankopan 2015).
Society & Space, 2019
In foregrounding the voluminous materiality of the state, the essays in this collection speak to ... more In foregrounding the voluminous materiality of the state, the essays in this collection speak to current and emerging concerns about the emulsive relationship between political sovereignty and elemental forces... This dramatic shift in conceptual models is having significant repercussions on the way state borders are imagined and approached: less human-centered, more collaborative, eminently three-dimensional. It is perhaps here, at the juncture between political theory and the more-than-human, that a volumetric imaginary is especially critical.
Cultural Anthropology, 2017
Having engaged with the recent volumetric turn in architecture and political geography, anthropol... more Having engaged with the recent volumetric turn in architecture and political geography, anthropologists are increasingly concerned with realms such as air, oceans, riparian environments, and outer space, as well as with their social, political, and cultural reverberations. This Theorizing the Contemporary series, which grew out of a panel at the 2014 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, brings into dialogue these converging interests in volumetric sovereignty and more-than-human geographies. The contributors suggest that this theoretical confluence can be especially illuminating for border processes and phenomena that extend beyond the two-dimensional.
Cross-Currents, 2016
While the term “cartographic anxieties” is metaphorically loaded, it has remained under-theorized... more While the term “cartographic anxieties” is metaphorically loaded, it has remained under-theorized and is used to refer to very different situations. A state can experience anxiety when it is subject to the “cartographic aggression” (de Blij 2012) of another. Anxiety can also be found in the gap between state representations and the imaginaries held by the citizens of that state, or between a dominant majority and an ethnic, religious, or political minority (Cons 2016). Further, it can have different temporal resonances in that the gap can index the nostalgic mourning for past territorial grandeur (Callahan 2010; Cartier 2013), evoke a programmatic future (Fortna 2002), or offer poetic and corporealized visions of the nation-state (Ramaswamy 2010).
The five articles in this special issue explore various political and cultural reverberations of cartography, as well as the complex set of discursive practices in which it is embedded. The discussion framing these papers began as a panel at the 2016 American Association of Geographers’ annual meeting, which included four of the authors featured here (Akin, Billé, Roszko, and Saxer). The contributions focus on China and its neighbors from the perspective of different disciplines: anthropology (Billé, Roszko, Saxer), history (Akin), and history of art (Tsultemin). In addition to bringing a cohesive and coherent focus to the special issue, this geographic convergence is timely given China’s recent economic and political trajectory. In tracing and analyzing the cartographic tremors of a geopolitical formation in flux, the different articles offer an outline of the mechanics of “cartographic anxiety” and together contribute to a better understanding of the affective power of mapping.
Papers by Franck Billé
Inner Asia, 2024
Few terms used in scholarly texts are as contested as ‘Silk Road’. Coined by the German geographe... more Few terms used in scholarly texts are as contested as ‘Silk Road’. Coined by the German geographer and traveller Ferdinand von Richthofen at the end of the nineteenth century, the term primarily denoted the routes along which Chinese silk moved from the Han Empire to Central Asia. It has long been denigrated by academics as a romantic and orientalist construct poorly suited to scholarly discussion (Billé et al. 2022: 11). Its recent political reactivation by China in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative to frame and underlie China’s global economic clout has further entangled it in political narratives, making the term even more problematic.
Territory, Politics, Governance, 2024
Russia's war with Ukraine is reshaping Russia's geopolitical orientation and transforming the way... more Russia's war with Ukraine is reshaping Russia's geopolitical orientation and transforming the ways the country relates to its immediate neighbours. In this article, rather than undertaking a geopolitical analysis of the consequences inside Russia of the ongoing war in Ukraine, we look at public discourse as one aspect of political activity. We describe how processes of a holistic kind are depicted in metaphors and how new spatial metaphors are emerging. The war has pushed earlier somatic and emotion-laden state-generated images into coexistence with new tropes of centripetal convergence around the President and loyalty to the power vertical. We also bring to attention other kinds of images: the downbeat metaphors and historical analogies with which people describe Russia's changing actuality, and the new spatial-territorial images produced by ethnic groups who are looking at Russia from alternative, non-central and sometimes conflictual perspectives. Unlike the national homogenisation that has developed from Xi Jinping's image of 'China's dream', Russia remains a consciously 'imperial', multiethnic and economically diverse country. We suggest that examining the influential metaphors by which it is imagined, both the holistic and the diverse, incongruous or splintered, is one way to capture the multiplicity of a country at war and in flux.
