CHEN, KUAN-HSING, 2010 ASIA AS METHOD, REVIEWED BY JAMIE DOUCETTE

From: http://societyandspace.com/reviews/reviews-archive/chen/

Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010) Asia as Method: Towards Deimperialization, Duke University Press, Durham.
344 pages, 1 table. $ 24.95 paper, $89.95 cloth, ISBN: 978-0- 8223-4676-0 and 978-0-8223-4664-7
(https://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=16019&viewby=reading%20list&ca
tegoryid=83&sort=newest)

Kuan-Hsing Chen is a rare intellectual, one who played a role in key democratic events and transitions
that shaped East Asia during the 1980s and whose scholarly practice has remained loyal to potential for
emancipation unleashed by these movements. This makes Asia as Method an important book. While
Chen’s experience and scholarship were formed through his participation in the Taiwanese democracy
movement, his work speaks also to cognate events such as the Korean June Democratic Uprising of
1987, Tiananmen Square movement in China, People’s Power in the Philippines. These and other events
have shaped contemporary Asia and have attempted to address interconnected and overlapping global
power relations. An important cohort of intellectuals has emerged from such events. Many of them
were then college students involved in grassroots social movements, so it has taken time for their voices
to gain prominence in regional debates about democracy, development and social change. There are
many such voices among Chen’s generation across Asia. Wang Hui in China and Cho Hee Yeon in South
Korea are two best known in the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Movement, whose eponymous and flagship
journal Chen edits.

While Chen has certainly been in dialogue with geographers—he was a keynote speaker at the 2006
EARCAG conference in Taipei alongside David Harvey, Eric Sheppard, Helga Leitner and others—,his
work has not received due attention in the discipline. This is surprising because at the heart of Chen’s
project is an attempt to rethink the spatial relationships of modernity and globalization. In particular,
Chen uses Asia’s variegated geographies and political, ethnic, economic and cultural constellations to
reconfigure the way we think about the dominant power relationships that shape the region. Our
present, Chen argues, is one in which capitalist globalization is reworking earlier forms of regional
integration established by colonization, imperialism (of the Chinese, Japanese, and American variety),
and the Cold War. To the last Chen urges us to pay special attention. The Cold War, he argues, has more
recently produced Asia as a region, tying together other sedimented layers of imperial and colonial
history in the process. Furthermore, the shadow of the Cold War remains active in East Asia in
multidimensional ways: in the image of the internal enemy used to repress domestic social movements
and intellectuals, in the imaginary of terror and territory, in migration patterns and in geopolitical and
economic alliances, as well as in other forms of cultural imaginary. Chen’s project is to work out these
constellations of power and geography. This, he argues, can be a painful process involving ‘the practice
of self-critique, self-negation, and self-rediscovery, but the desire to form a less coerced and more
reflexive and dignified subjectivity necessitates it’ (page 3).

These themes are explored through wide-ranging and complex essays. Arranged under the wide banners
of de-imperialization, decolonization and ‘de-Cold War’, the essays discuss the prospect of Third World
Cultural Studies, the sexual triumphalist and subimperial desires of Taiwanese nationalism, the
psychoanalysis of nationalism and nativism, Han-Chinese racism, and, closer to home, the project of
decolonizing geographical materialism. On the last Chen discusses earlier work by Soja, Lefebvre,
Harvey, Castells and Blaut—an unfortunately all-too-male sampling of radical geographers. Chen
applauds these thinkers for respatializing social theory. At the same time, however, he also criticizes
them for their bias towards American urbanism and the lack of reconfiguration within historical
materialism and radical geography to account for how Asian and colonial geographies have been shaped
by the international state system and globalization. Chen uses this critique as a starting point to
advocate for a decolonized cultural studies. He does so with such force that the book often reads as a
manifesto.

Asia as Method is a militant but at the same time also very personal book. The author frequenty slips
into the first person to put the friendships, experiences, and observations he has accumulated in the
process of creating dialogue among Asian intellectuals into tension with contemporary cultural practices
in literary and film studies: from filmic and literary imaginations of inter-Asian migration, to the
spectacles of Taiwanese nationalism and emotional family reunions on the divided Korean peninsula and
beyond.

For me Chapter 5, ‘Asia as Method: Overcoming the Present Conditions of Knowledge Production’, is key
for understanding Chen’s project. Written in dialogue with Partha Chatterjee’s The Politics of the
Governed, in this chapter we get a fuller sense of the political and geographical implications of Chen’s
interventions. In particular, the scholar argues for a reconceptualisation of our understanding of politics
and the division of political space into the spheres of state and civil society. He argues that the
normative distinction between state and civil society is too simplistic as it ignores the experience of an
East Asian modernity in which civil society has been subordinated to the state and social struggles kept
mostly excluded from both spheres. Chen speaks of an additional sphere of the min-jian (the Korean
pronunciation is minjung) or peoples’ sphere as a space of political society. He argues that this sphere
should be a priority in political analysis. Chen develops this term out of a tension (common to many East
Asian languages that share Chinese terminology) between between officialdom and a people’s
sphere. Minjian and minjung share the same prefix Min (民), a term that connotes the opposite to
officialdom, or Kwan (官). This is a space of subaltern struggles that is relatively autonomous from
dominant institutions of state and civil society. The latter may appropriate these struggles as part of a
hegemonic project. However, political society, according to Chen, cannot be reduced to a fixed point
within state and civil society even though, as a site of engagement, it can have effects that modify
established relations of power and interest.

In a sense, Chen aims to develop a more popular analysis of the political that can be used to shed light
on the many subaltern and disparate struggles that shape Asia from below and interact with wider,
intersecting colonial, imperial and (post) Cold War geographies. This is a particularly important insight
for Asian countries such as South Korea, where key reformers and social movements have emerged
from popular peoples’ or minjung movements that have helped reconfigure the political field, precisely
by grouping a variety of social struggles together into a radical oppositional bloc. In Korea the usage of
the term civil society (simin sahoe, or citizens’ society) largely emerged from this bloc and is still
associated with comprehensive social transformation and popular struggles rather than simply with
normative or passive interest group mediation. Chen himself was once member of a similar oppositional
Taiwanese group known as ‘popular democracy.’
Some might find the use of the terms political society or min-jian society too idealistic, in the sense of
searching for a comprehensive political force outside of established institutions. Spivak’s criticism of
Chatterjee’s political society and the ideas of vernacular cosmopolitanism might apply here. Spivak
argued in her recent AAG address that cosmopolitanism is a project of world governance and should not
be applied to migrant struggles and she makes a similar criticism of the application of the term political
society to subaltern struggles. However, Chen seems to be advocating for something more, and that is
an analytical focus on popular struggles that can identify inter-Asian connections, particularly in the
context of dominant geo-historical power relations. The idea of a min-jian sphere seems to be a
proposal for a method instead of a normative sphere of influence. As such, Asia as Method is a plea for
finding correspondences among intellectual and social struggles within Asia, and for translating them
into a wider analysis of global power relations. As such, it represents a welcome geographical project
that should garner attention from scholars in geography and a number of other disciplines.

Jamie Doucette, School of Environment and Development, The University of Manchester, PO Box 88,
Manchester, M60 1QD, UK.