Guest Editors's Introduction: What's Left of Asia

Guest Editors’s Introduction: What’s Left of Asia When we began organizing this special issue two years ago, we were motivated by two imperatives for rethinking “Asia.”1 One has a long history: the project of rethinking Asia has infused the complex histories of struggles that deined and redeined what and how Asia means. The luctuating meanings and valences of Asia were particularly driven by Europe’s subjugation of regional empires and societies in Asia since the mid – nineteenth century, which marked a watershed in the global expansion of capitalism. Yet Asia was also mobilized by multiple social imaginaries and enlisted in the imperialist projects of the United States and Japan, as well as by various anticolonial movements, alliances, and revolutions. In an important sense, we inherit this historical terrain, full of the past’s contradictions, tensions, and mixed legacies as still-living forces to be contended with in the current global conjuncture. Ours is a moment, of course, marked by the reasserpositions 15:2 doi 10.1215/10679847-2006-029 Copyright 2007 by Duke University Press positions152_01_Yan.indd 211 7/17/07 2:38:48 PM positions 15:2 Fall 2007 212 tion of U.S./Western global hegemony and the occupation of Iraq, as well as by the commemoration and revival of the ive-decade-old dream of the Bandung spirit and the irst formation of the East Asia Summit.2 Thus the challenge today is that while we cannot escape rethinking the question of Asia, we also can neither reduce Asia to certain Western historical imaginaries nor invoke an essential, ontologically pure Asia as self-evident, selfsuficient, and self-made. The dramatic rise of new regional networks and discourses emerging in Asia and beyond presents another imperative for rethinking Asia today. Since the ending of the Cold War era, the growth of these efforts — what Tani E. Barlow in this collection calls “reregionalization” — does not point to a single imaginary or identity, but intersects with various contradictions and historical problems both old and new. While the Cold War may have ended as an oficial era, it has not ended as a reality, as the Thirty-Eighth Parallel dividing the two Koreas indicates.3 Less stark but no less the products of the global Cold War, albeit in new forms, are the transformation of the Taiwan issue into a “new world order” conlict of “democracy,” the Japanese right-wing politicians’ brazen commemoration of its Second World War criminals, the mutation of the Taliban in Afghanistan from Washington’s “freedom ighters” to its “terrorists,” and so on. Hence Asia doubles as the old frontier of an incomplete Cold War and as the home of what Washington calls the “axis of evil,” the center stage for the open-ended war on “terror.” But we should note here that our inclusion of West and Central Asia in this introduction runs the risk of an Asian expansionism, as it is questionable whether people in these regions see themselves as part of Asia or as Asians, as the Asia-signiier circulates mainly in East Asia and North America. And yet our intent here is to disrupt the euphoria over Asia in certain quarters and to suggest that if Asians — and Asianists — were to take this name and traditional cartography seriously, they should register the occupation of parts of Asia. Intersecting with these discourses are networks that have grown out of the post – Cold War era market expansion and that now link various parts of the Asian continent in new ways. Note, for example, the group called the Shanghai Six (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan) and its attempts to coordinate the political and economic inter- positions152_01_Yan.indd 212 7/17/07 2:38:49 PM Guest Editors’ Introduction 213 ests of central Asia in order to strengthen a regional position in the Northdominated neoliberal empire. The accelerating trade between China and India, whose economies are predicted to make up half of the global economy by 2050, has given rise to the talk about the “Chindia” effect, the “Chindia” region, and think-tanks such as the India-China Project and the ChinaIndia Project.4 The ongoing negotiations for an “ASEAN plus three” (i.e., the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, plus Korea, China, and Japan) promote greater regional integration through inter-Asian lows of capital, resources, and labor. At the same time, Asia has also increasingly become the qualiier of a new media-scape (e.g., the Asia Times and Satellite Television Asia Region [STAR] TV) that nurtures a translocal Asian subjectivity. As Leo Ching has noted, these reregionalization processes form new conditions for “economic production and symbolic reproduction under global capitalism,” which moves apace with “Asianness” abstracted and manifested as “a commodity-image-sound” circulating