Abstract This article brings together science and technology studies, sound studies, postcolonial history, and critical disability studies by examining how the intellectuals André Malraux (1901–1976) and Guo Moruo (1892–1978), with speaking or hearing impairments, conceptualized sound reproduction technologies during the peak of imperialism. It focuses on how their ideas were entangled with and articulated through bodily experiences during the anti-colonial revolution and the global expansion of technological innovations. By analyzing their writings on the gramophone, this study highlights how bodily impairment influences cultural imagination and challenges the conventional narratives that are inattentive to the social experience of disability. It first investigates how Guo articulated his view of the gramophone against the backdrop of an ableist revolutionary culture, thereby adapting a distinctive sonic imagination to align with anti-colonial movements. It then supplements this with the works of Malraux to evaluate the potential of a disability-mediated view of revolution in the greater anti-colonial world. In so doing, this article assesses how the intellectuals’ impaired bodies, as sites of engagements with revolution and sound technologies like the gramophone, provide a valuable lens for contesting ableist assumptions and a critical understanding of the historical dynamics of auditory culture.
Abstract Through an analysis of photographs produced in and around the 1975 Okinawa International Ocean Exposition, this essay develops the concepts of flattening and unflattening in material and visual registers. In line with the construction championed by Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei, the Ocean Expo demonstrates that the Japanese state took post-reversion Okinawa as a space to be flattened into the mainland. Drawing on a phenomenological approach to space, the essay explores photographs published in Ocean Expo News, an official publication of the Ocean Expo. These promotional photographs visually flattened out the land around the expo site. In this way, they oriented Okinawa within cartographic space, ready for assimilation. The essay also examines a series of photographs taken on the Amami Islands that the mainland photographer Nakahira Takuma made in response to the Ocean Expo. Through consistently disorienting photographic space itself, they suggest a mode of unflattening. Photographs taken by Okinawan activist Ahagon Shōkō of land on Iejima also warp the cartographic space of the state and the US military, as if pushing through the second dimension into the third. Taken together, these three groups of photographs suggest that an unflattening of space might happen through the body.
Abstract This essay examines the understudied role of personal computers in China’s literary transformation, focusing on the shift from handwriting to computer writing led by established literary elites circa the 1990s. It first contextualizes writers’ switch to computer writing within early-reform China’s information craze, exposing the purported efficiency of computer writing that allured writers and engineers alike as a constructed technophilic myth. It then contends that the adoption of personal computers has reconfigured literary composition into “processing words,” which manifests in three aspects: compartmentalized and human-machine entangled workflows, reinterpretation of the Chinese language stimulated by input methods, and writers’ negotiation with their new “processor” roles within the burgeoning and diversifying Chinese cultural market. Particularly, this essay closely analyzes Chen Cun 陈村 and his computer-written novel Fresh Flowers And 鲜花和 (1997) as an epitome of established writers’ shared navigation of the computerized creative environment. Writers grapple with the paradoxical effect of literary creation becoming “processing,” which unleashes new textual and paratextual expressive possibilities for literary experimentation but simultaneously desanctifies literary elites in the increasingly streamlined cultural production mechanism. This essay thus also identifies the nation’s pursuit of information modernity as a crucial catalyst of the cultural commodification witnessed in 1990s China.
Abstract This article traces the popularization of modern comic strips in Republican-era Shanghai via such strips serialized in the English-language newspaper The China Press. Consumed by both foreign and Chinese readers, these comics were some of The China Press’s most attractive features, especially George McManus’s strip Bringing Up Father, which appears to have been nearly universally known in Shanghai. From around 1920, the characters, form, and visual vocabulary of comics such as Bringing Up Father increasingly permeated Shanghai media and society, with significant overlap between English- and Chinese-language publications and audiences. The use of comics for advertising purposes played an especially large role in familiarizing Shanghai readers with comics, culminating in the appearance of the first major serialized Chinese-language comics in 1928. A central factor in this local establishment of comics as a transnational narrative technology of modernity appears to have been their contemporaneous embrace by periodicals published in Japan, which were widely available in Shanghai. Japanese military aggression during the 1930s conversely would preempt the continued development of Republican Chinese comics.
