Uncategorized Archives - positions politics

September 21, 2026

Mingwei Huang reviews Nadine Attewell, Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905-1949

Nadine Attewell, Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905-1949 (Stanford University Press, 2026).

In the early twentieth century, Chinese migrants, among others from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe, flocked to London, Liverpool, and Hong Kong. Nadine Attewell’s luminous Archives of Intimacy transports readers to these vibrant early 20^th century dockside worlds and offers a feminist and queer history of relation, one that expands how we understand the global formation of “Chineseness” and write history. Through Attewell’s vast archival research, we encounter Chinese migrant men who married white immigrant women and local women of color, mixed-race Chinese children, elite Eurasian families, and Chinese Caribbean diasporic subjects. The book unfolds across the street corners, laundries, boarding houses, brothels, dance halls, and shops of London’s Limehouse and Liverpool’s Pitt Street neighborhoods. The heterogenous presence of seamen of color, sex workers, and social reformers exceeded the moniker “Chinatown.” Attewell examines the working-class cosmopolitanisms, intimate relations, and everyday acts of solidarity between port city residents to survive the anti-immigrant, racist inhospitalities of interwar Britain under the 1905 Aliens Act. In contrast to British port cities, Attewell also considers the Chinese majority British colony of Hong Kong to highlight a different set of mobilities, intimacies, and forms of Chineseness.

Since the relational turn in the study of race, colonialism, and empire—of which Lisa Lowe’s Intimacies of the Four Continents (2015) is paradigmatic— “relation,” “intimacy,” and “entanglement” have become ubiquitous to the point of losing their analytical specificity. However, in Archives of Intimacy, intimacy and relation are treated with precision. In this book, intimacy is both the stuff of the archives and a heuristic, “a genre of relation,” for bringing together histories of (semi)colonial east Asia, Chinese migration, and imperial Britain. Archives of Intimacy attends “to the fleshy, emplaced particulars of Chinese people’s social lives” (Attewell 3). What makes this book distinctive is its emphasis on the ephemeral, queer forms of relation that are not easily categorizable: same-sex intimacies and transactional sex, homosocial domestic arrangements, “deviant” family formations, and acts and aspirations “not always in accordance with imperial dictates or desires” (Attewell 3). Attewell mobilizes relational terms to write a connected history of colonial capitalist modernity that brings Chinese people across imperial geographies together, shaping and constraining their lives and “wayward itineraries” but never determining them. While it is easy to romanticize intimacies, the intimacies in this book are in the service of Chinese working-class survival and the reproduction of class privilege and imperial power. Interracial intimacy and multiracial conviviality are “material social practices with the potential to proliferate life chances for more people than might otherwise have been supported to survive, let alone thrive” (Attewell 4). Intimacies do not spontaneously spring up whenever racialized people encounter one another but must be laboriously forged through relational work.

Like the pejorative terms “half-caste” and “Chinaman,” “mixed-race” and “Chinese” are terms of identity freighted with racial and geopolitical meanings, and they have not been available for all diasporic subjects to claim. Accordingly, Attewell is careful to not rely on identitarian logics that posit a stable mixed-race Chinese subject and that reify Han-centric, racial nationalist “Chineseness.” Rather, she approaches Chineseness as a cultural text and frames it through relation; subjects become Chinese through their encounters with and ties to others. Refusing to narrow who can claim Chineseness, she emphasizes “the capacity of Chineseness to…mean and do new things.” “Chinese” is a “capaciously descriptive rather than a normative modifier to mark an inheritance or ascription that people may have taken up in any number of ways, or refused altogether” (Attewell 15). Refusing to demarcate and police who is Chinese, Attewell radically expands Chinese into an “inclusive category through which a range of subjects might access care and pleasure” (94). Crucially, Chineseness is not a fixed identity based in lineage and biology, nor a property of the self, but “materializes as a key site of attachment and meaning” (Attewell 75, 93).

In three parts — “Encounters,” “Itineraries,” and “Lifelines” — Attewell tells the singular and collective stories of Chinese men, women, and children, while interrogating the heteronormative, racial ways of knowing that structure their inclusion or absence in the archive. Chapter 1 “Looking Relations” centers a photograph of three mixed-race Chinese girls in London, their names and the provenance of the photograph unknown. Writing against the “archive of pathology,” Attewell attends to the girls’ refusal to be captured on film, attending to their practices of looking, knowing, and relating instead. Chapter 2 “The Queerest Parish in England” examines the promiscuous social relations of Chinese Liverpool and the pressures of white heteronormative respectability on shaping the community’s historical narratives. We meet the memorable Bella Gomes, a neighborhood resident of “Portuguese and Negro blood” who sold sexual services to Chinese migrant men. Gomes is absent from community oral histories despite her sustained presence and the solidarity she offered to the community. Chapter 3 “Everyday Chineseness” theorizes how “Chinese” is relationally produced and lived through the affective, nostalgic medium of food. Chinese mixed-race children felt a sense of identity and belonging through foodstuffs and goods. Practices of nourishment—the devalued yet “necessary work” of social reproduction—formed the bedrock of children’s acculturation and the community’s regeneration. Continuing Attewell’s attention to child subjects, Chapter 4 “Black and Chinese Liverpool in Relation” analyzes photographs of Asian and Black children playing at school. The children’s relations emblematize the maritime networks that brought African and Chinese men to Liverpool and the possibilities of Afro-Asian conviviality against racial division.