Geopolitics, 2021
The concept of aura deployed in this article-a notion contained in inchoate form in the popular u... more The concept of aura deployed in this article-a notion contained in inchoate form in the popular usage of "backyard"-evokes the tension between the apparent stable boundaries of the state and its much more ambiguous incarnation. It allows for a view of the state that is both unconfined to its physical boundaries and that melts into its contiguous neighbours. Building upon the recent work of philosophers on more-than-human entanglements and symbiotic assemblages, the auratic can also help challenge the Darwinian model currently predominant in geopolitics. Indeed, adopting collaboration and sym-biosis as organising metaphors rather than zero-sum survival predicated on competition and rivalry seems especially crucial in the current context of climate change and pandemics.
Geoforum, 2022
New technologies are increasingly making it possible to colonize and inhabit realms previously de... more New technologies are increasingly making it possible to colonize and inhabit realms previously deemed beyond-the-human. While airspace and maritime spaces feature particularly prominently in these larger geopolitical formations, subterranean spaces have not elicited the same levels of dynamism, anxiety, or excitement. Unlike air or water, subterranean spaces are often imagined to be static and inhibitive of movement, and are therefore less amenable to geopolitical mobilizations. Focusing precisely on this absence, the paper will look at the subterranean as spatial metaphor for what remains unspoken, unexplored, or forcibly repressed in geopolitical narratives. In doing so, the argument will touch upon nonhuman geographies, insularity, and the "monstrous" through two examples of subterranean sites, namely the UK/France Channel Tunnel and the Korean DMZ.
Cultural Anthropology, 2019
Topology is often used as shorthand for the geography of connections and networks that extends th... more Topology is often used as shorthand for the geography of connections and networks that extends the political and economic reach of states beyond their physical borders (see Allen 2016). But if the metaphoric reverberations of topology are certainly worth exploring—notably to account for the operation of multinationals supplementing the state—they tend to leave space itself disembodied, abstract, and flat (Billé, forthcoming). Yet, ironically, where topology is perhaps most productive is in the very materiality inherent to the concept—this rubber sheet surface (cf. Leach 1961) on which a state’s spatial and material constraints interact dynamically with its operational plasticity.
Cultural Anthropology, 2017
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Books by Franck Billé
Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State brings together essays, poems, artwork, and memes – a bricolage of media that conveys the experience of living in state-inflected worlds in flux. Critically and poetically engaging with redaction in politically charged contexts (from the United States and Denmark to Russia, China, and North Korea), the volume closely examines and turns loose this disquieting mark of state power, aiming to trouble the liberal imaginaries that configure the political as a left–right spectrum, as populism and nationalism versus global and transnational cosmopolitanism, as east versus west, authoritarianism versus democracy, good versus evil, or the state versus the people – age-old coordinates that no longer make sense. Because we know from the upheavals of the past decade that these relations are being reconfigured in novel, recursive, and unrecognizable ways, the consequences of which are perplexing and ever evolving.
This book takes up redaction as a vital form in this new political reality. Contributors both critically engage with statist redaction practices and also explore its alluring and ambivalent forms, as experimental practices that open up new dialogic possibilities in navigating and conveying the stakes of political encounters.
It is telling that, along a border consisting mainly of rivers, there is not a single operating passenger bridge. Two different worlds have emerged. On the Russian side, in territory seized from China in the nineteenth century, defense is prioritized over economy, leaving dilapidated villages slumbering amid the forests. For its part, the Chinese side is heavily settled and increasingly prosperous and dynamic. Moscow worries about the imbalance, and both governments discourage citizens from interacting. But as Billé and Humphrey show, cross-border connection is a fact of life, whatever distant authorities say. There are marriages, friendships, and sexual encounters. There are joint businesses and underground deals, including no shortage of smuggling. Meanwhile some indigenous peoples, formerly persecuted on both sides, seek to “revive” their own alternative social groupings that span the border.