globally.5 Hence, in addition to doubling as sites of the Cold War and the war on terror, Asia has become the most dynamic center of global capitalism. With its precarious situation and mixed legacies, Asia is a bundle of contradictions and is thus gathering divergent imaginaries that attempt to shape the region’s future in relation to the United States – led neoliberal empire. If the above two imperatives suggest the need to return to the project of rethinking Asia, the new Great Game in the making makes this all the more compelling. The escalating, manufactured conlict over Iran’s nuclear capability reveals a “new” Great Game in the struggle of the United States and the European Union to control Western/Central Asia, arguably in large part to contain China.6 Iran is central to the Asian Energy Security Grid, critical for Russia, China, and India. In the wake of the regime change in Afghanistan and the U.S. occupation of Iraq, Iran — part of President George Bush’s infamous “axis of evil” — is subjected to similar demands and pressures that the United States and European Union deployed to bring Iraq to its knees. Aijaz Ahmad pinpoints the heart of the problem: “If Iran goes, the Asian Energy Security Grid goes. Iran is quite justiied in pointing out that the battle over Iran is, in fact, a battle for securing Asian sovereignty against expansionist imperialism.”7 Yet, with the Indian political leadership voting against Iran (seduced by the dream of “big power” status offered by positions152_01_Yan.indd 213 7/17/07 2:38:49 PM positions 15:2 Fall 2007 214 the United States), the strengthening of security and defense collaboration between the United States and Japan through their 2005 joint statement, and the Chinese government’s endorsements of the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the provisional Iraqi government, we must ask whether “Asian sovereignty,” like “the third world” in past decades, is a fragile concept that falls prey to its own disarticulation and fragmentation. Is there potential in devising a concept of Asian sovereignty to mobilize against a chauvinistic and self-interested regionalism that promotes Asianization (the “rediscovery of Asia by Asians”) as a mere simulation of the American Dream?8 And yet what is emerging on the horizon to undermine European Union – United States global hegemony is not only China or Asia, but new economic exchanges and political alliances within the global South that are potentially fermenting a new global order. Ravi Palat interprets the manufacturing of the Iranian nuclear crisis in the nascent context of growing cooperation and ties among states in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and a shift in global inancial lows: the Group of Twenty led by Brazil, China, India, and South Africa; the alliance between Cuba and Venezuela and the growing political resistance of Latin America against its northern counterpart; Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez’s resource outreach to Asia and poor neighborhoods in North America; growing Afro-Asia ties; and U.S. dependence on Asia to balance its colossal current account deicit.9 Fifty years after the Afro-Asia Conference in Bandung, there seems to be at least some potential and real resources for asserting the autonomy of the global South. Placed in this context, the United States’ and European Union’s attempt to subjugate Iran is not just to contain Asian sovereignty and China, but also to contain the growing political and economic formation of a global South. Hence, rethinking Asia as a signiier for critical regionalism becomes compelling in light of this nascent geopolitical formation. What intellectual resources are there to help us rethink Asia today? Rethinking Asia has been a leitmotif of progressive forums such as Critical Asian Studies (formerly Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars), positions, and other U.S. journals. The efforts to rethink Asia in these journals have sought to foster ethical scholarship and pedagogy that critique the making and remaking of “areas,” whose boundaries are literally drawn along lines of U.S. military deployments and market connections. The recent reregion- positions152_01_Yan.indd 214 7/17/07 2:38:49 PM Guest Editors’ Introduction 215 alizing networks in Asia have also generated new historical critiques, anticapitalist regional imaginaries, and social movements. Intellectual networks connecting East Asia with South and Southeast Asia are now the most productive of discourses on Asia. Among them are the emergence of working groups and publications like Inter-Asian Cultural Studies: Asia’s New Century from Japan, or Creation and Criticism from Korea; the interdisciplinary and interregional research group ARENA (Asian Regional Exchange for New Alternatives); the post-9/11, movement-based