Largely set in Hong Kong, “Itineraries” explores patterns of mobility, settlement, and place-making. Contrasting the working-class cosmopolitanism of previous chapters, Chapter 5 “Relationship on Top of Relationship” turns to the imperial cosmopolitanism of Hong Kong’s elite Eurasian families, including the Cheng family, and the multigenerational reproduction of social influence through marital alliances and pedagogical training. This is also relational work, but in the service of accruing familial privileges within the British colonial capitalist order. In Chapter 6 “Model Students and Problem Children,” we follow doctoral student Irene Cheng as she embarks on dissertation research about working-class Chinese in Limehouse, only to suffer a mental breakdown and change her dissertation topic. Cheng exerts a ghostly presence throughout the book. For Attewell, in perhaps a poignant moment of identification with her subject, Cheng’s breakdown “point[s] to the affordances, costs, and limits of the deeply personal repertoires of knowledge that researchers bring to some projects more than others” (18). Chapter 7 “Exit Strategy” follows the case of Sarah Hing, a mixed Chinese woman born in the United States under the Chinese Exclusion Act, who married a Muslim medical student “of half Chinese and half East Indian blood” in Hong Kong, and was barred from re-entering the US when pregnant. Within the constraints of imperial citizenship, Hing rejected married life and shuttled back and forth the Pacific with her child. These chapters standout in Attewell’s creative reading of colonial archives, pressing at the limits of Cheng’s thesis and Hing’s immigration file to speculate about their interior lives, relations, and experiences as desiring, mixed-race subjects.

“Lifelines” clarifies the stakes of relational work during the Second World War in occupied Hong Kong and southern China. Chapter 8 “Mixed with the Caribbean” examines how Afro-Chinese Caribbean diasporic returnees mobilized knowledge of Jamaican, Trinidadian, Guianan, and Surinamese social worlds and local Chinese relations to support Britain. It tells the story of Percy Chang, an Afro-Chinese Jamaican who worked as a British intelligence agent in Guangdong where he could stealthily pass as Chinese, and Chang’s fraught ties across the Caribbean and Pearl Delta River worlds. Chapter 9 “A Matter of Life and Death” commemorates the mixed-race Chinese women who engaged in relational, social reproductive work for collective survival. To keep their families together, Chinese women often joined their white British partners in POW camps. They procured foodstuffs, sent parcels, raised children, and engaged in sex work. These everyday acts may not be as legible as rebellions, strikes, and insurgencies, but they resolutely were forms of political action. Throughout the chapters, Attewell insists on Chinese women and girls’ everyday practices of resistance—girls who refused the photographer, women who chose another way—and the social necessity of their relation-making labors. In this way, we can consider Archives of Intimacy as a companion text to Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019). Focusing on daughters, wives, aunties, and sex workers, Attewell recasts “ordinary people’s intimate experiments as (counter)archives of global Asian thought and action” (14).

There are many ways to read this book: a social history of early twentieth-century Chinese diasporic life, an Afro-Asian atlas, a people’s history of the port, a feminist manifesto about reproductive labor, a model for writing histories of relation, a collection of community and life histories, among other things. For me, Archives of Intimacy realizes the radical potential for engaging Asian and Asian diasporic studies with feminist and queer theories and methods to imagine usable pasts of connection. It can also be read as a timely blueprint for mutual aid and care in the face of cruel state violence, organized abandonment, imperial war, repressive border regimes, and family separation. An indispensable resource for interdisciplinary methods, Archives of Intimacy offers an exercise in attention: listening at “lower frequencies” (Campt 2017) and reading images for what appears on the edge of the frame or is absented all together. Ethnography is a form of knowledge-production specific to the subjectivity of the ethnographer and their relations with a particular group of people and place. The same is true for the historian. Attewell, herself a mixed-race Chinese diasporic subject, narrates her encounters with the archive and how its silences affected her. Research is relational work, she reminds us.

References

Attewell, Nadine. 2026. Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905-1949. Stanford University Press.

Campt, Tina M. 2017. Listening to Images. Duke University Press.

Hartman, Saidiya. 2018. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. W. W. Norton & Co.

Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke University Press.

Mingwei Huang is Associate Professor, Program in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Dartmouth College. Huang is the author of Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century (Duke University Press, 2024).

September 17, 2026

Christian Sorace, The Golden Chinggis and the Iconoclast

Several years ago, I met S. Molor-Erdene at a café in Ulaanbaatar. He is hyped as Mongolia’s ‘only’ continental philosopher—a provocateur with a large following among young Mongolians alienated from the hypocrisy of tradition and cult-like reverence for Chinggis Khan.

Over the years, his position has been consistent: Mongolians are backward; anything good in Mongolia has been the gift of Soviet modernity; Mongolians should praise Marx, not Chinggis Khan. His hatred of all things Mongolian always struck me as an inverted narcissism; the preservation of Mongolian exceptionalism through its negation. My gripe with Molor-Erdene, however, has less to do with his persona, and is more squarely with his politics: How could someone who is supposedly a socialist disparage ordinary people as a ‘black mass’ (khar massa) of uneducated and unclean commoners? This is not a socialism I can affirm.

Molor-Erdene told me that an essay he wrote on Chinggis and Marx resulted in death threats. I believed him, but also attributed the claim to his narcissism. He is said to have claimed that the Mongols never existed as a people, an argument that may not be as outlandish as it sounds: after all, the Mongol empire was based on aristocratic genealogies, not anachronistic national mythologies. A nation always retroactively projects its own founding myths and origins, and Molor-Erdene was turning over the stones. For this, he is being investigated under Article 19.9 of the Criminal Code for ‘undermining national unity,’ a charge that could carry five to twelve years in prison and that one commentator compared to Hong Kong’s National Security Law. In China, he would be accused of what the Chinese Communist Party calls ‘historical nihilism’ — a species of revisionism that challenges the nation’s founding myths and can also result in criminal charges.

One thing most commentary on him has not actually done is look at what Molor-Erdene has written. He offers a principled critique of identity-based belonging. In his Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow trilogy, he warns, ‘The “biological” era of blood ties and wanting to know who you are has begun.’ (Tsus oirtokh bolon khen gedgee medmeer baina gesen ‘biologiin’ tsag üye ekhelsen.) To further Molor-Erdene’s point: Why should anyone need to know, or prove through state documents, who they are, to be a political subject? One does not need a microscope to see the tincture of blood in liberal democracies. Molor-Erdene’s critique of Chinggis Khan is also worth considering: what kind of political symbol is Chinggis Khan? What political possibilities is he retrofitted to support, imagine, and foreclose? Are these yours?

