Much scholarship extrapolates global narratives of the Anthropocene from the “fossil capitalism” of European imperial powers. This analysis deploys the alternative lens of grid electricity—the great macro-technology of the twentieth century—to reevaluate the dynamics of the Anthropocene outside the Anglozone. Histories of Asian electrification refute the notion of any simple relationship between colonialism and fossil capitalism. Instead, they point towards a postcolonial trend of fossil developmentalism. Especially in the context of late development, energy expansion became a state-led moral project. Cutting against fossil capitalism's logic of commodification, electricity provision was increasingly conceptualized as a national good and an entitlement, even if one honored in the breach. This trend transcended the distinction between market and planned economies, and extended beyond formal democracies. The (partial) democratization of consumption brought by fossil developmentalism is the hallmark of the “Great Acceleration” in human impacts on the environment since 1950.

This address was intended to be and remains about global circulatory processes and the ways that human societies have sought to deploy, control, or regulate these processes. In this essay, I principally consider how nationalist ideologies regulate global circulatory processes. The parallel with the current COVID-19 crisis is evident, and my remarks do suggest some similarities. Although COVID-19 is not the topic I engage here, my theme alerts us to thinking methodologically about largely invisible or inconspicuous modes of circulation and their consequences, less dire but deeply transformative.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has produced two different narratives in India. One, here described as “historical,” looks back to the pandemics of the colonial past—bubonic plague from 1896, influenza in 1918–19—as a source of comparisons, lessons, and dire warnings for the present. This narrative envisages the reenactment of past scenes, including flight from the cities, victimization of the poor, and the questioning of state authority. The other narrative, here called “insurgent,” questions the value of historical analogies, doubts that history ever substantially repeats itself, and stresses the specificity of postcolonial Indian politics and health. While recognizing the validity of both narratives, the author urges caution in employing colonial history to critique contemporary events and, while recognizing the 1890s plague as a watershed moment, questions whether even the most devastating pandemics (such as 1918's influenza) necessarily result in profound social, political, and health care changes.

This study identifies and interprets dominant developments in the Taiwanese literary field by examining data included in publication catalogs of literary journals and supplements from 1940 to 1953. Utilizing social network analysis, it focuses on both ruptures caused by crucial political events and continuities that spanned these ruptures. The study revisits central tenets of Taiwanese literary history and, by seeking to articulate structuring principles, also unveils new perspectives on how to map and interpret the dynamics of literary systems and the ways in which they mesh with society. It thereby exemplifies how digital humanities can guide researchers toward new historical insights.

Public health in China has become a global concern as a consequence of the outbreak and worldwide spread of COVID-19. This article examines the historical place of China in international and global health. Contrary to prevalent narratives in the history of medicine, China and Chinese historical actors played key roles in this field throughout the twentieth century. Several episodes illustrate this argument: the Qing organization of the International Plague Conference in 1911; the role of China in the work of the interwar League of Nations Health Organization and postwar establishment of the World Health Organization; Cold War medical diplomacy; and Chinese models of primary health care during the 1970s. These case studies together show that Chinese physicians and administrators helped shape concepts and practices of “global health” even before that term rose to prominence in the 1990s, and current events are best understood in the context of this history.

Pigs have played a central role in the subsistence and culture of China for millennia. The close relationship between pigs and people began when humans gradually domesticated wild pigs over 8,000 years ago. While pigs initially foraged around settlements, population growth led people to pen their pigs, which made them household trash processors and fertilizer producers. Household pigs were in daily contact with people, who bred them to fatten quickly and produce larger litters. Early modern Europeans found Chinese pigs far superior to their own and bred the two to create the breeds now employed in industrial pork production around the world, including China. In recent decades, industrial farms that scientifically control every aspect of pigs’ lives have spread rapidly. Until recently, most Chinese people ate pork only on special occasions; their ability in recent decades to eat it regularly exemplifies China's increasing prosperity. Meanwhile, vast areas of North and South American farmland are now devoted to growing soybeans to feed hundreds of millions of pigs in China, and the methane, manure, and antibiotic resistance they produce creates environmental and health problems on a global scale.

The solidarity between socially marginalized groups in India is often compromised, directly or indirectly, by their own internecine complicity with structures and histories of systematic social violence. We look at this problem through a close analysis of the graphic novel Bhimayana, which brings together key events from the life of B. R. Ambedkar—the architect of the Indian Constitution who was born into the “untouchable” Mahar caste—and the artwork of the Gond tribal artists Durgabai and Subhash Vyam. While there is considerable affinity in terms of socioeconomic disadvantages between the tribes and the lower castes of India, these affinities are strained by contradictions that problematize the principle of solidarity. We argue that the intrusion of complicity and guilt into performances of solidarity finally serves to strengthen the political empowerment of these groups by making it possible to acknowledge their implication in the history of social harm.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indian classical music was in transition. Most readings of the transition stress the choices of the professional musicians, as these musicians and the institutions in which they functioned were caught up in political and economic movements such as nationalism and commercialization. This article studies a different type of transition: when a small-town professional group with a strong associational culture became musicians. This second process, standing in contrast to the received narratives, suggests novel lessons in the history of urban cultures during a time of change.