Asian Peace Alliance; the Asia-Paciic – based network Focus on the Global South; and the emergence of transnational and interregional alliances and groups focused on the environment, gender and sexuality, and labor. Cross-fertilization between leftwing intellectuals based in Asia and their counterparts in North America has been an ongoing process. Growing out of these exchanges are new theorizations of Asia. For example, Chen Kuan-Hsing takes Asia as a “method” in order to critique Taiwan’s “leaving Asia and joining America,” to undo the West as epistemological and political problematic, and to create alternative frameworks of reference and identiication (of inter-Asia, as opposed to the West-and-Asia).10 Wang Hui offers a genealogy of past social imaginaries of Asia and argues that Asia offers an opportunity to reconstruct “world history” and to develop analyses of Asia that refuse the double-bind of Eurocentrism and Asia-centrism and that imagine Asia as an uninished project of emancipation.11 Brij Tankha’s and Madhavi Thampi’s Narratives of Asia searches for earlier interregional connections that are elided and distorted by colonialism, but are coming into a new formation of Asia.12 Relecting on the intertwined histories between China and Japan, Sun Ge approaches Asia as an interspace for the production of a relexive and decentered subject.13 Informed by this cross-fertilization, “What’s Left of Asia” aims to foreground Asia as a line of inquiry that serves two interrelated purposes. We work from a position between critiques of area studies in North America and discourses that renegotiate regionalization now under way in Asia and beyond. In the current geopolitical context, avoiding the question of Asia — of how it means, and the work that it does or could do — is not an option. Asia’s transformation from frontier of the anticommunist Cold War to the dual site of global capitalist development and the battlegrounds of the war on terror implicates area studies in North America. U.S. area studies positions152_01_Yan.indd 215 7/17/07 2:38:50 PM positions 15:2 Fall 2007 216 on Asia are themselves witnessing a dual process of reregulation by national and security interests preoccupied with U.S. hegemony and a certain transformation required by global governance tied with certain interests of transnational capital.14 At the same time, a post – Cold War reregionalization process is beginning to transform Asia, often with the active participation of global governance institutions like the United Nations and the World Bank. We suggest that neither the U.S.-based critiques of area studies, nor Asiabased discussions of Asia, can be self-adequate for rethinking Asia. Second, we seek in this inquiry to point toward that which remains left over from, or cannot be assimilated into, the dominant political frameworks currently structuring the world — e.g., conservative ideologies of regionalism and neoliberal economics and its forms of global governance. Such inassimilable entities might include progressive scholarship, but perhaps more important are the popular cultural effusions, social movements, contested histories, and other texts that our contributors have analyzed here. Although the essays in this collection approach Asia in varying ways and in differing historical and geopolitical contexts, collectively they represent renewed efforts in exploring the possibilities of transforming and radicalizing Asia. Nearly three decades after Edward Said’s Orientalism, the discourse of civilization has mustered renewed support in the recent war on terror. Following in the steps of Samuel Huntington’s 1993 article on the “Clash of Civilizations,” the idea of empire — condemned to political and moral bankruptcy ive decades ago by global waves of decolonization — is summoned back by Niall Ferguson and his backers to legitimize an open imperial ambition. If this nakedly imperialist concept of civilization lags itself for criticism by cultural studies and critical area studies, what about the more quiet running of the civilizational/culturalist worldview whose hegemony often goes unnoticed and unchallenged? In a recent seminar session taught by one of the guest editors, students were asked to discuss Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” as well his “Hispanic Challenge.” Huntington’s civilizationalist premises of global politics is of a piece with his culturalist understanding of the making of U.S. capitalist growth. Students, including some graduate and undergraduate students, were quick to point out the racist implications of Huntington’s thesis. But when asked whether they knew any interpretation of global and national history that offers an alternative to the civilizational/ positions152_01_Yan.indd 216 7/17/07 2:38:50 PM Guest Editors’ Introduction 217 culturalist perspective propounded by