Affective engagements in East Asia

Another aim of this collection is to "provide an analytical tool for a nuanced and enriched analysis of social, political and economic transformations in East Asia"(I). These aims are endorsed by Sarah Ahmed in her foreword to the collection by acknowledging the two fold process described by the editor. The volume holds affect theory shaped in the West as its primary analytical tool, and gestures toward its productivity in describing governance methods and ways of political intervention in the everyday life. In this case, as in any other occasion when a theoretical paradigm is dislocated from its birth place, and relocated in a culturally different space, the trick is to avoid the complete subsumption of the new environment to the theory employed to explain it, while being painstakingly aware of the historico-cultural genealogy of governance in East Asia.
The editor, Jie Yang, in her introduction for the collection cites the existing body of literature on social relations in East Asia and the possibility of dialogue with affect theory, which indicates an underlying aim for this collection: to challenge the autonomous status of affect emphasized by Brian Massumi in a Western context by looking at it now from a non-Western perspective. However, the distinction made in the title between affect and emotion becomes blurred through the essays, which interferes with the ways in which the collection attempts to illuminate the dynamics of contemporary governance and, implicitly, the status of affect.

Affective body

The collection is divided into six parts, each of them having broad titles that not only capture the common theme of the encompassed essays, but contribute to the overall cohesion of the entire volume. The sections are well balanced and besides the introduction and part six, all of other sections envelope two essays. The geographical area covered is quite broad, stretching from China, to Japan, South Korea and Canada. This addition of a non-Asian space underlines the study's transnational character. Moreover, the collection offers its audience a very nice surprise in part six. Among the three essays there, one is dedicated to a study of North Korean cartoons in relation to familial communism and political economy. Thus, the editorial organization of the collection is designed to keep the sections balanced and the readers engaged by shifting the attention from one country to the other, and from themes such as Body, affect and subjectivity or Tears, media and affective articulation, to themes such as Gender affective labor and biopolitical economy and Affect, modernity and empires.
Following part one, which coincides with the editor's introduction, part two, entitled Happiness and Psychologization, hosts two essays on related Chinese phenomena: Yu Dan's interpretation of Confucianism as a tool for achieving happiness and counseling strategies for laid-off workers. These strategies tie the notion of happiness to the social reality of employment or, in this case, unemployment, and reveal the mechanics through which the government intervenes in the social behavior of its people. Yanhua Zhang's essay, Crafting Confucian remedies for happiness in contemporary China: unravelling the Yu Dan's phenomenon, as well as Jie Yang's piece entitled The happiness of the marginalized: affect counseling and self-reflexivity in China, draw heavily on ethnographic approaches that unravel the strategies of affective social discourse. Also, they indicate that "happiness can become both a nexus for contending with social and political change, and an analytical tool for social critique"(57). Obtaining happiness becomes the goal which transforms unemployment into an opportunity for self-transformation and participation in reading the Confucian classics, all of which are, as Jie Yang shows, means of maintaining social and political stability.
Part three, Body, Affect and Subjectivity, encompasses two articles with different focal points. While Teresa Kuan's Banking in affects: the child, a landscape and the performance of a canonical view is deeply invested in the analysis of children's education in China and the resulting lack of emotional development, Shiho Satsuka's Hospitality and detachment: Japanese tour guides' affective labor in Canada explores in detail the significance affective labor done by Japanese guides has for Canadian tourism. By bringing in the Canadian case, the editor broadened the transnational scope of the project, and by drawing the attention to children's education, she is gesturing toward affects' ubiquity and their importance for society's structure and cohesion. However, the Canadian environment is not focused on enough and it does not seem to play a role in the structuring of the affects the author describes. Thus, albeit having contrasting methodology and focal points of analysis, the two articles underscore the relations between national economy and affects, between children's education and their later behaviors as adult participants in the capitalist market.