I devote one of my seminars to Chinggis Khan and the historical battles over his legacy. In it I discuss how, at different points in history, Chinggis Khan has meant different things to different people. In Mongolia, he is now viewed as the founder of the Mongolian people and state; during the socialist period, by contrast, he was cast as a feudal tyrant. Across the border, in Inner Mongolia in the 1930s, the Communists claimed Chinggis Khan as an anti-colonial hero, only later to repudiate him during the Cultural Revolution. Further afield, in the late nineteenth century, a Japanese student at the University of Cambridge wrote a dissertation claiming Chinggis Khan was Japanese, prompting imperial expeditions into Siberia to find proof. I usually end the class with the trailer for John Wayne’s racist, tragicomic portrayal of Chinggis Khan in The Conqueror. Chinggis Khan has never been a stable referent.

But the Mongolian state needs Chinggis more than Chinggis needs it. Every new populist needs his own Chinggis. Former president Kh. Battulga was behind the world’s largest equestrian statue of Chinggis Khan, in Töv Aimag — though he built it as a businessman, years before he entered the political scene. More recently, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Science, and Sports unveiled the Chinggis Khaan National Museum: the building is nine storeys of marble and concrete; a golden falcon perches on top of the dome designed to look like a Mongolian ger. Visitors enter the museum through its imperial façade and gilded doors, which resemble the signature of imperial authority. On the top floor, for an extra fee, one can sees a 7.5-metre golden Chinggis Khan. It was enshrined in a state ceremony in March 2025 — consecrated with soil from Mongolia’s thirteen sacred mountains and attended by the president, the prime minister, and the speaker of parliament. Trump has the same taste for gold; populism, on either side of the Pacific, speaks of a metallurgic desire. It is an architectural obscenity.

This is at a time when China is folding Chinggis Khan’s memory into its own Sino-civilizational-multi-cultural fantasy and erasing the last vestiges of minority national (minzu) autonomy and language in its own quest for national rejuvenation. One nation’s independence myths are another nation’s extinction myths. As I write about in my forthcoming book, Steppe Immunity: Reimagining Political Futures from Mongolia, extinction anxieties drive national attachments, foreclosing alternative political futures. The problem may not be Chinggis Khan, or even the states that keep reinventing him. It is the nation-form itself that requires the policing of identity, history, and movement.

This is the sacred line of national immunity that Molor-Erdene is criticised for crossing. On social media, many comments have approved of the government’s actions. One representative comment ran: ‘I support freedom of speech. However, this case is not about freedom of speech. This man is attacking Mongolia’s independence…’ Say whatever you want, but do not question the nation. Another person suggested: by denying the historical fact of Chinggis Khan and the Mongol people, Molor-Erdene has left the protected realm of free speech and academic debate and is engaged in ‘slander.’

The common liberal rejoinder went: ‘I don’t agree with what Molor-Erdene says but I will defend his right to say it.’ There is palpable worry that Mongolia’s legal protections are being peeled like clementines, one after another. But is there a way out of this dialectic of liberal free speech versus nationalist slander? There is, but it is not one that fits within nationalist historiography—it is only visible by the faint light from a star that has since disappeared.

Complicating matters further is the usual intrigue and opacity of Mongolian politics. An unlikely Socrates, Molor-Erdene has ambitions to run for president. Speculation has been rampant whether he is a pawn of a larger electoral game, always being played behind the scenes. The person leading the charge against Molor-Erdene, S. Amarsaikhan, last month announced a new policy of social media registration, copying China’s playbook; each social account would be linked to a personal identity number. Perhaps Molor-Erdene is an early victim of what such a policy portends: a fly stuck in a turbid ointment. The latest news on this issue is that he is being detained for a month, pre-trial.

A friend said to me this morning: ‘This whole thing is a farce,’ which does not mean it is without consequence. It is a scandal commensurate with the times in which we live.

Christian Sorace is Associate Professor of Global China at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. He is the author of Shaken Authority: China’s Communist Party and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake (Cornell 2017) and of the forthcoming Steppe Immunity: Reimagining Political Futures from Mongolia (Stanford, 2027). He co-edited Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi (ANU Press and Verso, 2019) and Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour(Verso, 2022). He also serves on the editorial board of the Made in China Journal.

September 14, 2026

Susan Thomas, The Foreign Student “Threat”: Repression, Austerity, and the Politics of Scapegoating

It is undeniable that university life in the United States is implicated in the current moment of state violence, institutional repression, and worsening neoliberal austerity. What has been noteworthy is how, in this context, the foreign student has emerged as a significant figure. The broader targeting of the higher education sector by the right-wing Trump administration, the violent quelling of Palestinian solidarity protests on campuses, and the surge in nativistic resentment in light of President Trump’s own inconsistent positions on education- and labor-related migration all have involved a heightened, hostile attention to the presence of international students at American universities. In the latest instantiation of this trend, the Trump administration issued a change to the “duration of status” rule that had permitted international students to remain in the country as long as they had maintained their enrolled status; with this revision, a fixed period of four years is now imposed, ultimately meaning that foreign students will be subject to additional federal immigration scrutiny during their time in the United States (See Department of Homeland Security, 2026).

How did the student-migrant subject appear in the political crosshairs of the battles raging on and against our campuses? Why is this the case? Our answers cannot merely come from a presentist framing that only interprets the attacks on international students through critiques of the overtly fascist turn in U.S. national electoral politics. Rather, we must attend critically to the political and policy legacies that have long been part of the story of student migration in the U.S. and have helped foster this current moment of strife in which our international students are being aggressively targeted by a familiar politics of scapegoating.