Huntington, almost all of them were at a loss. If this instance indicates a problem in our educational system, it is time to make that unfashionable assertion about political economy as the necessary and inextricable premise for discourse. It is in this context that we can particularly appreciate Andre Gunder Frank’s uncompromised and impassioned writing in our issue against civilizationalist discourse through a political economy of the world system. Much of the history of Asia continues to be narrated in terms and tropes derived from the European Enlightenment. Named the East Asian Miracle, the recent discourse of Asian capitalism supplements and sustains — rather than challenges — the civilizationalist mystiication of what Frank calls “European exceptionalism.” To implode this myth, Frank approaches the trajectory of Asia through a structuralist examination of the world history of Afro-Eurasia. The China-centered silver-based global trading system was undermined and destroyed by the ascendancy of a Europe that, through force, appropriated “free” slave labor from Africa and “free” silver and land from the Americas. While one might take issue with what seems to be a location-determinism in Frank’s thesis — that location in the historical world system determines a region’s success — his world-historical account rubbishes the discourse of civilizations and Western exceptionalism as the motors of history. Debating the decline and resurgence of Asia is indeed critical to the world history of capitalism. The European “discovery” of capitalism, of its miraculous, autochthonous birth in Europe, is still far from being displaced. Alternative, critical examinations of Asia’s place in historical capitalism may set off a chain-revolution in both European and world history. Giovanni Arrighi’s examination of the history of Asian decline and renaissance in the world system achieves this very signiicance. Rather than focusing, as Frank does, on circulation and location as the vantage point to examine the shifts in the world system, Arrighi pursues an analysis of geopolitical environment, particularly the interstate system, that he sees as critical to the great divergence between the industrious revolution embarked on by the China-centered world region and the Industrial Revolution developed in Western Europe. The thesis of the nineteenth-century divergence suggests that the China- positions152_01_Yan.indd 217 7/17/07 2:38:51 PM positions 15:2 Fall 2007 218 centered world region found itself in a “Smithian high-level equilibrium trap,” embarked on a labor-absorbing and resource-saving industrious revolution, and focused on a self-centered development with more state-making, short-distance trade, and greater division of labor within households and microregions. Western Europe took a different route: it escaped the Smithian high-level equilibrium trap, embarked on overseas empire-building, warmaking, and long-distance trade, created core regions and overseas peripheral regions, and had a labor-saving, land/resource-absorbing Industrial Revolution. Arrighi emphasizes that military superiority is critical to Europe’s process — “successful pursuit of power within the system [depends on] accesses to resources . . . outside the system” — and decisive for the revolution in capital-good industries. Pushing this thesis further, Arrighi analyzes what shaped and enabled the great divergence between the China-centered world region and Western Europe. This leads to a fundamental question: with greater market density in China and with capitalist organizations present both there and in Western Europe, why did capitalism become articulated at the level of state in Europe while it had an interstitial and external existence in the China-centered world region? The questions of state, interstate systems, and the relation between state and market are brought into Arrighi’s reconstructed history of capitalism and the two divergent patterns of development. While the development of the world regions saw convergence and hybridization in the twentieth century, the grave challenge we face in the recent China-led “Asian renaissance” is its convergence from an energy-saving to an energy-consuming path of development. Whither Asia? How can difference be made and alternative development strategies nurtured by lessons drawn from these reconstructed world histories of Asia, Europe, and capitalism? What is more clear is that this is a challenge we can no longer afford to ignore. The possibilities entailed by rethinking Asia preoccupy Tani E. Barlow’s demonstration that there are ways to rearticulate the politics of gender and the sexed division of labor to foster other routes of reregionalization. The strategic questions here are how do we identify and register the visibility of the sexed, “Asian” division of labor, and what possibilities