Surprising and rigorously researched, On the Edge testifies to the rich diversity of an extraordinary world haunted by history and divided by remote political decisions but connected by the ordinary imperatives of daily life.
Contributors. Debbora Battaglia, Franck Billé, Wayne Chambliss, Jason Cons, Hilary Cunningham (Scharper), Klaus Dodds, Elizabeth Cullen Dunn, Gastón Gordillo, Sarah Green, Tina Harris, Caroline Humphrey, Marcel LaFlamme, Lisa Sang Mi Min, Aihwa Ong, Clancy Wilmott, Jerry Zee
Building on the richly detailed historical studies already published in the context of the United States and Europe, contributors to Yellow Perils confront the phenomenon in Italy, Australia, South Africa, Nigeria, Mongolia, Hong Kong, and China itself. With chapters based on archival material and interviews, the collection supplements and often challenges superficial journalistic accounts and top-down studies by economists and political scientists. Yellow Peril narratives, contributors find, constitute cultural vectors of multiple kinds of anxieties, spanning the cultural, racial, political, and economic. Indeed, the emergence of the term “Yellow Peril” in such disparate contexts cannot be assumed to be singular, to refer to the same fears, or to revolve around the same stereotypes. The discourse, even when used in reference to a single country like China, is therefore inherently fractured and multiple.
The term “Yellow Peril” may feel unpalatable and dated today, but the ethnographic, geographic, and historical breadth of this collection—experiences of Chinese migration and diaspora, historical reflections on the discourse of the Yellow Peril in China, and contemporary analyses of the global reverberations of China’s economic rise—offers a unique overview of the ways in which anti-Chinese narratives continue to play out in today’s world. This timely and provocative book will appeal to Chinese and Asian Studies scholars, but will also be highly relevant to historians and anthropologists working on diasporic communities and on ethnic formations both within and beyond Asia.
Franck Billé challenges these reductive explanations. Drawing on extended fieldwork, interviews, and a wide range of sources in Mongolian, Chinese, and Russian, he argues that anti-Chinese sentiments are not a new phenomenon but go back to the late socialist period (1960–1990) when Mongolia’s political and cultural life was deeply intertwined with Russia’s. Through an in-depth analysis of media discourses, Billé shows how stereotypes of the Chinese emerged through an internalization of Russian ideas of Asia, and how they can easily extend to other Asian groups such as Koreans or Vietnamese. He argues that the anti-Chinese attitudes of Mongols reflect an essential desire to distance themselves from Asia overall and to reject their own Asianness. The spectral presence of China, imagined to be everywhere and potentially in everyone, thus produces a pervasive climate of mistrust, suspicion, and paranoia.
Through its detailed ethnography and innovative approach, Sinophobia makes a critical intervention in racial and ethnic studies by foregrounding Sinophobic narratives and by integrating psychoanalytical insights into its analysis. In addition to making a useful contribution to the study of Mongolia, it will be essential reading for anthropologists, sociologists, and historians interested in ethnicity, nationalism, and xenophobia.
Frontier Encounters presents a wide range of views on how the borders between these unique countries are enacted, produced, and crossed. It sheds light on global uncertainties: China’s search for energy resources and the employment of its huge population, Russia’s fear of Chinese migration, and the precarious economic independence of Mongolia as its neighbours negotiate to extract its plentiful resources.
Special issues by Franck Billé
Counterintuitively, these very imprecisions can make it a useful and fer- tile organising concept, fostering transnational, transregional, cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary approaches to research. It allows an embrace of the amorphous nature of Eurasia astride Europe and Asia, and of its many social, cultural and linguistic entanglements (Smith 2019: 20). Ultimately, as Susan Whitfield has recently noted (2018: 252), the fact that the term was coined nar- rowly around an exchange focused on silk between China and Rome should not distract from more productive investigations of the interregional networks trading in commodities other than silk (see also Frankopan 2015).
