Editor's Introduction

In "Magic and Modernity in China," Laikwan Pang argues that a transnational magical imagination and the uncanniness of modernity per se are visible in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century urban Chinese magic shows. Chinese aficionados participated in the larger modernist magic culture. For them, magic became a central medium of popular culture. Magic shows shifted old-fashioned wizardry to professional theatrics of a technologically inspired modern magician. When the new Chinese urbanity proved truly estranging, Pang suggests, transnational magic culture came to be viewed as "the very material embodiment of modernity itself." From the first stagings in protected bourgeois enclaves, shows provided tangible proof of scientific rationality. As they spread to popular venues, they conveyed science's suddenly unaccounted, extrarational, uncanny exterior. Popular magic shows brought into visual culture a characteristic mix of rationalist incredulity, public sexuality, and up-to-the-minute performance. Finally, as Pang shows, the magic craze grew in the 1930s into a populist pastime for urbanites broadly speaking. Magic shows set the scene for what would become an identifiable blend of modern spectacle, corporate department store culture, and broadly adaptable techniques of commodity consumption.

Pang's essay sets a tone that echoes through this issue. Hiroko Sakamoto's "The Cult of ‘Love and Eugenics' in May Fourth Movement Discourse" extends the rationalist incredulity motif into the tangled intellectual and political history of Chinese colonial modernity. Rather than compare unfavorably the rationalist excesses of the Chinese Enlightenment intellectuality to a robust consumer culture, Sakamoto traces the magical thinking that infused that 1920s and 1930s rationalism itself. She powerfully establishes that eugenics is a modern pseudoscience at the core of a transnational theory stream originating in China in the late nineteenth century with Yan Fu and saturating the enlightened credo of Kang Youwei, Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, Zhou Jianren, Tan Sitong, Yi Nai, Tang Caichang, Liang Qichao, and Li Dazhao. She ties the Chinese phenomenon to the scientific racism of Japanese eugenic theorists Fukuzawa Yukichi, Takahashi Yoshio, Kure Ayatoshi, Uchimura Kanzo, Oka Asajiro, and Nagai Hisomu and the Euro-American eugenicist pantheon of Karl Pearson, Frances Galton, Havelock Ellis, George Bernard Shaw, Annie Besant, and Richmond Mayo-Smith. From its sacralization of sex to its biometrics of the brain, eugenics is a style of magical thinking about human population. It is, moreover, as Sakamoto establishes, a special modernist pleading for the new class order. Rooted in fallacious science and scientific ideologies of race privilege, eugenics centered social-evolutionary theory on the health of capitalist states in the new international state system before its spectacular denouement in German National Socialism.

Fantasy's indwelling role in intellectual defense of state policy has a long pedigree. Look, L. H. M. Ling argues, at the foreign policy of George W. Bush if you have any doubts whatever about that monstrous magic at the core of current geopolitical policy. Ling's key argument regards the ways that pulp fiction—a recognized regime of magical or imaginary thinking—continues to popularize "classic themes of terror and desire" in the United States and Europe. Fu Manchu and Hannibal Lecter, "monsters of global appetite" in Ling's phrase, are monsters for a popular political culture that is predisposed to seeing monsters. Her analysis mixes political theory and popular novels, the Leviathan and Hannibal the Cannibal. Her argument highlights how Bush's "war on terror" succeeds because it has linked a denied populist desire for law and justice to the monster within. Hannibal delivers the people at home from evil; he offers them what Ling calls an "alternative code of ethics." Hannibal, that is, pursues only his own eccentric truths and the justice denied to those remaindered in a corrupt economy—the sexually tormented, the cheated, unjustly accused, or betrayed. "Some readers," Ling opines, "may dismiss this connection between popular culture, war, and sexual fantasy as too fanciful to consider." Calling on Hobbes and a lawsuit against MIT for copyright infringement, Ling documents insistently the exact inverse point.

So does Ashley Carruthers, who initiates her essay establishing that while Vietnam is "by anyone's measure, an abrasive place," in the serious ideological work of...