have emerged to move global governance away from neoliberalism. These strategic questions could be entertained if we give up the rigid distinction between scholarship positions152_01_Yan.indd 218 7/17/07 2:38:51 PM Guest Editors’ Introduction 219 and policy. The essay issues warnings and hope in a dialectical manner: “Gender, in the context of reregionalization, has emerged as a unifying element in the ideology of global governance, along with the human-rights regime and the cosmopolitan efforts to salvage the environment.” The imposition of the interests of neoliberal capital on women and gender (via governance ideology) renders them categories of indenture. Yet it is also Barlow’s argument that our political imaginations need not surrender to this imposition, but need to grasp the potential in the rhetorical opening of “women in Asia.” As a category in the “UN matrix” that travels and circulates, gender has to reveal itself as a highly problematic, contested term, even while it continues to discipline and unify. Asia, as a qualiier, may be a lever to open up complex practices and theorizations about sexed difference that cannot be easily subsumed to global governance. It is by grasping this potential that “Asia scholarship and praxes have much to offer.” Yiman Wang is interested in the links between mediascapes and Asia and investigates what transformative potentials exist in the sphere of popular culture. Wang’s historical examination shows the ignominious imaginings of Asia in Japan’s Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere, in Hollywood Orientalism, and in the post-1980s New Asia discourse, and shows further that each incarnation of Asia on the silver screen has depended on the performative “border-crossing” translations of actresses. If Anna May Wong and Yamaguchi Yoshiko had been ignored or subsumed in previous representations of Asia (and in ilm studies), Wang suggests that Maggie Cheung’s border-crossing performance indicates a certain palpable and nonreiied moment of indigestibility of “localized agency.” Today such localized agency could offer potential for a different reenacting of Asia because the Asia-Paciic is itself a self-differentiating and enabling contact zone. In the general context of Asia as a market and Asian-ness as commodity in the regional and global capitalist economy, Wang sensitizes us to affective performance and mobilization, including their transformative potential and politics that cannot always be reduced to the logic of the market.15 Tobias Hübinette’s commentary in this collection takes us on an unexpected tour: through Asia’s operation as a compulsive, contradictory “topos of fear and desire” for Nazi and right-wing Asia scholars in Sweden. A scrutiny of this historical and unknown terrain reveals mutations and continuity positions152_01_Yan.indd 219 7/17/07 2:38:51 PM positions 15:2 Fall 2007 220 in the operation of Orientalism: in 1930s Europe, fear of Asia reinforced a phobia against Jews as “internal Orientals”; in the Cold War, communism was linked with Oriental despotism and the “yellow peril” and “Red menace”; in the war on terror, terror originates from the “barbarity of the Orient.” As if in sync with the mutation of Orientalism, fascism has found renewed employment in the anticommunist agenda of the Cold War and the post – Cold War “end of history” crusade for democracy. Urs Matthias Zachmann in this collection revisits the vexed problematic of Asia for Meiji Japan. In a close, defamiliarizing reading of the classic and disseminative debate between Okakura Tenshin and Fukuzawa Yukichi, Zachmann argues against the dominant reading that they are, in fact, polar opposites, representing Westernization and pan-Asianism that, in turn, combine to form a perfect “double portrait” of Meiji intellectual history. As suggested in this essay, it is still the European subject who speaks through this too handy and dualistic schema. Underpinning the binary of “leaving Asia/joining Asia” lies Fukuzawa and Okakura’s shared vision of Japanese transcendence over the Orientalist locations of the East and West and their mutual support for Japan’s war with China as Japan’s necessary self-expression as an independent sovereign subject. These classic debates, then, are less about some real East/West opposition than about a nationalist expression of discontent with the new global episteme. The metaphysical desire for transcendence, articulated through an imperialist logic, only propelled Japan physically and violently into Asia, to confront Europe by mastering Asia. Drawing on Zachmann, it may be proposed that Asia is a problematic for Meiji intellectuals because the sign of Asia slides between the transcendental self (embodied by Japan) and what is left over, the other embodied by the rest of Asia. Reading Zachmann in the current context of