Editor's Introduction

Vanessa B. Ward's "Rethinking Intellectual Life in Early Postwar Japan: Shisō no Kagaku and Common Man's Philosophy" opens this issue. In her essay Ward establishes how the influential journal Shisō no Kagaku was founded and to what end. Liberal postwar intellectuals titivated US pragmatism into serving a Japanese postwar liberal democratization. Among them were prominent but not well-studied female intellectuals Tsurumi Kazuko and Takeda Kiyoko, quite well-studied male intellectuals like Maruyama Masao and Tsurumi Shunsuke, and, on the periphery, the massively studied Takeuchi Yoshimi. Ward takes special note of the scholarly roles women intellectuals played during the journal's fifty-year history, but mostly she describes how the Shisō no Kagaku coterie weaponized John Dewey and William James to attack and displace academic wartime high philosophy in the interests of liberalism. Inside and outside Japan, Ward seems to argue, the fixation on academic Japanese philosophy, particularly Nishida theory, is historically reprehensible.

positions: asia critique is also an intellectual journal founded in a postwar moment and preoccupied with a changing, related series of scholarly political commitments. Ward's focus on how journals set intellectual agendas will resonate. But the Shisō no Kagaku co-founders explicitly targeted an issue Ward calls "the individual in the quotidian." Founders debated forms of social subjectivity (hitobito, shimin, jinmin, jiinmin taishū, and kokutai) in relation to a democratic civics project they called "Common Man's Philosophy." Affiliated scholars expected to enter the lives of "ordinary people," crush academic high philosophy, and benevolently supplant it. positions's intellectual history reads differently, but the point is that journals are visible signs of significant debate, and in the end they require intellectual histories be written of them.

While Ward addresses the relatively underappreciated importance of intellectual journals, Teri Silvio's "Crying Songs and Their Fans: The Material and Affective Economy of Taiwanese Opera, 1945–1975" raises a popular form to an appropriately sophisticated analysis. Silvio argues that previous efforts to explain crying songs, or koa-a-hi performance, do not ring true. Standard Taiwan-based masculinist nationalist and female feminist analyses reduce cultural products to signifiers of national and sexual difference. Actually, this indigenous opera lasted only thirty years and featured intense, dynamic, affective, and commercial relations among a living social group. It is consequently irreducible to stage development (nation) or psychoanalytic law (Lacan). Crying-song operas consisted of largely female Hokkien-speaking audiences lavishing emotion and cash on local stars in exchange for tragic performances, with both audience and performers crying during the show. Silvio's general argument proposes that we grasp specific affect and performance inside a changing labor market; performers and fans are ephemeral, historical, local collectivities engaged in social acts.

Silvio's preoccupation is with how "emotional identification and material payment" are fused in koa-a-hi performance. In an argument that is likely to resound in thinking about other high velocity Asian political economies, all of which relied on under-or unpaid female labor, Silvio shows that as local women entered wage labor markets, modes of female commodification transformed the affective power of this performance art. And then it was over. Fans rode massive economic changes in a specific way expressing and appealing, in equal measure, to themselves. At its peak, Silvio notes, fans stood in the position of a patriarch paying for tears, even authoring sadness, so as to rescue performers with cash exchange and benevolent investments. This is what Silvio terms the "ambivalent aspects of pity—emotional reciprocity combined with hierarchy in terms of wealth and power." Takeaway point? Analyzing female sentiment demands scholars know the material and the temporal given conditions as well as a theory of affect.

Daniel McKay's "The Hot Sun and the Mad Moon: Hiroshima in South African Literature" offers a critique of globalized clichés. The article addresses two South African writers, William Plomer and Laurens van der Post. McKay wants us to know how each handled the problem that Hiroshima raises for cultural studies and the post-A-bomb arts. In the dispiritingly cliché-ridden work these South African expats produced, McKay finds two basic points. First, that...