For the past two decades or so, we have been witnessing an extraordinary rise in overseas students at U.S. institutions of higher education. A consequence of the global commodification of higher education, drawing students from overseas in large numbers has been accepted as a viable and easy option for revenue generation. Indeed, throwing open American campus doors to students from other parts of the world is now the primary strategy of what has come to be referred to as “internationalization,” the systematic efforts and policy agendas made by universities seeking to ensure their own survival and relevance in the era of neoliberal globalization. There are currently over a million students from overseas studying on American campuses. Notably, these students overwhelmingly arrive from the Asian region, with India and China serving as leading sources of foreign students for over 20 years. They contribute billions of dollars to the U.S. economy, serve as key sources of revenue and labor for the campus, and predominantly enroll in technical fields seen as pivotal to the “global knowledge economy” but ones that are otherwise chronically under-enrolled by domestic students.

In the academic world, the economic significance of foreign students’ enrollments is widely recognized today, often casually referred to behind closed doors as our campuses’ “cash cows.” This sentiment often smuggles in a range of assumptions, such as the notion that these students are elite, wealthy, and that their arrival on our campuses is not because they earned a place, but solely because of their economic value. These kinds of assumptions are problematic not only because of the ways they disregard the actual lived and quite varied experiences of this migrant population, but also how that disregard, then, contributes to rendering them vulnerable to the politically charged tussles transforming our institutions. The neglect I allude to here is partly explained by the tendency in U.S. scholarship to hold the international student as an analytically distinct, ahistorical, and apolitical category of transnational mobility, thus divorcing their experiences and stories from the socio-political and historical conditions forging their paths as migrants. I want to suggest that re-framing and attending ethnographically to the foreign student as a key migrant personhood would bring to the surface deeper, crucial insights on the interface of migration, race politics, and higher education in the era of late-stage capitalism.

In my critical ethnography, Indebted Mobilities (2024), I offer this kind of ethnographic reading of the migratory lives of non-elite, middle-class, Indian men pursuing an overseas education at a public university in the U.S. within the post-9/11, neoliberal landscape. The book argues that the transnational educational sphere is imagined as a site of masculine becoming among these men who are raised in a post-liberalized India, and whose arrival on an American campus is imbricated in the geographies of racial capitalism. These young people’s desiring for successful modern manhood, which they believe can be made possible through their migration for an American education, articulates with the racial and class formations that mark their movement across borders and locate them ambivalently on campus. The sensemaking that emerges from these articulations is configured not only through the narrative of US exceptionalism, which has been tethered to the history of Indian educational migration to the United States, but also through interrelated ideas of indebtedness.

Importantly, the vast majority of these migrant youth would not have been able to study overseas without having received significant amounts in student loans to finance the pursuit. Their transnational migration being directly linked to the accrual of student debt informed key aspects of their lives as student-migrants—being forced to live in subpar, segregated housing conditions on campus, working part-time jobs that were regularly low-wage, exploitative and at times, involved taking risks around their visa status,¹ and feeling immense pressure to stay and secure professional work in the U.S. after graduation in order to repay their loans.

At the same time, drawing on late anthropologist David Graeber’s (2011) analysis of debt, the book contends that student debt, and the material conditions wrought by such debt, were intertwined with other affective and moral logics of indebtedness to mediate how these young people negotiated their desire to become modern “men of the world.” My middle-class interlocutors revealed how the webs of obligation attached to their migratory paths produced a cultural logic of indebtedness—a sort of inventory-taking of what they owed and what they were owed in return—that configured how these Indian youth registered their lives as migrants. This moral calculus, working in tandem with the impersonal and legal nature of the market-based obligation to immediately repay student loans after graduation, served a crucial disciplinary function that ultimately groomed these young people for the volatility of the global neoliberal economy.

As disillusionment and crisis pervade the ethos of U.S. higher education in the throes of neoliberal restructuring, the notion of the U.S. university as the place one can seize the promises of the so-called “American Dream” is arguably beginning to fade in the American popular imagination; peddling such promises to the aspirational middle-classes of the Global South, then, makes sense. Doing so is not only crucial for the economic vitality of campuses because of the revenue and labor student-migrants end up providing, but also because it ultimately draws in student populations whose growing presence helps ideologically sustain the exceptionalist logic inherent to the mission of U.S. higher education. The Indian middle-class migrant youth centered in my ethnographic work lamented to me about what they deemed the failures of India’s higher education system to provide the upward mobility, status, and success they were convinced were rightfully theirs;² they felt an American education, in contrast, was the authentically liberal, secular site where true meritocracy thrives, hard work is rewarded, opportunities are abundant, and the successful modern futures they believed they deserved are rendered possible. That they are chasing these possibilities by falling into severe financial debt because of their student loans (the repayment of which becomes mainly dependent on whether they can stay in the United States and secure stable work in pertinent fields) is indicative of how the violence of debt is increasingly a shared condition of student life that includes foreign student populations, and continues to be essential to sustaining the neoliberal university. And still, the pertinence of student-migrants arriving from the Asian region is hardly recognized or acknowledged in the student debt discourse in the United States.

Overall, Indebted Mobilities’ ethnographic centering of the Indian student-migrant as a key figure of South Asian transnationality illuminates how the production of indebted, racialized migrant-subjects is a vital feature of the educational circuits of neoliberal empire. This kind of ethnographic attention to the trajectories of student-migrants can offer something toward undoing a troubling erasure of the lived experiences of a migrant population that has become especially critical to the landscape of higher education today.

