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.
