Abstract In 2022 and 2023, Duke University Press published three major works as part of its Sinotheory series. Ban Wang's book explored the political ethos of tianxia underlying the advent of the new rise of China. Pheng Cheah and Caroline S. Hau's volume of essays presented critical views of the latter in East Asia from the context of literary postcolonial theory, while Carlos Rojas and Lisa Rofel's volume surveyed the interdisciplinary landscape of China's globalist political economy, perhaps in light of recent history. Despite the mutual thematic overlap, each work interprets “China in the world” from inherently different perspectives. While they may resonate with wider discussions of nation-state, postcoloniality, and globalization elsewhere, this review essay argues that each work has its own problems of internal compatibility, especially when cast in its specific relevance or applicability to China. Instead of a sinotheory, the review essay argues that geopolitics can integrate cultural sociology as critical ethos.

Review of: The Chile Pepper in China: A Cultural Biography, Brian R. Dott (2020) New York: Columbia University Press, 296 pp., ISBN 978-0-23119-532-4, cloth, $32.00/£28.00

Marcus and Fischer's advocacy of cultural critique in anthropology, which I subscribe to wholly, is admirable, but it takes for granted the inherent nature of anthropology as the study of other cultures while more importantly sanctifying values of its implicit cultural relativism. The dialogical nature of ethnography refers to the reconciliation of outsider and insider points of view in their respective constructions of ethnographic reality. There is on the other hand little consideration of what might constitute a critical perspective from a symbolic (Geertzian) native's point of view or for a native studying his own society. Cultural relativism is a virtue, to be sure, but it has its limitations in practice. The neutrality that is attributed to prevailing understandings of the cultural and social system, even in the best traditions of interpretive and reflexive anthropology, persistently reflects in my opinion our normative definitions of system.

What is a Nationalist ideology? If anything, the writing of political discourse reflects upon the role of the state as a thinking, acting and practicing the subject. In postwar Taiwan, the KMT regime took an unusually active role in invoking icons of traditional authority, writing myths of historical unity, advocating the legitimacy of certain shared values and establishing the orthodoxy of founding political principles, but primarily through the mediation of culture. Within this process of cultural reconstruction, the constant metamorphosis of Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People typified the KMT's attempt to impose its political utopianism not just in accordance with changing times but by reference to the authority of texts that could not change. This was the basic paradox of the KMT's peculiar Orientalism: it was by nature a modern project of state formation that aimed to mold the polity as an object of disinterested domination, but in the service of newly emerging discourses of Chineseness that constructed their legitimacy on the basis of its roots to a traditional past and proprietorship of this legacy.

Education is "normal" in more ways than one. First of all, modernity is the era of the norm. It not only gave birth to the notion of society as the social structural framework upon which various institutions, behaviors, rites and practices were seen as functionally integrative, but it was also reinforced by theories of the norm in various incarnations that viewed diverse aspects of social and cultural life as inherently systemic and totalizing. The notion that society was inherently normal rather than imaginative, exceptional or violent was nurtured more importantly by social scientific theories that made the norm sacred. Institutions were in fact impositions of political policy, social order and rational epistemology, backed, if necessary, by the violence of the state. Within the social "system", some institutions, such as the school, were thus considered as more "normal" than others.

This book comprehensively discusses ethnography that can serve as a paradigmatic case study for critical cultural studies

This book is in short an ethnography of a middle school in Taiwan in the early 1990s. In literal terms, it describes a moment in time as well as an institution in social space. It is less a description of a cultural institution than an attempt to understand the mechanisms of power that have inscribed the school within other overarching institutions in society, which are also moments in time and space. One cannot write an ethnography of a school in Taiwan without in the first instance viewing it as a dependent variable in the maintenance of other a priori institutions in society. The subjectivity of the state is in this regard a multi-layered process of ideological investment and social routinization; the subjective baggage of the author pales by comparison. The school is a seminal nexus for viewing the intersection of policy and everyday praxis in the practice of culture and for understanding moral regulation in the political abstract and as a social norm. Ethnography thus relates the socially visible to the politically invisible. As a literary act, its function is really more critical than descriptive.

In recent decades, migration studies has become a major academic cottage industry, in Taiwan as well as elsewhere. Migration is hardly new in global history, nor are experiences of economic exploitation and social injustice rooted in the systemic regulation of foreign labor. Its growth in the late twentieth century was not only the product of transnational movements but also the perception of borderless economies and decentralized flows of people. Foreign labor has always been stratified, but outside the West the closed primordialism of the nation as "imagined community" reified structural inequality. In Taiwan, the fictive advent of "multiculturalism" was in fact a process of indigenization that rigidified newly instituted notions of nationality.