The five articles in this special issue explore various political and cultural reverberations of cartography, as well as the complex set of discursive practices in which it is embedded. The discussion framing these papers began as a panel at the 2016 American Association of Geographers’ annual meeting, which included four of the authors featured here (Akin, Billé, Roszko, and Saxer). The contributions focus on China and its neighbors from the perspective of different disciplines: anthropology (Billé, Roszko, Saxer), history (Akin), and history of art (Tsultemin). In addition to bringing a cohesive and coherent focus to the special issue, this geographic convergence is timely given China’s recent economic and political trajectory. In tracing and analyzing the cartographic tremors of a geopolitical formation in flux, the different articles offer an outline of the mechanics of “cartographic anxiety” and together contribute to a better understanding of the affective power of mapping.
Papers by Franck Billé
Redacted: Writing in the Negative Space of the State brings together essays, poems, artwork, and memes – a bricolage of media that conveys the experience of living in state-inflected worlds in flux. Critically and poetically engaging with redaction in politically charged contexts (from the United States and Denmark to Russia, China, and North Korea), the volume closely examines and turns loose this disquieting mark of state power, aiming to trouble the liberal imaginaries that configure the political as a left–right spectrum, as populism and nationalism versus global and transnational cosmopolitanism, as east versus west, authoritarianism versus democracy, good versus evil, or the state versus the people – age-old coordinates that no longer make sense. Because we know from the upheavals of the past decade that these relations are being reconfigured in novel, recursive, and unrecognizable ways, the consequences of which are perplexing and ever evolving.
This book takes up redaction as a vital form in this new political reality. Contributors both critically engage with statist redaction practices and also explore its alluring and ambivalent forms, as experimental practices that open up new dialogic possibilities in navigating and conveying the stakes of political encounters.
It is telling that, along a border consisting mainly of rivers, there is not a single operating passenger bridge. Two different worlds have emerged. On the Russian side, in territory seized from China in the nineteenth century, defense is prioritized over economy, leaving dilapidated villages slumbering amid the forests. For its part, the Chinese side is heavily settled and increasingly prosperous and dynamic. Moscow worries about the imbalance, and both governments discourage citizens from interacting. But as Billé and Humphrey show, cross-border connection is a fact of life, whatever distant authorities say. There are marriages, friendships, and sexual encounters. There are joint businesses and underground deals, including no shortage of smuggling. Meanwhile some indigenous peoples, formerly persecuted on both sides, seek to “revive” their own alternative social groupings that span the border.
Surprising and rigorously researched, On the Edge testifies to the rich diversity of an extraordinary world haunted by history and divided by remote political decisions but connected by the ordinary imperatives of daily life.
Contributors. Debbora Battaglia, Franck Billé, Wayne Chambliss, Jason Cons, Hilary Cunningham (Scharper), Klaus Dodds, Elizabeth Cullen Dunn, Gastón Gordillo, Sarah Green, Tina Harris, Caroline Humphrey, Marcel LaFlamme, Lisa Sang Mi Min, Aihwa Ong, Clancy Wilmott, Jerry Zee
Building on the richly detailed historical studies already published in the context of the United States and Europe, contributors to Yellow Perils confront the phenomenon in Italy, Australia, South Africa, Nigeria, Mongolia, Hong Kong, and China itself. With chapters based on archival material and interviews, the collection supplements and often challenges superficial journalistic accounts and top-down studies by economists and political scientists. Yellow Peril narratives, contributors find, constitute cultural vectors of multiple kinds of anxieties, spanning the cultural, racial, political, and economic. Indeed, the emergence of the term “Yellow Peril” in such disparate contexts cannot be assumed to be singular, to refer to the same fears, or to revolve around the same stereotypes. The discourse, even when used in reference to a single country like China, is therefore inherently fractured and multiple.