For part four, Tears, Media and Affective Articulation the editor chose two articles that study the types of affects generated by television programs in Japan and Chinese TV dramas. In the first piece, Daniel White closely unveils the importance television has for public education and crystallization of ethics in the public sphere thorough affect. Shuyu Kong's Gender, kuqing xi and the affective articulation of Chinese TV drama narrows the focus toward a specific type of TV dramas, the politically, socially and affectively invested TV series, such as the ones about laid-off female workers, Crying Your Heart Out. Both articles argue that television and, more specifically the emotionally imbued TV dramas, open up an alternative space for the audience to develop better skills for dealing with the market driven economy, as well as grieve their scars of being laid off. In this regard, Shuyu Kong's article is in direct dialogue with Jie Yang's piece in the second part of the book which looks at laid-off workers in general. Therefore, the dialogue between different parts of the book, as well as the essays’ themes convergence furnish an over-all sense of unity for the entire volume.
Following a very subtle cue on gender in the volume's progression from children's education to affect in the general population, and to laid-off women, now, in part five, we get to learn more about the affective labor Indonesian female care workers in Japan and Filipino female domestic workers in South Korea provide for the elderly in the two countries. Ayaka Yoshimizu and Toshiko Tsujimoto explore the multifaceted dimensions of the care system and care labor in Japan and South Korea from an ethnographic stance, as well as making use of their cultural studies training. The concept of the foreigner who is allowed to produce value through affective labor is laid out in both of the articles tangentially bringing up the historical implication Japan had in Indonesia at the middle of the 20th century through its occupation of the Dutch East Indias, and South Korea's involvement in The Philippines through marriages and businesses between Koreans and Filipinos. However, these tangential implications and attitudes that enhance the affects produced in the care receivers are not essential for neither of the articles. What is essential is the portrayal of "migrant workers as concrete sites for producing racially and sexualized marginal subjectivities" (139).
The last part, Affect, modernity and empires, draws our attention towards the development of Japanese women's language analyzed in Momoko Nakamura's article, Affective attachments to Japanese women's language: languages, gender and emotion in colonialism. The article is cogently contends that the particular vocabulary and syntax women use in their speech became instruments in legitimizing Japanese linguistic colonization of East Asia during World War II. Moreover, women’s speech became a site where Japanese tradition could manifest itself, a site that "could be mobilized for political and economical purposes" (192) with the help of affect. Unlike Nakamura's essay, the next two do not overtly touch upon the tradition of empire, but are closely related to modernization and affect. However, Sun Kil Min's The politics of haan: affect and the domestication of anger in South Korea ties the phenomenon of modernization and marketization to the reformation of people's affects and emotions. The essay shows how anger or better yet, 'haan', is deeply politicized and the mechanisms of coping and the affects around them are used by the government in the discourse of building "a more truly advanced, 'cultured' society” (215). The last article, Craig MacKie's Familial communism and cartoons: an affective political economy of North Korea refers to a titillating area of study because of North Korea's underresearched culture, although its position in this volume does not suggest so. The essay itself looks at the concept of national identity and its affective mechanisms portrayed in undeniably politicized cartoons. Although very well constructed, the article takes a distant stand from its object of study and uses Western theory to translate the ways in which North Korean power substantiate itself through media. Under these circumstances, the last article brings to our attention an underresearched area and opens the floor for further research and inquiry.

Conclusion

In the absence of a concluding chapter, I believe the book reiterates once more the question of the feasibility of applying Western theory to a non- western culture in order to unveil its mechanics and translate it for Western audiences and, possibly, to show the shortcomings of the said theory. While the essays in this collection successfully apply affect theory concepts to different areas and offer compelling explanations for the political, cultural and social strategies adopted by the governments of countries such as China, Japan and South Korea, the collection partially fulfills its goals of unveiling the “affective dimensions of power and economy in East Asia”(I). Furthermore, the volume ”illuminates the dynamics of contemporary governance”(I) from the point of view of Western affect theory and allows a very broad audience to get a sense of the affective mechanisms of power in East Asia. But, in the absence of any definite concluding line, it is safe to assume that the volume insists in extending the invitation for answering the already decades-long question: How does theory, alongside our own understanding of the world, change when we place it in another place?

Reviewed by Victoria Oana Lupascu, PhD Program in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies, Second Year Pennsylvania State University (vol103@psu.edu)

Citation:
Lupascu, V.O. 2016. A review of Yang, Jie. (ed.) 2014. The Political Economy of Affect and Emotion in East Asia, posted online on 3 June 2016: newbooks.asia/review/affective-engagements