Asia’s Transformations, 42. London; New York: Routledge, 2014. xxiii, 247 pp. (Figures.) US$140.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415-70970-5.
The book sets out to use affect (or emotion) as a fresh analytical tool for exploring the ways in which it can be used for achieving political and economic objectives, and for understanding dynamics of contemporary governance which are specific to East Asia. While these specific questions are well posited in the introduction, not all chapters in the book are in fact exploring them. However, as is well put by Sara Ahmed in the foreword, the book successfully delivers a sense of how affect studies pulls from different directions and how scholars engage it differently in an effort to theorize an emerging field. Put differently, this book is an engaging collective contribution to the exploration of the potential of affect as a social or socio-political practice.
In the introduction, Jie Yang outlines the goal of this book as stated above and offers an overview of relevant (mostly Western) literature. She emphasizes that the study of affect in East Asian cultures and societies may require adjustments of this literature because social relations in East Asia are more rooted and articulated in terms of affect than in the West—a point that some would find contestable. Yang organizes her introduction according to themes that aim to contextualize the chapters in the book but the result is not entirely convincing. Yang also uses terms that the reader may expect to find again in the book, such as soft power, that never reappear.
The book picks up momentum in the following chapters. In chapter 1, Zhang offers an ethnographic investigation of Yu Dan, a media studies professor who became the Chinese state’s star with her series of lectures on Confucian Analects from the Heart. Zhang interprets these lectures as effeminate, affective practices that are a response to the needs of the state, the market, and the consumer subjects. They are ideological but also emotive, giving instructions on how to feel and live as a modern neo-liberal individual in contemporary China.
In chapter 2, Yang presents an ethnographic study on Chinese state-led re-employment counselling programs for those who have been laid off from state-owned enterprises. Happiness, positive psychology, and self-reflection are used as therapeutic strategies for adapting to the economic transformations, in line with the state’s project of constructing a people-centred, socially and economically sustainable “harmonious society.” Yang shows that these measures also attract contestation.
Chapter 3 by Teresa Kuan discusses an ethnographic case on quality education reform in China. The author focuses on Zhou Ting, an education expert, who promotes the concept of affect education—i.e., creating opportunities for emotional-sensory experiences to an overly grade- and information-oriented education system. Kuan argues that while this project goes hand-in-hand with a neo-liberal market system which is best advanced by encouraging individual responsibility, there are in fact benefits of affective economy to the individuals as well.
The next chapter by Shiho Satsuka examines affective labour in the tourism industry. In this ethnography, the author describes how Japanese guides in the Rocky Mountains are trained to produce emotional attachment in their Japanese customers. For the tourists the guides become an embodiment of liberated cosmopolitanism. The author explores the limits and dialectics between the conflicting economies of gift and commodity in a competitive market.
Chapter 5 by Daneil White uses an ethnographic perspective on the relations between emotions (as they are embodied in tears) and the public sphere in Japanese media. Using two examples, White shows how media producers aim to secure a relationship between affect, emotions, and narration through reflexive practices, to ensure rating and capital. The author argues that contrary to the accepted theorization of the public sphere as thriving on rationality, affective intensity triggers moral reflection and therefore functions as integral rather than injurious to a flourishing public sphere.
Shuyu Kong, in chapter 6, offers a textual analysis of Chinese television dramas that deal with retrenchment and socio-economic transformations. Kong argues that these television dramas offer on the one hand a neoliberal message of inspiration and upward mobility in a new market economy, and on the other hand affective contentious voices from the point of view of the reform victims (who are mostly female in the case of television dramas), thereby complicating the resulting image, and providing the viewers with catharsis.
Next, Ayaka Yoshimizu analyzes the media coverage of a Japanese government trial in importing care labourers for the elderly from Indonesia. The author argues that this deployment of labourers is an example of biopolitical economy: individuals and collectives are scrutinized and controlled by state apparatuses. Yoshimizu demonstrates how the female and male workers are effeminized, socially marginalized, and portrayed as inherently fit to perform affective labour because of specific racial and cultural attributes. She suggests that these images may be connected to colonial images and neo-colonial images of Southeast Asian women in Japan.
In the following chapter, Toshiko Tsujimoto offers an ethnography of migrant Filipino domestic workers in South Korea. Using emotional labour as their tactic, these workers manage to juggle the roles of worker, mother, breadwinner, and community volunteer. Tsujimoto concludes that the delimitation of emotional labour to the discourses of femininity and gendered subjugation may result in neglecting its dynamic functions and potential to promote socio-economic status and fulfill personal goals.
Chapter 9 by Momoko Nakamura investigates the contemporary emotional attachment of Japanese people to women’s language in the context of its dwindling caused by socio-linguistic transformations. Through an informed reconstruction of the dynamically changing attitudes towards women’s language in Japan since the late nineteenth century, Nakamura shows that this emotional attachment is not natural but historically situated. Women’s language is today a felt space for recovering and ascertaining Japanese social order and identity.
Next, Sung Kil Min explores haan—a key word in Korean culture that refers to accumulated personal or collective feelings of frustrations and anger after experiencing a trauma, usually an injustice caused by human agency. The author argues that throughout Korean history collective feelings of haan have been mobilized by leaders for various objectives, including rapid economic growth and rehabilitation from colonialism and war. The result was haan-puri (the resolution of haan) that stimulated cultures of creativity and determination.
Lastly, Craig Mackie argues a comparative study of North Korean and American children’s cartoons representing the army. The author demonstrates how affective pedagogy is used to create a specific relationship between the North Korean national community as an extended family, the private family, and the role of the soldier as protector from within the national territory. The author wishes to point out that emotions can be wielded as a political technology to mobilize action and unify groups.
Michal Daliot-Bul
University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
pp. 613-615