Pushing back against this erasure is something that matters not only because these young people have become integral to our classrooms and university community, but also because of the ways their presence on our campuses is implicated in the political tensions around immigration in the United States. When immigration debates traffic in reductive binaries of the good, appropriate, virtuous migrant striving for the promises of US exceptionalism, on the one hand, and the treacherous, criminal and illegal migrant exploiting an all-too-benevolent immigration system on the other, the student-migrant, understood to be migrating for educational opportunities they receive as part of a commodified exchange, is typically idealized as the former. The migrant youth arriving on student visas in large numbers from places like India are especially positioned to be seen as the desirable migrant because of how their paths resonate with long-existing tropes of Asians as more ambitious, hard-working, and more naturally or culturally inclined for educational and economic success. But in my work, I argue that in moments of political and economic crisis, such clear divisions between the innocuous and the risky migrant become blurred, and the student-migrant is revealed as a much more ambivalent figure. This ambivalent positioning thrusts the figure of the foreign student into the politically charged spotlight in various conjunctures of crisis and nationalist angst, marking this migrant subject as a racialized threat to the national order.

One such significant conjuncture was the inception of the “War on Terror” following the September 11, 2001 attacks, which had enduring consequences for the foreign student presence on American campuses. The War on Terror not only heralded an era of endless, devastating military invasions and occupations abroad; it also involved a massive restructuring of national state agencies that enabled the consolidation of mass surveillance and deepened the link between transnational migration and the U.S. carceral state. As a feature of this restructuring, restrictive, stringent measures to track and surveil foreign students on campuses and in the U.S. were an important development. The justification for this scrutiny of the figure of the educational migrant was tied to the discovery that some of the 9/11 hijackers had been issued student visas or had used educational reasons to gain entry in the U.S., thus suggesting how the student visa system was inefficient, ineffective, and putting the nation in danger. In the context of post-9/11 racial profiling and racially motivated acts of violence, student-migrants who could be constructed racially as potential terrorist-threats (including Arabs, Muslims, South Asians, and other so-called “Muslim-looking” individuals) were marked as ambivalent, suspicious figures on our campuses, drawing institutions of higher education into the nationalist narratives of border security. For the student-migrants discussed in Indebted Mobilities, the post-9/11 surveillance state was crucial to their moral calculus and racialized becoming in the era of neoliberal globalization, illuminating how the circuits of educational migration specifically linking South Asia and the United States are caught up in the exigencies and contradictions of nation- and empire-building projects and pointing to the need to read these young people’s ambivalent positioning through the nexus of geopolitical interests, conjunctural crisis, and racial politics.

The politicized targeting of foreign students and their place in the tussles around the future of U.S. higher education we are witnessing in the current moment should be situated in relation to some of the considerations I have noted above. For one, the framing of international students as mere economic subjects essential to revenue-generation schemes, which contributes to a problematic disregard of the actual differences that exist within the transnational class formations of this migrant population, easily dovetails with the nativistic scapegoating of overseas students in the face of broader economic and political turmoil in the U.S.

Most recently, President Donald Trump’s own vacillating on whether or not to severely restrict the issuance of F-1 (student) and H-1B (work) visas (Gooding, 2025; Licon and Tang, 2025), two categories that are often perceived as synonymous with a larger arrival of Asian foreign nationals, led to a backlash within his own base that revealed the xenophobic resentment of international students. During a televised interview with Fox News, Trump made a stunning reversal in his earlier stance on the issue, arguing that not only would restricting international student enrollments spell disaster financially for universities across the country, but that the U.S. simply did not have the home-grown talent necessary to strengthen the U.S. economy (Trump, 2025). Online discourse condemned the change in Trump’s position as a grave betrayal of his promises to put “America First,” insisting that it both impacts the availability of jobs for Americans, as well as encourages a saturated foreign presence on American campuses where “talent” is meant to get nurtured. The online exchange around the Trump interview also reflected the widespread misinformation that exists about the relationship between the foreign student and the campus economy. Namely, there appeared to be not only an overall rage that these “foreigners” were taking up seats in university classrooms, but that they also must be taking scholarships and other funding opportunities away from American students who are increasingly unable to afford a college education (Stonetoss, 2025), reflecting the widely held assumption that these students are highly privileged foreigners displacing the U.S.’s own more deserving citizens.

Indicative of how racialized migrants are often scapegoated in times of political and economic crisis of U.S. global hegemonic power, the Asian foreign student has come to play the bogeyman in white nationalist anxieties linking immigration, the US economy, and higher learning. Such nativistic resentment is consistent with the broader right-wing attacks on higher education that have escalated recently. Higher education as the main target for the culture wars that have ensued has had a strong ally and enforcer in the second Trump administration, which has been using executive actions to bend institutional decision-making to the will of the administration’s agenda. This has included the threat (and in some cases, the actual implementation) of massive federal funding cuts. Importantly, the right-wing government’s show of force has helped serve as a cover for universities to carry out acts of austerity and repression that could be argued were in their institutional interest all along. For one, campuses have gradually been turning their attention to redefining policies in ways that weaken the conditions for academic freedom and campus dissent, something that has been amplified in the wake of the egregious, violent crackdown on the 2024 Palestinian solidarity encampments and protests (Blinder, 2025; Charbonneau, 2026; Greenfield, 2026). For another, institutions of higher education have been using the broader political tensions caused by the Trump administration to move forward with slashing academic programming and curricula that apparently don’t meet the muster of economic value; unsurprisingly, many of the programs that are impacted tend to have a humanistic and critical edge to them (Otterman, 2026; Robbin and Gomez, 2025).

These developments serve as the backdrop for the recent targeting of foreign students. Existing at the intersection of the Right’s attacks on liberal campuses and on immigration, student-migrants are a valuable target but one that is marked in contradictory ways because of their economic import. In fact, the shifts in Trump’s rhetoric—from the promise to return to an isolationist and unapologetically White America to the realization of and allusion to how U.S. economic, political, and military might are dependent on [racialized] foreign talent and labor—are not simply the inexplicable whims of a megalomaniac madman; it is a central tension in the history of U.S. migration policy. The xenophobia directed at the Asian foreign student is a familiar reaction to the long-standing contradictions and angst that underlie the liberal capitalist logic of the U.S. nation-building project. Whatis noteworthy is that as the rhetorical and policy maneuvers that surface to manage these contradictions are worked out on student-migrants, it reveals how the university is a pertinent node in the U.S. migration policy regime; indeed, the university being entangled in and understood as a site of broader nativistic battles today is not all that unexpected or unprecedented.

