Introduction

The political life of academic intellectuals is a theme positions often returns to. Wen Tiejun’s “Four Stories in One: Environmental Protection and Rural Reconstruction in China” is rooted in his academic work as an economist and dean of the School of Agriculture and Rural Development at Renmin University in Beijing. Wen draws on the academic convention of the cautionary tale to excoriate social policies in Mexico and China such as land commodification, neoliberal efforts to extract economic surplus from agriculture, incoherent urban planning, the ruin of healthy traditional farming, and the poisoning of food. On the strength of his surveys, Wen urges intellectuals to join the debate over land privatization in the People’s Republic of China. Academic intellectuals have to seek truth through grassroots research, he argues, and in this case, the evidence suggests that agriculture and food are best off when peasants organize themselves and the state reinstitutionalizes organic farming as a national policy.

A pragmatics of truth is also at stake in Minoru Iwasaki and Steffi Richter’s “The Topology of Post-1990s Historical Revisionism,” which disputes the spurious project of Japanese right-wing war atrocity deniers. Iwasaki and Richter offer a critique of “historical revisionism” and reestablish the status of truth in historical narrative. Atrocity deniers seize on an alleged right of self-narration to devalue the patient, slow, factual work of actual history writing. In the name of narcissistic self-narration, the ultranationalists particularly target military sex slavery, school textbooks, and the International Women’s War Crimes Tribunal in 2000–2001. These, and denial of the 1937 Nanjing atrocities and 1945 compulsory mass suicides in Okinawa, are right-wing strategies in the struggle to fill the political vacuum the Cold War’s end left in Japanese civil society. Skilled historians must contest the claims of the radical rightist project and claim truth on the basis of evidence.

Focus on the pragmatics of truth among professional intellectuals brings Rebecca Karl’s “Journalism, Social Value, and a Philosophy of the Everyday in 1920s China” to the related question of how it is possible to write history that is not a form of misrecognition. Karl’s objective is to address “the relationship between journalism as a commodity form and the emergence of philosophical concepts of everyday life” that proliferated in polemics on social value in the Asia of Japanese imperialism. Focus on philosopher journalists in the 1920s clarifies how the problematic of social value gives rise to the category of the social problem. Using the example of sexual scandals, she shows how the love-triangle suicide in philosophically informed journalism transformed womanhood into a social problematic. The journalistic matrix these intellectuals laid out allowed the everyday to be understood as a philosophic problem and gave analysis a philosophical base for apprehending social facts. Addressing the present as much as the past, Karl’s point encourages us to consider the implications and long-term effects of our own history-writing projects.

Fabio Lanza’s “Politics of the Unbound: ‘Students’ and the Everyday of Beijing University” seeks to distinguish the sociological or state category of “the student” from the mobilized political category of “student activist” at elite Beijing University in the 1910s. Lanza shows that contemporary American models and statist, colonial policies were implemented and did produce athletic, Christian, bourgeois subjects. By contrast, amidst the organizational fevers and semianarchic cultural politics that swept informal Beida study societies, obdurate modernist intellectuals clustered as learners around the university. These informal students invented collective practices at a distance from the state; in fact, their momentary innovation meets the criteria of Badiou’s concept of the event. Student is a historical, or contingent, political configuration that remains categorically a still vital question facing academic intellectuals: how do we and our students surmount statist conventions restricting what students can know and what they are entitled to do right now?

Lanza and Karl invoke the problematic of everyday life. Helen J. S. Lee assumes this point in her “Writing Colonial Relations of Everyday Life in Senryu.” She opens, as Richter and Iwasaki advocate, a new historicity. Her subjects are those shock troops of...