Editor’s Introduction

Our lead article takes readers to “WTO-era China.” Fan Yang’s “From Bandit Cell Phones to Branding the Nation: Three Moments of Shanzhai in WTO-era China,” reveals that the twenty-first century phenomenon of shanzhai is a “discourse about new media . . . from cell phones to the Internet,” structured around knockoff products and copycat media forms. Originating in the market for fake brand mobile phones in southern China, a visible collectivity has been formed around consuming fake brands. Shanzhai mass consumers’ point of cathexis is the commodity form (real and fake). Commodified media gives people “illegal” access within the state regulatory apparatus. Shanzhai practically and theoretically stands in defiance against not the party state but globalizing intellectual property rights regimes and in this way reanimates a party-state, which then guides “the people” right back into the old discourse of national progress. As Fan explains, belligerent fakery contributes to the most longed for achievement of all, making China’s own national brands.

Tyrell Haberkorn’s “Engendering Sedition: Ethel Rosenberg, Daranee Charnchoengsilpakul, and the Courage of Refusal” invokes another historical temporality, of salutary future political models resurrected out of the past. Here the question is how to evaluate two sedition cases separated in almost every way except for the fact that both the accused were female. Haberkorn deftly shows that despite era, space, and type of national crisis, the Rosenberg and Daranee cases overlap because two anomalously “seditious” women found themselves unapologetically refusing to perjure themselves. What the essay shows once it works through the particulars of the law, legitimate dissent and normativity in gender performance, is that disproportionate punishment—death in one case, and cruel and unusual imprisonment in the other—helps to clarify the contemporary stake. It draws our contradictions more tightly and makes a model case for what Haberkorn calls scholarly work that aims to be seditious, precisely in order to challenge so-called crises, routinely manufactured.

When Sandra So Hee Chi Kim’s essay on “Suji Kwock Kim’s ‘Generation’ and the Ethics of Diasporic Postmemory” questions understanding of what is remembered and what is forgotten, who can speak for the other’s suffering and who is compelled to do it, she must cycle into an entire vocabulary of post-and trans-in order to achieve her own understanding of compassionate identification. The question that the poet Suji Kwock Kim raised, in her Notes from the Divided Country, treated why and how a second-generation Korean American poet could legitimately represent things she had not directly experienced. Not only does Sandra Kim remind us how complex the time sense becomes for people, like Suji Kwock Kim, whose memories are precisely tasked with inexperiential recall. Sandra Kim also adds the burden of release. The critic reiterates the poet’s general call to imagine and create compassion for a suffering that never ends because the war is never over. Through politics and poetics, responsibility and remembering, imagination as a means of compassion, the poet and her loyal critic ask readers to see in the postmemory of diasporic people a generalizable or universal ethic.

Coining a resonant term, “the latter-day minjung,” to describe migrant workers in South Korea, EuyRyung Jun’s “ ‘The Frog That Has Forgotten Its Past’: Advocating for Migrant Workers in South Korea” shows how cognition of the suffering of labor migrants and South Korean citizen’s disavowal of colonial mimicry has led labor migration political activists to moralize the dehumanizing conditions of foreigners, conditions which in fact mirrored the earlier experience of a desperate Korean people after the national division. Distinctly uncomfortable with being positioned as bad masters, South Korean activists react against labor abuse with shame. The central point of this delicate mapping of emotion onto contracts and citizenship matters is that what Jun calls an emergent postcolonial ethics of shame and responsibility. This perverse ethics, arising over the last twenty years, established experience of suffering in common. So, Jun argues, why not inaugurate a politics rooted in common, though unequal claims, to labor, surplus, and citizenship?

Ratheesh Radhakrishnan’s “The ‘Worlds’ of the Region” shares with other articles in this...