To this point, another key consideration is how the consolidation of the post-9/11 surveillance apparatus directly set the stage for the current moment of political targeting and repression of international students and their political activities. As suggested, the ambivalent positioning of racialized student-migrants, at times, constructs them as a threat to state interests; this is especially true when their political alignments unfold in ways that are unexpected and deemed inappropriate. Throughout the history of educational migration to the United States, students from other parts of the world, particularly from the Global South, have gotten involved in the cultures of dissent that have been partly nurtured on American campuses, participating in anti-colonial struggles and internationalist social movements that challenged the repressive and imperialist campaigns of the U.S. and other nations (Shannon, 2017; Thomas, 2019). Overseas students’ involvement in such acts of resistance meant risking their educational standing, migration status, and their bodies. Most recently, foreign students took these kinds of risks protesting alongside American students as part of the global Palestinian solidarity movement. In 2024, thousands of students got involved in the pro-Palestine encampments that spread across campuses to demand a halt to U.S. complicity in the genocidal violence and ethnic cleansing campaigns driven by Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism. In response, under both the Biden and the Trump administrations, and facilitated by university leadership, this student resistance was criminalized using the full force of state violence. The migration status of foreign students who were involved in the protests made them an especially easy, vulnerable target. The 2025 detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a former international student, is a telling instance of how the U.S. migration policy regime is mobilized, even in contradictory ways, to ensnare the disruptive, dissenting foreign student. While Khalil was initially admitted on a student visa to study at Columbia University, he had already been granted permanent residency or “green card” status by the time ICE agents arrived at his doorstep claiming to have revoked his student visa (Svrluga, 2025). When informed of this status change, the agents detained him anyway. Now, Khalil is fighting in the courts to keep his green card and prevent his deportation from the United States (Bustillo and Johnson, 2026). Such cases exemplify how ICE is systematically using immigration law and the extensive powers sanctioned by post-9/11 surveillance measures to intervene by identifying, threatening, detaining, or deporting student-migrants who dared to engage in acts of protest on U.S. university campuses (Jeyaretnam, 2025).

The transnational lives of student-migrants entangled in the migratory circuits of racial capitalism are, and always have been, implicated in the geopolitical struggles and crises of critical political and historical conjunctures. Ethnographic analyses that uncover the particular material and affective conditions of these migrant subjects’ everyday lives produced within such conjunctures can contribute to deepening our understanding of those implications and help unsettle the distorted assumptions made about their presence on our campus that are directly rendering them vulnerable to state-sanctioned scapegoating and violences.

To end, I would like to return to the idea of debt. What if, as I ask in Indebted Mobilities, we were to collectively re-think a notion of indebtedness—of what is owed in this life—that is not driven by a market logic? Graeber, in his own work, pointed to the various kinds of already-existing, mundane practices of obligation to and care for one another embedded in everyday life that are not processed through a paradigm of exchange. Meanwhile, in The Undercommons, Harney and Moten (2013) reflect on the promise of “bad debt”—a refuge of mutual, social dwelling in which we may perpetually owe, but payment is never possible. It is here, Harney and Moten insist, where true study and solidarity can meaningfully thrive. As they write, “Justice is only possible where debt never obliges, never demands, never equals credit, payment, payback. Justice is possible only where it is never expected, in the refuge of bad debt, in the fugitive public of strangers and not of communities, of undercommons and not neighborhoods, among those who have been there all along from somewhere” (p. 26).

The 2024 Palestinian solidarity protests ignited on our campuses, which also included the courageous involvement of student-migrants, offer an invaluable example of thinking indebtedness differently as Graeber, Moten, and Harney move us to do. Students from across campuses and legal status stepping out of the bounds of the institutional classroom and into makeshift encampments, raising their voices, sharing food and knowledge, taking turns resting and protecting one another, and putting their bodies on the line in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle gesture to a praxis of being in each other’s (bad) debt that was not dictated by a market logic, but through other, already-existing and re-imagined ways of owing each other and our collective futures.

For those of us engaged in the endeavor of higher education but in ways that are mired in the complicities of the institutional violence of American campuses, what are we moved to reconsider through such notions of indebtedness? For instance, what do we, as scholars and educators, owe the people of the Global South that have been and continue to be at the receiving ends of U.S.-led political, economic, and military destruction, which is fundamentally facilitated by our institutions? What do we owe the people of Palestine? Of Yemen? Of Venezuela? Of Iran? What is owed to the poor and disenfranchised in our universities’ own surrounding communities? In a time of aggressive austerity and growing repression on our campuses, such questions are tied to a probing of whether we can regard spaces of higher learning as having value beyond being, first and foremost, an economic good. Can we reimagine higher learning through a consideration of what we owe one another that will allow us to study and create and exist together differently than the violences of late-stage capitalism allow?

As the global neoliberal project of higher education today brings students from other parts of the world to our campuses, some arriving in substantial numbers from places like India and China, we need to include student-migrants in this re-envisioning. They are critical to the conditions of being in our institutions. Yet, neglecting to consider this significance in more robust ways not only contributes to our own pedagogical inadequacies in the classroom; it also renders these students vulnerable to the political volatility rocking the very foundation of U.S. higher education today. Attending to their experiences with restrictive migration policies, racial exclusion, surveillance, exploitative labor conditions, and the shackles of student debt and precarious futures offer nodes of connection that could help draw these young people, who overwhelmingly fill seats in technical fields that are the engine of US hegemonic power, into collective acts of political study, protest, mutual care, and solidarity in times of ever-expanding austerity, repression, and imperialism. In a sense, student-migrants’ arrival to and presence at our institutions are often perceived as embodying the human face of the “global” on our campuses. I believe, then, that the acts of risk-taking and internationalist solidarity that some of the student-migrants enacted in the most recent protests for Palestine, a legacy of resistance they continue from their predecessors, are a glimpse into what a more just notion of globality is made possible through them—one that looks and acts across the violent borders of this world and reimagines what we owe one another.