Abstract This essay examines the intermedial practice of Japanese artist Kondō Ginga, situating her work within the historical and theoretical contexts of postwar disability activism, queer/crip discourse, and feminist interventions in Japan. Through close readings of her works The Notifications (2021), Queer Street (2021), Separated (2022), Continuously Leaving the Closet (2022), and Prides in Streets (2024), the essay proposes that Kondō’ oeuvre renegotiates the intersections of digital and physical space, public and private visibility, and queer and disabled subjectivities. Kondō’s practice is analyzed along three dimensions: (a) the dissolution of the digital-physical divide; (b) small-scale, affective forms of reworlding and activism; and (c) sustained self-articulation across mediated and relational contexts. Historical case studies, from Ueno Park’ 1948 queer resistance to figures such as Yokota Hiroshi, Yonezu Tomoko, Asaka Yūho, and Hanada Minoru, contextualize her interventions, revealing continuities in gendered/queer and disabled visibility, exclusion, and resistance. The essay argues that Kondō transforms embodied limitation, chronic illness, and digital mediation into a politics of intimacy and care, redefining activism beyond public protest. Her work enacts “crip world-building,” demonstrating that survival, relationality, and aesthetic intervention constitute simultaneous, iterative forms of queer/disabled presence, challenging conventional notions of liberation, pride, and collective identities.
Abstract Kamagasaki, an urban enclave in Osaka, maintains a long history of marginalization that can be traced to the early 1900s. This article examines the representation of Kamagasaki in Osaka writer Takeda Rintarō’s novella “Kamagasaki.” Written in 1933 during the economically prosperous “Greater Osaka” (“Dai Osaka”) period, the story features the underclass and working-class people in the neighborhood of Kamagasaki, revealing how Osaka’s development has concealed issues, including economic exploitation and social division. This article introduces the concepts of “a compassionate participant” instead of adopting existing tropes of observers of city life, such as the flâneur and the “curiosity hunter” (ryōkisha). Through the perspective of such an observer, Takeda represents the issues of poverty, segregation, and homelessness in a humanistic manner. Simultaneously, by constructing various voices for fictional characters in the novella, Takeda highlights the importance of the “internal gaze” and voices from Kamagasaki. This article argues that by emphasizing how the locals value dignity and interpersonal bonds, Takeda’s representation of the neighborhood subverts the stereotype of urban slums as morally degenerate. Through his conscious resistance to the social stigma imposed on Kamagasaki by dominant national discourse, which reduces Kamagasaki to a place of degeneration and danger, Takeda depicts a neighborhood characterized by shared attachment and resilience.
Abstract This article examines the precedents of “subversiveness” (buronseong 不穩性) in contemporary South Korea by tracing its genealogy from colonial-era censorship regimes through the authoritarian era during the Cold War to the present. This inquiry moves beyond conventional interpretations of top-down authoritarianism by exploring contemporary formations of neoliberal governmentality through the concept of subversiveness that undergirds the paradoxical coexistence of democracy and authoritarianism. Through close analyses of juridical and ideological apparatuses, the article shows how the state has historically constructed a legal-discursive order to define the “intolerable” within the literary field. Rather than conceiving censorship solely as an instrument of repression, the article repositions it as a productive dispositif that structures the conditions of expression. In addition, the article examines key episodes of literary suppression and symbolic resistance, shedding light on how the regulation of subversive discourse has served to sustain the paradoxical cohabitation of democratic ideals and authoritarian practices. Ultimately, the article argues that Korean society remains haunted by the spectral logic of subversiveness and calls for a critical rethinking of the politics of censorship and literary autonomy.
Abstract This article examines media networks as both the central object and method of analysis for understanding how Chinese workers with pneumoconiosis navigate survival in a postsocialist risk society where many are systematically denied compensation. Rather than emphasizing overt collective resistance, the study focuses on two forms of media-enabled self-rescue. First, it explores the “de-blackboxing strategy,” whereby workers use and rely on news reports and various social media platforms to give the slow violence of occupational disease public visibility and pursue justice. Second, it investigates the rise of “shanzhai cyborgs,” in which workers draw on technical knowledge shared within grassroots communities to construct life-sustaining homemade oxygen machines. The article contends that these fragile and improvisational modes of survival are neither isolated acts of heroism nor conventional political protest, but instead emerge through ongoing interaction and circulation within decentralized media networks. It argues that the effectiveness of self-rescue often depends on chains of mediation that translate, amplify, and mobilize private experiences into public events capable of driving tangible change. By dissecting these mediated practices, the article offers a new perspective on what resistance and survival mean for pneumoconiosis workers who are rendered disposable in contemporary China.
