Cross-Currents (4#2) is now available on Project Muse.

Governing Marriage Migrations: Perspectives from Mainland China and Taiwan

Introduction
Elena Barabantseva, Antonia Chao, and Biao Xiang, 405

Cross-border migration for the purpose of marriage is on the rise, and at present it constitutes one of the most common forms of long-term international mobility in East Asia. This special issue of Cross-Currents analyzes marriage migration in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan as a subject of governance. The articles included here demonstrate that marriage migration has attracted considerable policy attention and public anxiety not because it is about “marriage” or “migration” per se, but because it is perceived to be inseparable from a wide range of other issues, such as sexual morality, family norms, national identity, and border security. In particular, the long-lasting social relationships marriage migration creates and the role of marriage migrants (the vast majority of whom are women) in rearing the next generation of the state’s sovereign subjects tie marriage migration to state security concerns. Popular anxieties about marriage migration are often based on projections into the future rather than observations about the present reality. On one hand, the fact that marriage migration is deeply embedded in myriad social institutions and relations that cannot be dealt with in isolation causes a projection-based mode of governance; on the other hand, it renders transnational marriage particularly hard to govern, which further exacerbates anxiety. But this should not be seen as a failure in public policy. The articles in this special issue argue that such projections, imaginations, and self-perpetuating anxieties are important parts of how nationhood is constructed in the current era. As such, marriage migration as a subject of governance provides us with a special angle to examine how politics works in subtle and sometimes invisible ways on local, national, and transnational levels.

Continue reading “Cross-Currents, vol. 4, no. 2 (2015)”

(De)Memorializing the Korean War: A Critical Intervention

Editor’s Introduction
Guest Editor Suzy Kim (Rutgers University), 1
The purpose of this special issue is twofold: first, to engage in a critical intervention into the memorialization of the Korean War among the chief participants—the two Koreas, the United States, and China—to disrupt monolithic understandings of its origins, consequences, and experiences; and second, to do so as a necessary step toward reconciliation by placing divergent public memorials in conversation with one another.

ARTICLES

Continue reading “Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, vol. 4, no. 1 (2015)”

ARTICLES

Stories and Histories from the China-Vietnam Border

Editor’s Introduction
Guest Hue-Tam Ho Tai (Harvard University), 315

In keeping with the mission of Cross-Currents, I have selected four articles for this issue whose common trait is their focus on the border between China and Vietnam. I am deliberately eschewing the term “borderland” to describe the area they cover, as one article, by Robert J. Antony, concerns life on the water and piracy. The other articles, however, fit neatly into the category of borderland studies.
Continue reading “Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, vol. 3, no. 2 (2014)”

ARTICLES

The Globalization of K-pop: Local and Transnational Articulations of South Korean Popular Music

Editor’s Introduction
Guest Editor John Lie (University of California, Berkeley), 1

The global pop-music sensation of 2012 was Psy’s “Gangnam Style.” I am not sure if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but the sheer proliferation of downloads and impersonations, copycat videos and parodic performances—the very constitution of virality—established K-pop (South Korean popular music) as a global pop culture phenomenon. … It is one thing to acknowledge the immense popularity of “Gangnam Style,” but would it be wise to see this as a harbinger of a larger phenomenon—namely, the globalization of South Korean popular culture?
Continue reading “Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, vol. 3, no. 1 (2014)”

ARTICLES

Urban Chinese Living

Editor’s Introduction
Guest Editor Wen-hsin Yeh (University of California, Berkeley), 211

“Urban Chinese Living” speaks to a vibrant field of research in recent years. The essays grouped here examine aspects of Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They build on what we know of these cities in history and expand on the conception of the city as a particular site of discourse formation.
Continue reading “Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, vol. 2, no. 2 (2013)”

Transcolonial Film Coproductions in the Japanese Empire: Antinomies in the Colonial Archive

ARTICLES

Editor’s Introduction
Guest Co-Editors Takashi Fujitani (University of Toronto) and Nayoung Aimee Kwon (Duke University), 1

For decades following Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule, scholars and film critics avoided or largely ignored the study of Japanese-Korean film coproductions. In large part due to the difficulty of placing such films comfortably within the linear narrative of national history and the story of a presumed national subject, Korean scholars and critics in the immediate
postwar and postcolonial decades tended to discount and disregard films produced during much of the colonial period, especially the wartime years….
Continue reading “Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, vol. 2, no. 1 (2013)”

Mediating Chineseness in Cambodia

ARTICLES

Editor’s Introduction
Guest Co-Editors Lorraine Paterson (Cornell University) and Penny Edwards (University of California, Berkeley), 267

In 1981, social anthropologist William Willmott declared, “Today, no-one identifies themselves as Chinese in Kampuchea [Cambodia]” (1981:45). He certainly had the authority to publish such a statement. Having conducted sustained fieldwork on Chinese community formation in Cambodia from 1962 to 1963, Willmott offered an unprecedented examination of social structures, political organization, and patterns of identification among urban Chinese in his monographs, The Chinese in Cambodia (1967) and The Political Structure of the Chinese Community in Cambodia (1970). However, subsequent to his research, Chinese communities suffered terribly during the repression of the Lon Nol government between 1970 and 1975 and the atrocities of the Democratic Kampuchea regime. Willmott thus declared Chinese communities—and a willingness to identify as Chinese—destroyed. This understandably pessimistic vision turned out to be unfounded; the next extensive research done on Chinese in Cambodia by Penny Edwards and Chan Sambath in 1995 showed Chinese communities rebuilding. However, the descriptions of these communities showed a complexity of identity formation—from recent immigrants, “the raw Chinese,” to the five “traditional” Chinese dialect groups—that differed markedly from the indexes of identity applied by Willmott in his initial analysis. Academic ideas of how Chineseness should be configured had shifted and complicated; ascribing identity had become increasingly problematic….
Continue reading “Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, vol. 1, no. 2 (2012)”