Volume 30, Numbers 1-2

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Asia is not self-evident. The region called Asia was culturally defined after the Russia-Japan War and geopolitically designed after the Second World War. Modern Asia was the historical byproduct of colonialism and its effects; the rise of nationalism in Asia was collective resistance to colonial modernization. Modernity in Asia has been the consequence of the dialectical process between modernization and counter-modernization. Its complicated historical background registers the strong demand of “Asian theory” for analyzing the structure of Asian modernity. Recently, as participating in the global distribution of labor, contemporary Asia has attracted many scholars not only for its rapid economic development, but its cultural products. Asian contemporary artists and writers have critically acclaimed for their successful recognition. This issue aims to bring together various theoretical interventions into Asian literature, contemporary art and culture as well as any inquiry into the intellectual history of critical theory in Asia. Focus will be placed on the dynamic relation between Western theory and Asian intellectual history.

Focus Editor: Alex Taek-Gwang Lee

Contents

Alex Taek-Gwang Lee

Theorizing Asia: An Introduction

Hang Kim

The Jargon of Asia: Toward the Possibility of Postcolonial Criticism in Korea

Joff P. N. Bradley

On the “Outburst” of World Spirit

Abhisek Ghosal, Bhaskarjyoti Ghosal

Reconfiguring Asian Modernity: Negotiating Tantric Epistemological Traditions

Chun-Mei Chuang

The Diffractive Politics of Postcolonial Cyborg Translation

Rob Sean Wilson

Worlding Asia Pacific into Oceania: Ecopoetic Transfigurations in the Anthropocene

Ho Duk Hwang

Theorizing Asiatic Contradiction: The User Experience of Contemporary Korean Literature

Harumi Osaki

A Comparison of Watsuji’s Fūdo and Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Questioning an Equivalence between Japaneseness and Postmodernity

Soo-Young Nam

Theorizing the Invisible for the Media Industry: Cryptology and the Unknown Inequality

Christophe Thouny

Burning Barns: Poetics of Fire in Planetary Souths

Min Yang

Trauma, Guilt, and Shame in Ba Jin’s Random Thoughts

Tony See

On the Way to Salvation: A Reading of Shinran’s Tariki in the Light of Heidegger’s Gelassenheit

Jason C. Toncic

Invisible Atomic Bombs: Spectrality and the Testimonial Potency of the Atomic Bomb in Hibakusha and Post-Hibakusha Narrative

Woosung Kang

Theorizing East Asian Minor Cinema

Nidesh Lawtoo

The Angel as Host: J. Hillis Miller’s Last Flight

W. Lawrence Hogue

The Neo-slave Narrative and Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada

Helena Gurfinkel

Resisting Readability: Dyslexia and Sexuality in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Sparsholt Affair

Jessica Ludescher Imanaka

Contemplative Freedom in the Anthropocene: Inspiration from Sloterdijk

Keith Moser

Mastering the Parasite Within: Jean-Marie Pelt and Michel Serres’s Post-Darwinian Vision of an Ecology of Peace for the Anthropocene

John McGowan

What Can Poetry Do?

Paul Allen Miller

Foucault’s Formative Years

Brian O’Keeffe

Sites of Sight: Derrida’s Writings on the Spatial Arts

H. Aram Veeser

The Objective Form of the Object

Timothy Hampton

Foucault’s Work: A Reminiscence of Ancient Days

Mario Telò

Foucault, Oedipus, and Virality

James I. Porter

In Foucault’s Wake

Karen S. Feldman

Foucault’s Concretions

Ramona Naddaff

Foucault’s Use of Socrates

Paul Allen Miller

Response

Asijit Datta

On Gaian Systems: An Interview with Bruce Clarke

Jeffrey J. Williams

Literary Theorist to Union Organizer: An Interview with Robin Sowards

Jeffrey J. Williams

Literary Theorist to University President: An Interview with Steven Knapp

Cory Stockwell

The Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy: Wasteland Aesthetics by Aidan Tynan (review)

James Martell

Derrida on Exile and the Nation: Reading Fantom of the Other by Herman Rapaport (review)

Clare Rolens

Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction by David Riddle Watson (review)