Abstract This article explores the interface between Esperanto and the radio in the Japanese Empire. Viewing radio as more than simply a mode of conveyance, it examines the tensions that emerged when a universalizing language met a universalizing medium. The following sections explore how new communication infrastructure enabled Esperantists’ claims to political salience. Radio in the Japanese empire helped articulate powerful forecasts of political solidarity, liberated from the restraints of space or state. However, Esperanto on the radio also appeared in ways that deepened the borders of colonial relations and linguistic hierarchies. The article first discusses the history of radio infrastructure in the Japanese Empire and its role in shaping linguistic topography of the 1920s and 1930s. It then turns to a case study of the 1928 “Esperanto Evening” broadcast from colonial Taiwan by Japanese Esperantists. As one of the few surviving examples of when universalizing language and media met, the transcript of this broadcast reveals the limits of Esperanto’s emancipatory reach.
Abstract This article focuses on the prewar theoretical and print activities of Kyoto school philosopher Nakai Masakazu. It spotlights Nakai’s efforts to confront alienation under finance capitalism and inspire a new “critical” and “cooperative” form of mass subjectivity in consumers. The article contributes to extant scholarship in two ways. First, it develops Nakai’s novel interpretation of Marxism and consumer struggle in connection with his mid-1930s article “Logic of the Committee” (“Iinkai no ronri”) and his work on the tabloid-format newspaper Doyōbi (Saturday). Second, it provides a broader picture of Nakai’s philosophical development by showing how these ideas trace back to his involvement with an understudied set of coterie journals from the early 1930s: Bi-hihyō (Aesthetics/Criticism) and Sekai bunka (World Culture). The article divides into three parts, each of which moves across theory and praxis. Part 1 focuses on Nakai’s work on Bi-hihyō and Sekai bunka. It traces the historical development of Nakai’s early philosophy of collectivity, media technology, and specialization and massification in connection with the “crisis” conditions of early 1930s Japan. Part 2 focuses on Nakai’s attempts to develop and consolidate these concepts in the context of finance capitalism in his seminal “Logic of the Committee.” In particular, it shows how Nakai reinterpreted these early philosophical concepts in terms of consumer alienation. Part 3 then focuses on Nakai’s response to this condition of consumer alienation in his tabloid newspaper Doyōbi. It reveals how these sustained engagements in philosophy and print developed into a novel interpretation of Marxism from the standpoint of consumer struggle, and it shows how this connected with the so-called “housing problem” (jūtaku mondai) or “housing crisis” that peppered the pages of Doyōbi before its censorship. It ends by briefly considering how Nakai’s philosophy offers a novel contribution to twentieth-century Western Marxism.
Abstract This essay explores how immersion—its generative mechanisms, specific experiences, and cultural implications—was imagined and conceptualized in early modern accounts of the strange (yi 異). Rather than locating historical precursors to modern immersive technologies such as virtual reality (VR), it isolates immersion as an experiential mode from technologically driven paradigms that foreground presence within computer-simulated worlds. Drawing on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts of the strange, particularly Pu Songling’s 蒲松齡 (1640–1715) Strange Tales from Liaozhai, this essay demonstrates that immersive experience emerges not from make-believe or technological sophistication but through multisensory engagement with liminal spaces where reality and illusion intermingle. Central to these tales is the rendering of huan 幻—as not abstract illusion but a deeply felt condition of absorption, triggered by techniques such as huanxi 幻戲 (illusion show) and media like murals and narrative writing. These stories depict immersion as arising when everyday environments shift into the extraordinary and when multisensory experiences challenge established perceptual frameworks. They reveal a phenomenological understanding of the interplay between embodied sensory cognition and mediated environments. By approaching immersion from within these historical narratives and the reading experience they afford, this essay highlights the critical potential of accounts of the strange to illuminate a culturally specific, pluralistic understanding of immersion that technology-centered discourses frequently overlook.
Abstract This article examines precedents of Asian American sociopolitical marginalization in the United States and considers how appropriations of mobility and community building practices have resisted and relocated the assignations of those margins. Considering precedents of immigration exclusion, wartime incarceration, and refugee resettlement, the article excavates underlying continuities between these cases. It then turns to a specific examination of Vietnamese American resettlement and secondary migration processes following dispersion policies imposed by policy agendas to culturally assimilate Southeast Asian refugees in 1975 following the Vietnam War. Assimilation agenda trajectories were appropriated through secondary migration and affordances of automobility. Such histories of Asian American refusals offer their own precedents for reconstituting community, rebuilding solidarity, and asserting recognition.
