POEM OF THE WEEK

In continued celebration of National Poetry Month we are featuring a weekly poem on the blog. This week, a poem by Yokota Hiroshi, and a corresponding research article by Andrew Campana, published in positions: asia critique, volume 30, issue 4.

Hieru kokoro 冷える心 (Cold Heart)

“Today was so nice out
I could see Mt. Fuji, clear as day”
said my aunt, who just came back from an outing
“Oh, it’s not just today!
You can see it all the time around the end of fall.”
It was in the mid-afternoon
with a late November chill
I do not know the real Fuji
so when someone says Fuji
the prints of Hokusai are what immediately come to mind
but in my head
even though there’s Fuji through Hokusai’s careful eye
there is no form left to its own nature
even though there’s the beauty of his deformed ridges
there is no joy in following smooth slopes with a naked eye
and I
came to believe that was the real thing
convinced that this was the real Fuji
my heart
is always full
of these deformed things

“I want to climb Mt. Fuji, even just once”
said my cousin
me too even just once
I think I want to see the real Mt. Fuji
I think I want to know the real world

Further Reading:

“You Forbid Me to Walk: Yokota Hiroshi’s Disability Poetics” by Andrew Campana.

This article, published in positions: asia critique and made freely available through May 31, explores the work of the poet Yokota Hiroshi, a leader in Japan’s disability rights movement, and how he used his experiences of having cerebral palsy to create a new kind of disability poetics. Like in much of the world, Japan in the 1970s saw the emergence of disability movements that aimed to challenge the inaccessibility and cruelty of a society made by and for nondisabled people. Yokota was involved with two key groups of this kind—the literary coterie Shinonome and the activist group Aoi Shiba no Kai—and over several decades published multiple books about the ideologies that justified killing disabled people and the construction of disabled society and culture, as well as several books of poetry. In his poems, he aimed not only to shed light on the oppression and dehumanization of disabled people but to rethink dominant conceptions of embodiment and “able‐bodiedness” itself.

Dancing and Rapping the Good Life: Sharing Aspirations and Values in Vietnamese Hip-Hop | The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for March 23, 2024, is “Dancing and Rapping the Good Life: Sharing Aspirations and Values in Vietnamese Hip-Hop” by Sandra Kurfürst. The article appears in “the good life in late-socialist asia: aspirations, politics, and possibilities” a recent issue of positions: asia critique.

Read this article for free through May 31, 2024.
Buy this special issue and use coupon code SAVE30 for a 30% discount.

Abstract
Rap and hip-hop’s diverse dance styles have been practiced in Vietnam since the 1990s, shortly after the country’s integration into the world economy. What started out as a sphere of popular culture dominated by men was soon appropriated by female artists. The female rapper Suboi, Vietnam’s “Queen of Rap,” is internationally renowned, and more and more young women are engaging in dancing on the streets. This article investigates the aspirations of female hip-hop practitioners in Vietnam’s major cities, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. What does leading the good life mean to them, and how do they navigate the ambiguous moral landscape coproduced by authoritarianism and liberalism? Drawing on Aihwa Ong’s (2008) concept of self-fashioning and AbdouMaliq Simone’s (2019) practices of crafting, harvesting, and detachment, this article examines how young women use hip-hop as a creative device to achieve personal freedom and make a career for themselves. Carving out spaces for themselves in the male-dominated rap industry and dance community, they negotiate existing gender norms in both the music genre and Vietnam’s urban society.

Offering a fresh approach to Asia scholarship, positions develops theoretical, philosophical, historical, and critical approaches in a forum open to debate. In expansive scholarly articles, commentaries, poetry, visual art, and political and philosophical debates, contributors consider a broad variety of pressing questions. Thematic issues tackle new, sometimes pathbreaking areas of concern (or traditional areas from a fresh vantage point) and are interspersed with general issues offering scholarship that calls our scholarly assumptions into question and expands our various archives. The breadth and pace of the journal ensure that readers seeking to add “Asia” to their areas of critical competency are included in our debates, challenged and informed.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

Congratulations to our 2023 CELJ Award Winners!

We are very pleased to announce that multiple journals published by Duke University Press received recognition from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) this year! The CELJ announced awards this past Friday at the Modern Language Association Annual Convention in Philadelphia.

Tani Barlow, editor of positions: asia critique, and Paul Bové, editor of boundary 2, were named co-winners of the CELJ Distinguished Editor Award.

“This year, the award judges were faced with several exceptionally strong candidates and two in particular stood out among their peers for their accomplishments,” commented CELJ judges. “In both cases, the editors had served at least three decades at the helm of their journals; both had developed an effective editorial collective rather than a strictly hierarchical approach to leadership; and both are interdisciplinary yet have also published work that is significantly influential across several fields. With such high quality candidates, the judges agreed that we should declare two winners this year: Tani Barlow, editor of positions: asia critique, and Paul Bové, editor of boundary 2. Dr. Barlow is a founding editor of positions, which has won CELJ awards for best new journal and for several special issues. In 2020, she also developed a digital platform to complement the print publication, which is a major undertaking. Dr. Bové is credited with instituting a new editorial vision for boundary 2 when it was struggling in its initial years of publication, building its reputation and influence over the past three decades. The award judges find these editors equally worthy of the honor of being named CELJ Distinguished Editors.”

liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies was awarded the CELJ Phoenix Award. The open-access journal is edited by Allessandra Raengo and Lauren McLeod Cramer.

“Our selection from this strong pool of nominations is liquid blackness, which is just stunning. We appreciate how it explores its questions about theories of blackness through a wide variety of media, as well as its careful curation of various voices and methodological approaches through the new editorial sections. The changes made to the journal since it joined Duke University Press beautifully expand its founding mandate to practice “a kind of ‘black study’ that prioritizes equal care toward art/artists and contributors,” commented CELJ judges.

“Multispecies Justice,” a special issue of Cultural Politics (19:1) edited by Danielle Celermajer and Sophie Chao, was named a runner-up for the CELJ Best Special Issue Award.

Utilizing a multispecies lens and anti-colonial framework, contributors to this special issue seek to reconceptualize justice to include beings beyond the human realm.

Congratulations to all of this year’s winners! Learn more about boundary 2, Cultural Politics, liquid blackness, and positions.