the continuing problem of Asia for Japan, we also need to ask how intellectual history is accountable to history proper.16 Can intellectual history as an approach to history (about the Meiji era or otherwise) account for the split between the violent processes of abstraction and reiication (the transcendent, imperialist self) and that which is left over from or resists these same processes (what is left of Asia after such violence)? Yet the logic embedded in Asia as a problematic is not unique to Japan. Haven’t we seen this split or violent hierarchy reproduced in various places positions152_01_Yan.indd 220 7/17/07 2:38:52 PM Guest Editors’ Introduction 221 even after decolonization? The stellar performance of (East) Asia in global capitalism has not enabled a beneicent or progressive Asia or regionalism, but has perhaps trapped it in the slave’s “existential impasse” in relationship to the master.17 The split found in Asia today, between development and poverty or between self-interest and responsibility, invokes two opposing igures: the hyper models of development in the developed, urban parts of Asia, and the disavowed, rural third world of China, India, et al. This Asia has reproduced the exploitative and violent relationship between core and peripheries within the region and in each society, and has excluded and elided other, possible Asias. It is the very problem of violence, metaphysical, modern, and otherwise, that Han Yuhai unravels through his analysis of the historical relationship between speech and writing in the Chinese language. Following Marx, Nietzsche, and Lu Xun, Han argues that “metaphysical inversion,” or the social process of abstraction, is the secret of social domination and constitutes the domination of writing over speech, of abstract labor over concrete labor and exchange-value over use-value, and of the modern state as the abstract, imagined community over historical, multifaceted, and “local” communities. The law of value in the capitalist market economy and the juridical system of the modern state — the backbones of modern civilization — are founded upon this metaphysical violence. The process of community consciousness-forming in China, on the other hand, and including popular insurrections such as the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions and the Maoist social revolution, were transformative social practices that were not founded on the metaphysical reversal. Thus, collective consciousness formation did not depend on an abstract, graphocentric standardization of language, but was mobilized through the creative syntheses of regional varieties of speech, folk culture forms, and the common vernacular. Noting that “metaphysical inversion” also lies within the very formation of “the world” as an object of knowledge, Han warns us that the “Orient” or “Asia” is a similar construction; particular speech, cultures, and communities it within this rubric only as homologous entities, “much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes” (Marx). The current fantasy of the new “Asian community” and the rewriting of world history in the name of Asia runs the risk of falling into the same metaphysics underpinning the modern world sys- positions152_01_Yan.indd 221 7/17/07 2:38:52 PM positions 15:2 Fall 2007 222 tem. If we need to have a rethinking of Asia today, Han (following Jacques Derrida) seems to suggest that this must move in the direction of “a new international,” though presumably without the abstract, Derridean fear of taking positions. The unsettled historical toll of Japan’s self-Europeanization in the last century, and the newly professed ambition for an Asianization of “the American dream” in the new century, continue to call forth the necessity of a critical regionalism and a reorientation of thought that can resist and provide alternatives to neoliberalism and empire within and across Asia and the world. Counterposing the neoliberal empire as well as these Asia operations, Asia, for Gayatri Spivak in this collection, is a position without identity, and one that could facilitate a nonidentitarian, critical regionalism. The challenge is how to take such a position and produce such a politics collectively and how to think and work on Asia in a way that takes it as neither subject or object nor origin or end. To ask “what’s left of Asia” is to radically question Asia but without negating it. It is to make more thinkable and visible Asian legacies of resistances, revolutions, and historical forms of consciousness that cannot be abstracted and reinscribed into the current geopolitical order. We would like to close this introduction with a question and possible future line of inquiry that these articles implicitly raise. If Asia cannot be an end in itself, then there is ultimately no good reason why Asia, mediated through a reconstructed world history, cannot be articulated to a new international of the global South that is located both inside and outside Asia. How, then, can scholarship and social movements move the cartographically burdened concept of Asia toward this new international? Yan Hairong and Daniel Vukovich, Guest Editors Notes 1 The guest editors and some of the contributors greatly beneited from participating in the conference on “Rethinking Asia in the New Global Order” organized by Ralph Litzinger and Leo Ching and the guest editors at Duke University in the fall of 2004. 