Faced with environmental degradation and atmospheric pollution, Chinese citizens increasingly envision the good life as a green life. Yet in cities and the countryside, understandings of environmental hardship and ecological redress diverge and at times even contradict each other. Nonetheless, promises of a greener future mobilize shared notions of cooperation in exchanges of work and support between urbanites and their rural counterparts. Situated between socialist sacrifice, market service, and digital technologies, these reciprocal environmental engagements challenge historical narratives of a smooth transition from the Maoist collective-oriented and public-spirited hero to the private and individualistic new subject of the Reform era. The mobilization of ecological labor instantiates a distinct formation of neosocialist desires and subjectivities oriented toward a greener future. Underlying this vision is a conception of shengtai yishi 生态意识 (ecological consciousness) that resonates with the government rhetoric of constructing a shengtai wenming 生态文明 (ecological civilization) in China and beyond.

For ordinary people in late-socialist China, the good life seems to be singularly shaped: in the future and the elsewhere, it is oriented toward one's own well-being and the well-being of future generations. This article aims to open up discussion about the different possibilities that ordinary people have for shaping a good life, despite and within the restrictions caused by their limited possession of power or wealth. The exploration draws from my long-term ethnographic fieldwork on caogen gongyi 草根公益 (grassroots philanthropy) in southeast China. It shows that care for the well-being of people beyond one's immediate family in the form of organized charity and volunteerism offers opportunities for many ordinary people with limited resources to engage socially and politically in ways that are central to their experience of the good life in contemporary China. Unlike the better-off philanthropists and volunteers, whose philanthropic activities tend to enhance their status and dominance, the ordinary people presented in this article experience major tensions between providing for their family and caring for others in society, between ensuring the material conditions of the good life and being able to live an ethical life as a contributing member of society and to be socially recognized for doing so. Hence pursuing the good life can require extremely hard work and be emotionally draining for many ordinary people. Philanthropic engagement does not lead to substantial and sustainable material returns, yet the creative imaginations and public actions of ordinary people open up possibilities for valorizing life in social arenas, despite and within the prevailing economic valorization of life.

One may say that violence and the emergence of modernity were significantly interrelated at both the macro and micro levels.Establishing modern political systems and defining the borderlines of modern polities inevitably accompanied large-scale confrontations, which were reconfigured into a modern type.Various forms of violence -colonial, interstate, and internecinenecessarily paralleled the restructuring of time, space, and human mobility in the emerging capitalist system.Why does studying violence in Asia matter?What insights can the region's violent past and present bring into our discussion of the modern world?This special issue of positions: asia critique originated during a collective endeavor in response to the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar's Rakhine State.Scholars, mostly from the region, gathered at a workshop titled "Sight and Sound: Challenges and Ethics of Visual Representations of War and Con-

Cosmopolitanism promises to go beyond national thinking and tradition‐bound parochialism by reemphasizing the interconnectedness of individuals, communities, and cultures. This article probes the politics of adaptation of the left‐leaning Cantonese Union Film Enterprise (Zhonglian 中聯, 1952 – 1967) in colonial Hong Kong, and scrutinizes how it embraced world literary classics to enhance the prestige of Cantonese films. It focuses on three 1955 adaptations: An Orphan's Tragedy (Guxing xuelei 孤星血淚; from Great Expectations), Anna (Chuncan mengduan 春殘夢斷; from Anna Karenina), and Eternal Love (Tianchang dijiu 天長地久; from Sister Carrie). The founding of Union was a conscientious response of Cantonese film workers to the call of the Cantonese Film Clean‐up Campaign (Yueyu dianying qingjie yundong 粵語電影清潔運動) in the 1940s, launched by leftist filmmakers from Shanghai (Cai Chusheng 蔡楚生, Situ Huimin司徒慧敏) and supported by Cantonese film leaders Ng Cho‐fan 吳楚帆 and Lo Duen 盧敦. The study interrogates the predicaments and vicissitudes of Union's cosmopolitan stances as it wrestled with the cultural politics of Chinese cinema during the Cold War. It elucidates the ethnically rooted and culturally cosmopolitan Cantonese progressive cinema. The social realism represented by Union is not local or passé. The Union artists envisioned from below a humane and cosmopolitan community inhabited by workers and intellectuals, locals and diasporic Chinese subjects, which connects people beyond their parochialism and nationhood.

Eye-gouging is one of the most gruesome tropes of the uncanny.A terrifying specter, it recurs across genres, from horror films to Gothic literature to Freudian psychoanalysis.Zombies are abject precisely because they have "turned" and are no longer recognizable -their eyes have sunk away and are unable to see, either themselves or their beloveds.Eye-gouging fascinated Freud ([1919] 1999) too, as detailed in his essay "The Uncanny," where he psychoanalyzes E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1816 short story "The Sandman."Instead of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale about magic sand bringing sweet dreams to children, Hoffmann, whom Freud described as the unrivalled literary master of the uncanny, built on darker versions of the story.There, Sandman threatens sleepless children, throwing burning sand on their open eyes and plucking out their eyeballs.Freud ([

Other| May 01 2017 Contributors positions (2017) 25 (2): 431–432. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-3852285 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Contributors. positions 1 May 2017; 25 (2): 431–432. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-3852285 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll Journalspositions Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. 2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.