In Search of the Asia Principle

“Asia” is not the end result but a means of intellectual exploration. “Asia” is multivalent; it is not self-sufficient and exclusionary vis-à-vis other cultures. It does not exist as an epistemological abstraction. This unique attribute of “Asia” is, however, where its opportunity lies. Taking “Asia” as a means for intellectual inquiry, this article explores the “fūdo” 風土of humankind and cultural formations in dialogue with historical circumstances. It argues that global integration is not the homogenization of disparate societies but mutual respect for their specificities. Furthermore, this article proposes a new kind of universality and reassesses how the specific relates to the universal. Taking Asia’s historical experiences seriously, this article stresses that universality cannot act as an independent and superior imposition vis-à-vis specificities. Rather, specific experiences have to be put into an open dialogue between one another to unleash new possibilities. As a means to reconstruct a new universal imagination, “Asia” poses a potent challenge to hegemonic epistemologies.

Conclusion

The work of this book has been to engage with notions of human being that are mainstream in Western modernity. These common sense ideas have been forged and disseminated in the psy disciplines. I have sought to offer an alternative way of thinking about self and other that might alter how and why we think about our psychotherapeutic work. In the first chapter, I argued that the psy disciplines benefit when they learn from the humanities. In the final chapter, I outlined existing psychotherapy practices that already apply an understanding that human being is complicitous, even if those are not the terms they use. In between, I offered illustrations to bring into focus how systems of power evolve from specific historical events and from material practices, and then reinforce or underwrite these practices (see Kendi, 2016 for the example of racism in America as an illustration of how material practices can cause cultural formations as much as the other way around).

Looking on the bright side: Positivity discourse, affective practices and new femininities

From policy to personal practice, injunctions to harness the positive effects of positive affects are pulsing through global emotion regimes. Scholarship tracing this phenomenon links the push for positivity – and other seemingly “entrepreneurial” affects – to neoliberal cultural formations. Within and beyond psychology, feminist analyses are highlighting the gendered address of these formations and their imbrication with contemporary femininities. While this raises important questions about the gendered implications of positivity imperatives, an absence of fine-grained empirical work means little is known regarding how positivity discourse is taken up and lived out. We draw from interviews with 24 women facing distinctive emotional management demands (influencers, mothers and service workers) to investigate how positivity inflects everyday living. Our analysis presents two affective–discursive repertoires that participants drew on to explain positivity: positivity as attractive relationality and positivity as agentic cognitive style. We also identified four figures who are central to positivity talk, and three affective– discursive practices linked to positivity: keeping emotions in check, virtuously declining negativity and triumphant positivity. We conclude that, while offering new and appealing feeling positions, positivity discourse may also reaffirm profoundly unequal patterns of emotional practice and regulation.

Injecting as a sexual practice: Cultural formations of ‘slamsex’

‘Slamsex’ has emerged in gay vernacular in recent years to denote a particular way of taking drugs and a particular kind of sex. Slamming refers in this context to the practice of injecting drugs – typically crystal methamphetamine – intravenously. To pair ‘slamming’ with ‘sex’ is to propose that a particular mode of drug administration is constitutive of a particular kind of sex – a relatively novel idea that deserves some unpacking. What does it mean to make a route of drug administration definitional in the delineation of a sexual practice? What does this move reveal about contemporary practices of sex and drug consumption? In this article, we explore these questions with reference to theories of drug effects and practitioners’ accounts of slamsex. We conclude by considering the implications of our analysis for slamsex relations and associated harm reduction measures.

Excerpts from Abdelkébir Khatibi, La Blessure du nom propre (Paris: Editions Denoël, 1974)

Both experimental intersemiotics and double critique define the scope of Abdelkébir Khatibi’s La Blessure du nom propre (‘The wound of the proper name’). Published in 1974, this work presents the distinctive way that Khatibi intervenes simultaneously in North African cultural studies and in French semiotics. The two excerpts here include the book’s introduction “The Text’s Crystal” and an excerpt from the chapter on calligraphy, “The Calligraphic Trace.” Translated into English for the first time, these excerpts exemplify Khatibi’s pioneering effort to reimagine Moroccan and Arab/Arabic cultural formations outside of both the colonial anthropological frame and the retrenched theocratic forms of national culture ascendant in the postcolonial world after decolonization. Also, in “The Calligraphic Trace,” Khatibi sets out to formulate an Arab/Arabic theory of the sign that, implicitly, can compete or contrast with European models of the same.

Naturalizing the centennial: History, memory, and the limits of human lifespans

Recent studies of centennials focus on explaining the social and political contexts for such commemorations. This paper develops an alternative, naturalistic theory of these long-range anniversaries. The paper starts by describing the value of a naturalistic account of complex cultural formations, and by reviewing basic demographic and physiological facts underlying centennial observances. Next, the paper provides a novel taxonomy of three central social functions of centennials, highlighting their roles as standards of greatness, mirrors of progress, and spurs to renovation. Each of these functions reflects the existence of certain predictable limits to human lifespans. The paper concludes by considering some transformations in form and function that centennials might undergo in a potential future of extended longevity.

Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of the Polish–Lithuanian Jews' flight westward after 1648. Three major issues underlie the discussion as a whole. First is the nature of Jewish solidarity in those years and the fate of the Jewish refugees outside Poland–Lithuania when the religious imperative to ransom captives was not a relevant issue. Second is the policies adopted by the states of the Holy Roman Empire toward the refugees and their impact on the refugees themselves as they tried to rebuild their lives on German lands. Third is the new social and cultural formations created by the encounter of “eastern” and “western” Ashkenazim in the wake of the refugee crisis and their consequences for the development of German Jewry in both the short and long term.

Afterword

Urban Formalism has examined what it historically meant to “read” the mid-nineteenth-century city, in the broadest sense of that term. I’ve placed forms at the heart of this study in the belief that the work of urban interpretation ultimately requires us to attend to the representative patterns of the city’s cultural formations. These days, such formations are increasingly recognized as “forms.” This study accordingly sits at the semantic intersection of some of the historical city’s most readable (which is not to say most easily apprehensible) formal “texts.” Among these last I have included the literary city, the material city, the political city, and the visual city. My argument, throughout, has been that the often-contradictory ways by which our predecessors interpreted the forms of the modern city at once made the metropolis more and less readable.