References

Blinder, A. (2025, April 9). How Universities are Responding to Trump. New York Times.https://www.nytimes.com/article/trump-university-college.html

Bustillo, X., & C. Johnson. (2026). He was Detained for 104 Days. A Year Later, He’s Still Fighting for the Right to Free Speech. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2026/03/10/nx-s1-5716101/mahmoud-khalil-legal-fight

Charbonneau, L. (2026, March 18). Academic Freedom in US Under Threat: Book Bans, Distorted Curricula and Crackdowns on College Campus Protests. Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/03/18/academic-freedom-in-the-us-under-threat

Department of Homeland Security. (2026, July 16). Trump Administration Issues Final Rule to End Foreign student Visa Abuse [Press Release]. https://www.dhs.gov/news/2026/07/16/trump-administration-issues-final-rule-end-foreign-student-visa-abuse

Gooding, D. (2025, October 20). New H-1B Fee Change: Trump Admin Reveals How to Pay and Who’s Exempt. Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/h-1b-visa-change-update-fee-trump-immigration-10909882

Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House.

Greenfield, N. (2026, January 16). Catastrophic Year for US Academic Freedom and Autonomy. University World News. https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20260116140044901

Harney, S., & F. Moten, F. (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Minor Compositions.

Jeyaretnam, M. (2025, April 1). These are the Students Targeted by Trump’s Immigration Enforcement Over Campus Activism. Time. https://time.com/7272060/international-students-targeted-trump-ice-detention-deport-campus-palestinian-activism/

Licon, A.G., & D. Tang. (2025, August 26). Trump Saying 600,000 Chinese Students Could Come to the US Draws MAGA Backlash. The Associated Press. https://apnews.com/article/chinese-student-visas-trump-maga-dce4e064ea61a4df090865668ca48cde

Otterman, S. (2026, April 3). Syracuse Drops 84 Majors Including Classics, Ceramics and Italian. The New York Times.https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/01/nyregion/syracuse-university-degrees-eliminated.html

Robbin, A., & S. Gomez (2025, November 26). University to Cut or Pause 23 Programs Next Fall Amid Restructuring. New School Free Press. https://www.newschoolfreepress.com/2025/11/26/university-to-cut-or-pause-25-programs-next-fall-amid-restructuring/

Susan Thomas is the author of Indebted Mobilities: Indian Youth, Migration, and the Internationalizing University. University of Chicago Press, 2024. She is Associate Professor of Cultural Foundations of Education and a Senior Research Associate with the South Asia Center at Syracuse University.

September 8, 2026

Joshua D. Pilzer, Listening to Korean Victims of the Atomic Bombs: Prospects for the International People’s Tribunal on the 1945 US Atomic Bombings (November 13-15, 2026)

Since 2010 I have been listening to first and second-generation Korean victims of the atomic bomb and documenting their expressive lives. In November 2026 many of the victims whom I work with will host an International People’s Tribunal on the 1945 US Atomic Bombings, for the purposes of “examin(ing) the legal responsibility of the United States government for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. People’s tribunals, which originate in the 1960s, ³. are important interventions in the global practice of law: they attempt to make human beings, not state or corporate actors, the central focus and the executive authority of law. With the prospect of the International People’s Tribunal on the atomic bombings in view, in this essay I offer some suggestions about how to listen, how to hear as fully as possible the people who are and must remain the central focus and concern of the People’s Tribunal.

In March of 2026, I took part in an Association for Asian Studies conference panel on “People Power: Grassroots Legal Campaigns against Intra- and Inter-state Violence in the Aftermath of WWII and the Cold War,” organized by Lin Li of Kenyon College. The panel concerned two current grassroots legal efforts. The first of these is the current lawsuit in which South Korean women accuse the US military of illegal abuse, confinement, and medical treatment in the sex work network surrounding American military bases in South Korea. The second legal movement we were to discuss was the International People’s Tribunal on the US Atomic Bombings. I prepared my remarks by speaking with one of my key interlocutors, Han Jeongsun, by telephone. Han Jeongsun is one of the main plaintiffs in the People’s Tribunal, a second-generation victim of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and head of the Korean Society for Second Generation Atomic Bomb Survivors. I asked her about her reasons for participating in the People’s Tribunal.

“The most important reason is to let people know that we, as victims, exist,” she told me. When the atomic bombs fell on Japan in 1945 there were about 70,000 Koreans in Hiroshima and 30,000 in Nagasaki. Koreans had been recruited from underdeveloped parts of Japanese colonial Korea to do many of the most dangerous jobs involved in the construction of the Japanese empire and its military industrial complex; and the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Koreans had largely been brought to Japan for munitions labor. About half of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Koreans died in the bombings; the rest and their descendants have lived out their lives with injury, illness, and developmental disabilities arising from the experience of the bombing and the legacy of radiation exposure.

It is convenient for the US to ignore the existence of the Korean victims of the atomic bombs, because they are unquestionably innocent victims who cannot be cast as aggressors. It is convenient for Japan to hush up Korean victims, as it helps consolidate the Japanese monopoly on nuclear victimization, part of the post-war sleight-of-hand by which Japan transformed itself from an aggressor nation to a victimized people (see Yoneyama 1999). Even in South Korea, where the atomic bomb has been enshrined in history as an agent of Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonialism, historical consciousness has been reluctant to acknowledge its Korean victims. All of these forces of forgetting are why Han Jeongsun insisted first and foremost that the US and the international community recognize victims’ existence.

