International Center for Cultural Studies

《Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Movements》Volume 22 Number 1 出版

2021-04-20

Editorial statement

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, also known as the Movements project, is a transborder collective undertaking to confront Inter-Asia cultural politics.
Since the 1980s, a pervasive rhetoric of the “rise of Asia” has come to mean more than the concentrated ﬂow of capital into and out of the region. It has come to constitute a structure of feeling that is ubiquitous yet ambiguously felt throughout Asia. Historically, this feeling of the “rise of Asia” is complicated by the region’s colonial past. While Asia’s political, cultural and economic position in the global system will continue to ﬂuctuate, there is a need to question and critique the rhetorical unities of both the “rise” and of “Asia.” Wealth and resources are unevenly distributed and there is no cultural or linguistic unity in this imaginary space called Asia. On the other hand, no matter whether there are common experiences shared by sub-regional histories, there is an urgent need for forging political links across these sub-regions. Hence, “inter-Asia” cultural studies.
The politico-economic transformations across the region in the Post Cold War era have engendered both new social movements and critical cultural studies as forces of decolonization. These forces have given rise to alternative modes of knowledge production, and yet no adequate means exists for the circulation of intellectual work and for interaction among critical intellectuals.
It is at such a pivotal conjuncture that Inter-Asia Cultural Studies has emerged as part of a movement for the ongoing construction and reconstruction of critical Inter-Asia subjectivities. It gives a long overdue voice to the intellectual communities in the region and recognizes its own existence as an attempt to continue critical lines of practices. The journal’s aim is to shift existing sites of identiﬁcation and multiply alternative frames of reference: it is committed to publishing work not only out of “Asia” but also other coordinates such as the “third world.” Its political agenda is to move across: state/national/sub-regional divisions, scholarship and activism, modalities/forms of knowledge, and rigid identity politics of any form.

Kuan-Hsing Chen and Chua Beng Huat

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Movements Volume 22 Number 1 March 2021

Table of Content

Essays

Show Me the Monolingualism: Korean Hip-Hop and the Discourse of Difference
Jerry Won LEE and Chungjae LEE

A Theoretical Study on the Development Potential of the Korean DMZ as a Cold War Landscape
Eun-hye CHOUNG

Reunion and Division in Iowa City: International Writing Program and the 'Two Chinas' in 1979
Yi-hung LIU

Islamic Feminist Political Narratives, Reformist Islamic Thought, and its Discursive Challenges in Contemporary Iran
Afsaneh TAVASSOLI and Teo Lee KEN

Visual essay
India since the 90s
Gauri NAGPAL

Interview
Image, Subject, Power: Interview with Marie-José Mondzain
Marie-José MONDZAIN (Translated by Briankle G. CHANG and Nefeli Forni ZERVOUDAKI)

Webinar
Inter-Asia Book Launch Online Roundtable to mark the publication of Tejaswini Niranjana’s new book Musicophilia in Mumbai: Performing Subjects and the Metropolitan Unconscious
Tejaswini NIRANJANA, KIM Soyoung, IP Kimho, Chih-ming WANG, CHOW Yiu Fai, Meaghan MORRIS

Reflexive notes
Multiethnicity in multicultural Singapore in completion of the NM6201, communication as culture
Farah BAWANY