The collapse of the Japanese empire unleashed in the streets of Seoul new everyday epistemologies and affects closely tied to evolving relationships across media. This article analyzes how reportage, photography, and literature in post-liberation and post-Korean War South Korea synergistically addressed pressing postcolonial and neocolonial questions, the weight of which could be felt in the realm of daily life: What does liberation look like in the marketplace? How should we make sense of the foreign military presence in Seoul after the Korean War? What are the effects of foreign consumer goods on the minds and bodies of the people and the nation's sovereignty? The article shows how South Korean cultural actors responded to the increasing commodification of everyday life by bringing critical attention to the uneasy relationship between the body, foreign commodity-signs, and artifacts of mass visuality. These intermedial accounts succeeded in linking the granular experiences of everyday life to larger historical and geopolitical forces and making visible how the encroachment of mass media products and commodity-signs were transforming the very means by which the everyday could be represented.

The South Korean radio docudrama and adapted novel Take Me Home (1978) were based on the real-life case of Chol Soo Lee, who in 1974 was wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in the United States. Lee was later acquitted following a series of investigative reports and amid an emerging social movement calling for his release that spanned South Korea and the United States. Influenced by both the American civil rights movement and the Korean progressive minjung ideology, Take Me Home is among several popular radio programs and novels that helped spark this transpacific movement by critiquing US hegemony and Korean state nationalism and by reimagining the figure of the tongp'o in the context of a nascent pan-Korean consciousness. This article traces how the tongp'o is foregrounded, constructed, and ultimately saved in Take Me Home and argues that the radio novel's sonic imagination played a crucial role in broadcasting solidarity across the Pacific.

In response to US plans to withdraw troops from South Korea in the 1970s, the Park Chung Hee administration (1961–79) leveraged all defense-related civilian industries to build an independent system of weapons production. In keeping with Park's advancement of military modernization driven by strong private-sector growth, an agenda that he promoted with his banner slogan “rich nation, strong military,” large Korean companies known as chaebŏl were transformed to serve as government contractors that drove both national economic development and military modernization. A case study of one such company, Hanwha, illustrates how the state's hyper-militarization of Korean industries determined the distinct course and character of South Korea's national development. The study highlights the dynamic interplay that occurred between state actors and private-sector CEOs, managers, and laborers in shaping the chaebŏl-centered economic and defense industrialization.

This essay provides a critical observation of the South Korean government's distinctive management of COVID-19 with particular reference to the state of emergency. It reveals that the success of South Korea's handling of the pandemic is largely attributed by a majority of Western media to the efficient deployment of both information and communication technologies and Confucian collectivism, two components that seem contradictory yet not incompatible under the rubric of techno-Orientalism. Analyzing the intensification of surveillance and the rapid datafication of society, this essay argues that the current state of emergency is not a breakdown of normality but a continuation of the state of crisis and disaster that rules a developing country like South Korea. In doing so, the essay seeks to facilitate a critical discussion about a new mode of democracy in the era of pandemic that increasingly grapples with tensions between individual freedom and public health.

In March 2020, Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, the Tokyo Olympic Organising Committee, and the International Olympic Committee postponed the 2020 Tokyo Olympics for one year. The delay is the most prominent consequence of the COVID-19 crisis in Japan thus far. But the “Corona Calamity” (korona ka) is bigger than the Olympics. The totality of the disaster is impossible to capture. The very thing that makes it a calamity are the myriad rhythms of crisis that intersect at COVID-19. If there is a shared theme to be found in these rhythms, it is the question of recovery. When will it happen? What will it look like? And what, exactly, will we recover? In what follows, I share three rhythms of crisis and recovery: national history, the tourism industry, and the parcel delivery industry.

As anyone who has written a book can tell you, when you finally finish wrestling with it and it is confined between covers, or tucked away in e-book form, it goes on to have an afterlife, sometimes quite a complicated one, which the author may glimpse only in intermittent and fragmentary form. An original and provocative book such as Judith Butler's Gender Trouble will travel to places its author never anticipated and become embroiled in conversations the author may not overhear. A book's influence on another field far from its point of origin is not best assessed by a citation index—though Gender Trouble's numbers are massive. To take the measure of the work that Gender Trouble has done for scholars working in Asian studies (itself a constructed and constantly morphing category, like gender), we should ask how the book traveled. Which pieces were taken up by scholars of Asia, and what conversations and challenges did the book enable, not as a blueprint but as an incubator of locally grounded thinking? How has it been adapted, pruned down to one or two insights, or expanded into new domains?

This article examines the emergence of a new emphasis on contemporary specialized knowledge in sixteenth-century China. During this period, sources of authority such as antiquity and the court came to lose their elevated status. As a result, scholars increasingly saw the expertise of a contemporary disciplinary community as a superior standard for validating knowledge. This trend appeared in scholarly collaboration and the citation of contemporaries, as well as new kinds of paratextual materials such as lists of works cited and literature reviews. These findings on new intellectual communities in the sixteenth century call for a reassessment of the better-documented shifts in East Asian intellectual culture from the mid-eighteenth century to the present.

Writers in the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) apparently experienced writing in weaving terms. Such an imaginaire of writing as weaving was probably fully manifested in the first or second century BCE and crystallized in the coining of literary terminologies such as classics (jing), weft-writings (weishu), and literature/texts (wen). Situating the Huainanzi and its intertextual writing practice within this imaginaire enables us to reassess both the Huainanzi's widespread dismissal as a miscellaneous, encyclopedic behemoth in the first half of the twentieth century and its reappreciation over the last few decades. According to the Huainanzi's self-depictions, Liu An and his erudite courtiers apparently created the scripture in such an intertextual way in order to textually mimic the process of weaving. Since the Huainanzi commonly associates weaving with the Way's connective powers, the text's extraordinary design might be the result of a literary attempt to create an efficacious, textual artifact that embodies the Way by incorporating the act of weaving in its textual design.