2 On the golden jubilee of the Afro-Asia conference in Bandung and the new declaration of strategic partnership, see www.asianafricansummit2005.org/statements_declaration.htm positions152_01_Yan.indd 222 7/17/07 2:38:53 PM Guest Editors’ Introduction 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 positions152_01_Yan.indd 223 223 (accessed May 1, 2006); for a commentary, see Thomas Abraham, “Reviving an Old Dream of Afro-Asia Cooperation,” Yale Global, May 24, 2005, yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article ?id=5752. The East Asia Summit involved Asia’s two fast-rising powers, China and India, along with Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and the ten countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. See “Asia’s Continental Drift Changes Terrain for U.S.,” International Herald Tribune, November 16, 2005. The Cold War has ended as an era, but is far from over. See Chen Kuan-Hsing, “Why is ‘Great Reconciliation’ Impossible? De – Cold War/Decolonization, or Modernity and Its Tears,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 3 (2002): 77 – 99 (part 1); 235 – 51 (part 2). Randeep Ramesh, “Chindia: Where the World’s Workshop Meets Its Ofice,” Guardian, September 30, 2005; “India-China Project,” indiachinaproject.blogspot.com (accessed March 5, 2007); “China-India Project,” www.hku.hk/cas/cip (accessed March 5, 2007). Leo Ching, “Globalizing the Regional, Regionalizing the Global: Mass Culture and Asianism in the Age of Late Capital,” Public Culture 12 (2000): 235. Michael T. Klare, “Containing China,” Tom Dispatch, April 18, 2006, www.tomdispatch .com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=78021. Aijaz Ahmad, “Iran: Imperialism’s Second Strike,” Frontline 22 (2005), www.lonnet.com/ l2221/stories/20051021004602800.htm. The foreign minister of Singapore, George Yeo, used the phrase “rediscovery of Asia by Asians” when commenting on the upcoming East Asia Summit. The Harvard-educated minister at the same time stated, “We must not forget that what is now the Asian dream was really the American dream before.” See “Asia’s Continental Drift.” Ravi Palat, “India Suborned: The Global South and the Geopolitics of India’s Vote against Iran,” Japan Focus, October 24, 2005, japanfocus.org/article.asp?id=427. Chen Kuan-Hsing, “Asia as Method,” Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly of Social Science 57 (2005): 133 – 78. Wang Hui, “The Politics of Imagining Asia: A Genealogical Analysis,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8 (2007): 1 – 33. Brij Tankha and Madhavi Thampi, Narratives of Asia from India, Japan, and China (Calcutta: Sampark, 2005). Sun Ge, Zhuti misan de kongjian: yazhou lunshu zhi liangnan (The Space for the Diffused Subject: The Dilemma of an Asia Narrative) (Nanchang: Jiangxi Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 2002). The passing of HR 3077 by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2003, in the wake of the global war on terror and the occupation of Iraq, relected an attempt to reign in critical scholarship and to reregulate area studies in terms of “national security interests” through federal funds and Title VI legislation. For a discussion of the general context of Asia as a market, see Ching, “Globalizing the Regional.” 7/17/07 2:38:53 PM positions 15:2 Fall 2007 224 16 See the forum “Is Japan Not in East Asia?: From On Taiwan to Yasukuni Shrine,” organized by Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly of Social Science, November 12, 2005, www.bp.ntu .edu.tw/WebUsers/taishe/ (accessed December 3, 2005). 17 This term is from Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the “Phenomenology of Spirit,” ed. Raymond Queneau and Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969). Susan Buck-Morss’s discussion of the Haitian revolution and its impact on Hegel’s thesis of the master and slave is here apposite: “The goal of this liberation, out of slavery, cannot be subjugation of the master in turn, which would be merely to repeat the master’s ‘existential impasses,’ but rather, elimination of the institution of slavery altogether” (p. 849, emphasis in the original). “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 821 – 65. positions152_01_Yan.indd 224 7/17/07 2:38:53 PM