Editor's Introduction

This general issue opens with a literary parable on the sublimity of dogs. It ends on a note of hallucinatory poetics. “Statue of a Dog,” Zhang Chengzhi's short story, reflects in homely detail on the mutability of virtue. Set in the Mongolian grasslands and the migrant labor markets of the Tokyo metropolis—our own worlds, by any extension—Zhang says that we, too, are required to choose what we cannot avoid confronting. Yang Lian, the poet whose work with John Cayley closes this issue, claims in his aesthetic politics of transliteration that a common poetic space should and can be created. Though not as tangible perhaps as Tokyo's Shibuya train station, it too would exist and as a timeless simultaneity where all language is revealed to be composite.

Jian Xu's “Radical Ethnicity and Apocryphal History: Reading the Sublime Object of Humanism in Zhang Chengzhi's Late Fictions” suggests that the author of “Statue of a Dog” is on an important and dangerous quest. Zhang is seeking to displace a discredited Chinese secular humanism with a counterhumanism rooted in the fiction writer's ethnic identification with the Muslim Chinese sect of the Jahrinya. In a maneuver that resonates with Yang Lian's magical poetic space-time, Zhang Chengzhi, according to Jian Xu, is trying to fuse an old-fashioned Chinese game of politically engaged intellectuality with a “post-new-era” humanist subjectivity. This task requires the writing of an apocryphal history of Islam. But, as Jian Xu notes, invocation of the divine evokes a familiar problem. To reimagine the nation (always at stake in a Chinese humanism) and to rewrite its history, Zhang Chengzhi transforms the ethnic Jahrinya from subjects into objects. Zhang may redeem his own soul in this heroic identification. For Jian Xu great dangers attend the responsibility of staking out necessarily agonistic politics in the raging current of commodification, desublimation, and marketization.

Who consumes what other and how the market mediates these relationships is Koichi Iwabuchi's preoccupation in his essay “Nostalgia for a (Different) Asian Modernity: Media Consumption of ‘Asia' in Japan.” Here Japan's highly market-mediated idol worshipers nostalgically consume a masculine quality of “Asian vigor” that appears in film, magazines, TV documentaries, and other venues. To a degree, Iwabuchi lauds the admirable and savvy openness of the consumers whom he interviewed for this piece. But his own stake in launching the investigation would appear to be a larger question of where the various ideologies of “Asianness” and Japan's market relation with this object of “Asia” have led before and thus may lead in the future. How can a politically adequate historical memory be stabilized, he asks, in a media market so thoroughly saturated with unacknowledged drives? Iwabuchi's careful indexing of these dynamic relations implicates the market ideology of nostalgia. Politically speaking, no matter how discriminating and cutting edge the consumers of this new Asianism are, they cannot but collude with less savory forces to suppress the history of subjection of the very entities—Hong Kong, Taiwan, “primordial China,” Burma, and Vietnam—celebrated in yet another new Japanese pan-Asianism.

“On the Edge of Respectability: Sexual Politics in China's Tibet” allows Charlene E. Makley to raise other questions about mass-mediated culture. In this case the subjects are Tibetans in Gansu Province standing in relation to the dominant Han media markets, as eroticized Hong Kong movie idols do in relation to cutting-edge young Japanese consumers. However, Makley reverses focus. Her fieldwork tracks how unequal power relations play out in gendered relations among the Tibetan group. Particularly she reconstructs an earlier, local Tibetan sex-gender system where an earlier theocracy and the labor system operated according to a logic Makley calls “compulsive heterosexuality.” The rearticulation of older cultural logics after the Maoist era brought not a restoration of a relatively flexible compulsive heterosexuality and female “discrete” sexual expression but rather an eroticized market logic. In this logic the will of the modern and secular Tibetan woman...