The term “Yellow Peril” may feel unpalatable and dated today, but the ethnographic, geographic, and historical breadth of this collection—experiences of Chinese migration and diaspora, historical reflections on the discourse of the Yellow Peril in China, and contemporary analyses of the global reverberations of China’s economic rise—offers a unique overview of the ways in which anti-Chinese narratives continue to play out in today’s world. This timely and provocative book will appeal to Chinese and Asian Studies scholars, but will also be highly relevant to historians and anthropologists working on diasporic communities and on ethnic formations both within and beyond Asia.
Franck Billé challenges these reductive explanations. Drawing on extended fieldwork, interviews, and a wide range of sources in Mongolian, Chinese, and Russian, he argues that anti-Chinese sentiments are not a new phenomenon but go back to the late socialist period (1960–1990) when Mongolia’s political and cultural life was deeply intertwined with Russia’s. Through an in-depth analysis of media discourses, Billé shows how stereotypes of the Chinese emerged through an internalization of Russian ideas of Asia, and how they can easily extend to other Asian groups such as Koreans or Vietnamese. He argues that the anti-Chinese attitudes of Mongols reflect an essential desire to distance themselves from Asia overall and to reject their own Asianness. The spectral presence of China, imagined to be everywhere and potentially in everyone, thus produces a pervasive climate of mistrust, suspicion, and paranoia.
Through its detailed ethnography and innovative approach, Sinophobia makes a critical intervention in racial and ethnic studies by foregrounding Sinophobic narratives and by integrating psychoanalytical insights into its analysis. In addition to making a useful contribution to the study of Mongolia, it will be essential reading for anthropologists, sociologists, and historians interested in ethnicity, nationalism, and xenophobia.
Frontier Encounters presents a wide range of views on how the borders between these unique countries are enacted, produced, and crossed. It sheds light on global uncertainties: China’s search for energy resources and the employment of its huge population, Russia’s fear of Chinese migration, and the precarious economic independence of Mongolia as its neighbours negotiate to extract its plentiful resources.
Counterintuitively, these very imprecisions can make it a useful and fer- tile organising concept, fostering transnational, transregional, cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary approaches to research. It allows an embrace of the amorphous nature of Eurasia astride Europe and Asia, and of its many social, cultural and linguistic entanglements (Smith 2019: 20). Ultimately, as Susan Whitfield has recently noted (2018: 252), the fact that the term was coined nar- rowly around an exchange focused on silk between China and Rome should not distract from more productive investigations of the interregional networks trading in commodities other than silk (see also Frankopan 2015).
The five articles in this special issue explore various political and cultural reverberations of cartography, as well as the complex set of discursive practices in which it is embedded. The discussion framing these papers began as a panel at the 2016 American Association of Geographers’ annual meeting, which included four of the authors featured here (Akin, Billé, Roszko, and Saxer). The contributions focus on China and its neighbors from the perspective of different disciplines: anthropology (Billé, Roszko, Saxer), history (Akin), and history of art (Tsultemin). In addition to bringing a cohesive and coherent focus to the special issue, this geographic convergence is timely given China’s recent economic and political trajectory. In tracing and analyzing the cartographic tremors of a geopolitical formation in flux, the different articles offer an outline of the mechanics of “cartographic anxiety” and together contribute to a better understanding of the affective power of mapping.
Foregrounding this very spatial imbalance, the paper argues that the Russian association between horizontality and modernity unwittingly collapses Heihe’s riverfront skyline into a smooth surface lacking depth, and renders invisible those economic drivers that operate below this surface as well as along a vertical axis. As a result of this, spatiality provides an initial cultural grid through which the development, success and modernity of the Other is assessed."
Исходя из идеи пространственного дисбаланса, автор демонстрирует, что из-за восприятия современности в горизонтальной плоскости жители российского города невольно сглаживают объёмность вертикальных пространств и не замечают драйверы экономического роста, спрятанные за или под фасадами направленного им навстречу г. Хэйхэ. Иными словами, восприятие пространства формирует культурный фрейм, через который оцениваются развитие, успех и современность Другого.