During the COVID-19 global pandemic, Taiwan has been universally praised for its policy actions in preventing its initial outbreak there from Wuhan and for its strict measures in containing its communal spread locally. Memory of the SARS crisis played a major role, but people in Taiwan forget that SARS was initially considered a problem confined mostly to Hong Kong. Taiwanese did not seem urgently aware, until infections multiplied locally. Taiwan's health authorities eventually adopted a draconian quarantine policy, but mainly as a political tactic to contain the widespread panic, as though the dam had suddenly burst. In retrospect, the extremity and internal contradictions of the policy are remarkable, but they are instructive. The initial reaction of unprepared governments, most notably in the US, during COVID-19 mirrors this same ineptitude. Enabling hysteria and resorting to scapegoating were in turn diversions to cover up their inability to prevent a crisis. In the US, racism emerged, China and the WHO were blamed, people were even urged not to wear masks to avoid a run on short supplies. This is the tip of the political iceberg, if one adds tightened immigration and economic effects on the U.S. elections.

Following a series of mass protests in recent years, which has escalated into a seemingly full-blown crisis of democratisation, social movements have been and will continue to be staple phenomena i...

On the Geopragmatics of Anthropological Identification explores the discursive spaces of our speaking position, or what has routinely been referred to in the literature as the poetics and politics of writing culture. At issue here are its problematic underlying notions of cultural identity, authorial subjectivity and postcolonial critique. Contrary to the widespread assumption that cultural studies and the social sciences share a common discourse of culture and society, Allen Chun argues that 'modern' disciplinary practices and axioms have in fact produced inherently incompatible theories. Anthropology's ethical relativism has also created obstacles for a critical theory of culture and society.

The notion of colonial governmentality is the product of two intersecting themes, one being a deep product of Foucauldian reflections on the evolution of modern welfare states and the other being its political appropriation in a colonial context. David Scott's essay on colonial governmentality was in this regard an attempt to bridge Michel Foucault's notion and Partha Chatterjee's critique of Eurocentric constructions of nationhood by showing how colonialism transformed as a result of its application upon the body social and away from the economy. Taken literally as a framework of rule, many things can be said about the abstract nature of colonial governance. This article is an exploration of comparative colonialisms in Hong Kong and Macau viewed as the historical evolution (in cultural practice) of 'British' and 'Portuguese' regimes of rule. In addition to significant historical and political differences, their postcolonial fate in the aftermath of their return to Chinese sovereignty opens up other areas of debate. In short, I argue that epistemologies of 'order', 'governance', 'difference' and 'statism' are largely products of a late-Victorian British empire 'mentality' (imagination) gone global, which can be used constructively in comparative (post)colonialisms.

What used to be viewed as relatively self-defined polities in a previous era … are now being reconfigured by competing centripetal and centrifugal tensions.

This paper began as an inquiry into the plight of ethnic Japanese in postwar Taiwan. As a group, they have been an object of benign neglect. Despite the advent of multiculturalism (duoyuan wenhua zhuyi) in Taiwan, was marked by an alien (mainlander Chinese) KMT regime and led to the eventual liberation of opposition parties and indigenous ethnic groups, few have found it relevant to celebrate the cause of oppressed Japanese. The postwar ban on Taiwanese and Japanese culture was part of the same imperative of mono-cultural nationalism that endeavored to erase 50 years of Japanese colonialism in order to restore the legacy of Chinese civilization. At the same time, there is little recognition in the literature of any Japanese diaspora in Taiwan. It pales in comparison with the many Japanese orphans abandoned in Manchuria after the Second World War. The birth of a generation of children from mixed marriages making claims to Japanese identity has added other significant dimensions to the concept of diaspora and its definition as a social group or discursive construction.

What is the unseen presence of the nation-state? What is so mystifying about the state of social theory that has effectively masked the nature of its cultural hegemony? At the time of his initial writing, Geoffrey Benjamin’s ruminations on these themes were novel and theoretically critical. Thirty years on, many of these conceptual mysteries remain unresolved. However, like the advent of governmentality, neo-liberalism and biopolitics, the omnipresence of national imagination and violence of state power still warrant problematization.

This is a review essay of James Clifford’s recent book, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century, viewed in the context of his entire trilogy. The thematic transition from roots and routes to returns is the evolution of an approach to cultural relocations and indigenous histories that parallels Clifford’s subjective shift from that of discursive observer to cultural-historical interlocutor.