Editor's Introduction

Alexander C. Cook's "Chinese Uhuru: Maoism and the Congo Crisis" discloses what he calls an "emerging Maoist aesthetic of insurgency." Reading declassified political documents about Maoist guerilla activity in the quintessential Cold War event of the Congo Crisis, Cook guides the reader to a dramatic script War Drums on the Equator staged in Chinese cities on and around May 1, 1965. The geopolitical and the aesthetic are merged, in a situation where aesthetics play an active, powerful historical role in unfolding events. There is a Cold War over truth. On the side of untruth lie neo-imperialism, neocolonialism, and US style "democracy"; and on the side of truth, under the international banner of Uhuru, the play War Drums stars Congolese Maoist Parti solidaire africain partisan Pierre Mulele performing true freedom and true friendship. Alongside better-known politicians Patrice Lumumba and Joseph Kasavubu, Mulele plays the role of Maoist comrade, actively recognizing his shared circumstance and insurgent praxis to extract material politics on the ground, the people's revolution. Cook describes this logic of the drama as "insurrection of subjugated knowledges on the global stage." Cook's goal is to show how international events (e.g., Premiere Zhou Enlai and Minister of Foreign Affairs Chen Yi touring African nations in 1963–64) and China's own internally fractured ruling party put the truth at stake. There is nothing trivial in this play or the Cultural Revolution where violence over truth became one stake in a global struggle. Critically, Cook emphasizes that history and history making are fluid on all sides. What we name as history has to be reset, made freshly legible, on the basis of new evidence and in the performative mode.

Not wholly unrelated to Cook's analytic approach, Rea Amit's "What Is Japanese Cinema? Imamura Taihei's Wartime Theory of Japanese Film, Tradition, and Art" avoids a stationary relation of his own exegesis. He consequently avoids traps of nativism, neotraditionalism, essentialism, and so on to focus on Imamura Taihei's "phenomenology of the film-watching experience;" so "Japanese cinema" means the Japan-located "shared watching experience of films regardless of their country of origin." Amit is writing a genealogy of perception, rooted in the body, singularized in Japanese philosophy by Nishida Kitar's variations on Edmund Husserl. Imamura himself believed performance arts in Japan (bunraku, kabuki, etc.) and scroll painting predisposed the Japanese to perceive the arts in a singular way. It followed that in his mind the national film culture of Japan relies on the "continued excavation of cinema from traditional arts and appreciation of tradition as one part of cinematic culture." Imamura does "indigenize" his aesthetic philosophy and quarrels with realist painting as a universal norm. But he also claimed that anyone was free to join the viewing audience and in effect to perceive like a Japanese, to "be" Japanese in as much as being is possible at all. This leads Amit to argue that in Imamura's way of seeing there exists a "constructed ideal of a Japanese spectator who has evolved through a specifically Japanese genealogy of appreciation for the arts" yet is a nonessentialist ideal. It could be useful in grasping the past, how Imamura thought; but, for Amit, the fact is that Imamura's thesis holds true for today and future debates over national traditions, spectatorship, truth, and universality.

In "Java in Discord: Unofficial History, Vernacular Fiction, and the Discourse of Imperial Identity in Late Ming China (1574–1620)" Yuanfei Wang approaches a comparable history question, which is how sixteenth-century material and social conditions resulted in a low scholarly, intricately intertextual, literary language and extra-generic textual stream. The central problem is orthodoxy and its alternatives. Because, Wang argues, late Ming political apparatus reached its apex and faced an uncertain future, literati personalized their writing about the imperial center while, simultaneously, vernacular novels, and their odious, pun infested, bitterly playful challenge to official discourse took root. In popular novels, unlike formal or even informal chronicles, writers build a fictional historical reality where political criticism is baked in. "Java" would be such a place because it had...