Abstract This article examines precedents of Asian American sociopolitical exclusion and marginalization in the United States and considers how appropriations of mobility and community building practices have resisted and relocated the assignations of those margins. Considering precedents of immigration exclusion, wartime incarceration, and refugee resettlement, the article excavates underlying continuities between these cases. It then turns to a specific examination of Vietnamese American resettlement and secondary migration processes following dispersion policies imposed by policy agendas to culturally assimilate Southeast Asian refugees in 1975 following the Vietnam War. Assimilation agenda trajectories were appropriated through secondary migration and affordances of automobility. Such histories of Asian American refusals offer their own precedents for reconstituting community, rebuilding solidarity, and asserting recognition.

This article examines how artists from Jeju Island, South Korea, envision intimacies across spatial and spiritual severances imposed by Jeju's history as a militarily occupied and developmentally expropriated island. The article proposes “archaepelago,” or archaeological considerations of islands as a way of conducting archipelagic studies. Such focusing on vertical relations reveals new resonances in lateral connections across islands. Paying attention to Jeju's grounded layers and spirituality allows a closer look at the rich efforts of artists to connect with history, environment, and ongoing spiritual practices. Particularly, these artists engage ceremonies and found organic materials to reconcile the living with the dead and with the gods. Such intimate storytelling (naeryŏk) across animate and spiritual boundaries is part of larger efforts toward transpacific decolonization.

This article discusses minor transnationalism in China through a case study of mainland students’ emotional conflicts in the recent Hong Kong protests. Examining the emotional representations and experiences of mainland students through analysis of media texts and interviews, the article explains how their experiences are a product of tensions between two competing Chinese transnationalisms in Hong Kong against a backdrop of China’s rise. Further unpacking the ways in which mainland students negotiate both nationalist and localist politics through their cross-border mobility, the article reflects on the possibility of a minor transnational positionality that decenters statist configurations of identity. It argues that the case of mainland students in Hong Kong illuminates how a hybridized political subject could emerge amid the effects of the new, Sino-centric version of Chinese transnationalism.

Research on transnational migration from China since the 1990s has focused on stories about highly educated, skilled migrants. Little research has been done about the transnational migration of skilled trade workers who moved from China to Western countries. This article endeavors to analyze the experiences of this cohort through a case study of skilled trade workers who migrated to the state of Western Australia (WA) from China in the early 2000s. The life trajectories of these workers saw them migrate from villages to cities in China and then from Chinese cities to WA. By conducting semistructured in-depth interviews with eleven skilled trade workers, this study has found that trade workers’ translocal and transnational experiences should be viewed as a continuous process with both consistencies and discontinuities between the two scales of mobility. International migration strengthens the economic capital of these workers in their new context. Although the sense of social status disparity in internal migration is reduced, the language barrier becomes more salient. The workers have developed a dependence on bonding social capital by using social media to maintain their social networks in their host and home countries. These migration narratives demonstrate new modes of transnational mobility emerging from China’s rise on the global stage and the fluidity and mutability of class identities and personal capital in transnational migration.

This issue of positions opens with the unrecognized legacies of far-right movements in something as mundane as archival collections and closes with a searing critique of nationalist ideologies through the documentary medium.This way of bookending this collection seemed especially apt for the 2024 summer issue, given that it is scheduled to publish just before the US presidential elections.Though the outcome is unknown at the time of writing, it has become clear that we ignore the fringe at our own peril.I have therefore opted to reference Raymond Williams's phrase to title this introduction to insist that hegemony is never total and "structures of feeling" signal alternative formations of affects and modes of thought, struggling to emerge in the gap between convention and their unpredictable reception, especially evident in the cultural sphere.

As socially engaged art has played a vibrant role in responding to the crisis of the postmodernist art regime, the current post-Occupy condition has manifested itself in artistic interventions in rural China. In contrast to social writing, which encompasses street art, designers going to the countryside, and industrial empowerment to construct “good cultural governance” or “good cultural taste,” the term personal writing as used here describes a type of avant-garde intervention that has sparked interest in vernacular communities. It provides a socially minded critique of art production as bifurcated from the remaking of everyday social relations and subjectivities, political and cultural possibilities, and the rural Chinese future. Grounded in a contextual analysis of the social turn in Chinese contemporary art and the lingering “rural problem” under post-socialism, this article takes artist Mao Chenyu's Paddy Film project as an example of personal writing and proposes this artist's activisms at Dongting Lake as a specific intervening field, visual ethnography as a method, paddy rice as a distinctive “thing,” and archival practices as a deconstructive pathway that together have promoted the emergence of a resistance narrative in artistic intervention in Chinese rural communities.

This article introduces the 1933 novel After the Doll’s House by Ch’ae Mansik as an example of how revolutionary messages were presented through melodramatic narratives in colonial Korean proletarian literature. Between 1928 and 1930, several members of the Korea Artista Proleta Federacio (KAPF), most notably Kim Kijin, insisted that melodrama—a narrative form widely distributed in popular newspapers—could circumvent censorship to introduce revolutionary representations to the public. Although few proletarian authors initially agreed with Kim’s approach, many proletarian novels, especially those serialized in newspapers such as After the Doll’s House, adopted key elements from melodrama. Accordingly, this article explores how modern melodrama in colonial Korea as imported from Japan and Europe was uniquely adapted and transformed to deliver Marxist messages through localized literary symbols and tropes, despite strict censorship under the Government-General of Korea and the commercial demands of the publication market. After the Doll’s House thereby evidences how melodramatic narrative in colonial Korean proletarian literature was an effective strategy for expressing radical ideas within the restrictions of colonial rule as well as for creating a hybrid literary form under oppressive social conditions.

This ethnographic article focuses on the performance of Alce Lhamo (Sister Goddess) in Lithang, a Tibetan town on the western tip of Sichuan Province in China. It explores the linkages between local ways of residing in the world, the cosmological universe, and cosmopolitan centers. With an analysis of the two local Sister Goddess troupes and their competing claims to authority and authenticity, interactions with the local government, manipulation of state policies, and engagement with the global world, it sheds light on how people incorporate merit, karma, profit, power, the state, and the market in their vision of the good life, and how aspirations to the good life extend beyond the local and the social to include the cosmopolitan and cosmological scales.