She told me of her hopes that the People’s Tribunal will make that possible. “When we said we were going to the US…there’s an expression you probably know. People told us that it will be like ‘hitting a boulder with an egg.’” They told her it would be useless. “But,” she went on, “I don’t think of it that way. Thinking of the victims, especially the second-generation radiation sufferers, and how they have to leave the world in this terrible pain, it’s awful. That feeling of being ill-used… What we’ve got is not a chicken egg, it’s a quail’s egg. It’s so much smaller. We throw it to express these awful feelings, although it likely won’t break the stone. But we want to leave behind even a trace. And in this way victims might be able to relieve their hearts of their burdens just a little. And we want to ask people to understand the depth of these horrible feelings. We want to shout to demand such understanding. We want people to see our will to strike the stone with our pain. And in this way we want to communicate to Americans that even now there are people suffering as the result of the use of nuclear weapons.”

The atomic bomb, in the global imagination, conjures up images of mushroom clouds and horrible injury and destruction. If you have looked into the matter, you may have read something about it, perhaps starting with John Hersey’s astounding Hiroshima. The global imagination about the atomic bombs is largely silent, which means it is devoid of living people. It has been framed as a historical event, not the living legacy that it is, which continues to harm countless people. One way of acknowledging these people is to listen—to actually listen—to victims. The International People’s Tribunal, a remarkable product of the community of Korean bomb victims’ grassroots activism, is the best opportunity for the international community to do so yet.

In my monograph Quietude: A Musical Anthropology of ‘Korea’s Hiroshima’ (2022), readers encounter and listen to several victims at length, hearing their voices on the book’s website. Theirs are practically inconceivable stories of suffering and endurance, as double victims of the Japanese colonial exploitation of Koreans and the indiscriminate atomic bombing of Asian civilians by the United States. For all their injury and fragility, their voices have a strength that is powerful beyond the words that human voices are often reduced to, in scholarship, in thought, and in legal proceedings.

Han Jeongsun is a second-generation victim of the bomb because her parents were in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing. Her mother was pregnant with her older brother, who died soon after they relocated to Korea at the end of the war. All of her siblings have suffered from the intergenerational transfer of illness and disability that is the legacy of the atomic bombing and its radiation. Her youngest sibling lost all of his teeth as a child. Han Jeongsun herself suffers from avascular necrosis, a degenerative bone disease that has required her to have twelve surgeries for knee replacement. Her son suffers from cerebral palsy and, as she puts it, “lives lying down.”

There is much to be learned from listening to Han Jeongsun’s voice, and her often spoken, sometimes sung narration of her experiences. In my book, I investigate the remarkable ways that she draws on popular cultural resources in her effort of survival and in her activist speech—in official statements, testimonies, and casual talk. Through sung and spoken quotation she weaves songs into tapestry-like narratives of the experiences of second-generation victims of the atomic bomb. In so doing, she connects the experiences of profoundly marginalized and forgotten Korean atomic bomb victims with core metaphors of mainstream popular culture, making profoundly compelling claims to social membership and a plea for recognition.

Han Jeongsun does this work of connection utilizing myriad songs of struggle from the 20^th century genre of Korean ballads known as teuroteu, an abbreviated Koreanization of ‘foxtrot.’ ‘Trot’ originates in the Japanese colonial period and is perhaps the genre that most painfully and ambivalently expresses the sorrows of Korean modernity. She borrows the many references to walking as a metaphor for struggle found in Korean popular song in order to relate this core metaphor to her literal experiences of difficulty walking. Yu Jina’s 2009 “Gochu” (Hot Pepper), with its references to the seemingly endless chains of mountain passes that dot the Korean landscape, Shin Yu’s 2008 “Jam janeun gongju” (Sleeping Princess), which invokes the ‘world road’ (sesang-gil) one walks in life, and “Queen of Elegy” Yi Mi-ja’s 1968 “Yeojaui ilsaeng” (Woman’s Life), which refers to the “weary life-road” (godalpeun insaeng-gil), are just some of the references to walking that make appearances in her narratives. Han Jeongsun may sing a verse, or quote a text for support, or slip in a phrase from a song text so subtly that only people deeply familiar with the ‘trot’ genre would even know it was there.

Han Jeongsun’s knack for making these connections and for encapsulating experience in speech are just two aspects of her eloquence, which has assured her central place in the movement. Her narration of the second-generation experience has had subtle and enduring effects on the activism and media coverage surrounding Korean first and second-generation bomb victims. Her poetry of walking as struggle, for instance, surfaces across the activist discourse of the second-generation movement (Pilzer 2022: 170). And all of this eloquent activism has culminated in her central role in the upcoming International People’s Tribunal.

As we concluded our telephone call Han Jeongsun told me that she and Shim Jintae, a first-generation victim of the bombing of Hiroshima and director of the Hapcheon Branch of the Korean Atomic Bomb Victims Association, were planning to visit the US a few months later for a speaking tour, in order to spread the word about the tribunal. So in May 2026 I travelled to the UN to hear her and Shim Jintae speak at a side event held during the 11th Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The panel was put on by SPARK, Solidarity for Peace and Reunification of Korea, an activist organization founded in 1994 to fight for a more equable relationship between the US and Korea, and to pursue peace, disarmament, and Korean reunification.

Shim Jintae spoke first. He told us briefly about his childhood in Hiroshima, before giving a long and reasoned indictment of the US for its failure to acknowledge that the atomic bombings were war crimes. “How can there be victims without aggressors?” he asked. “How, if the US refuses to accept responsibility for the 1945 atomic bombings how do we hold accountable any nation that seeks to use nuclear weapons today?”

Han Jeongsun presented next, speaking forcefully and clearly, clearly feeling the gravity of the situation. This was not quite the place for her rich cultural embroidery, but for succinct, unequivocal and articulate expression of the situation of Korean second-generation victims, and of her suffering and anger. She read from a text she had written. She described her family’s suffering due to the bomb, and the onset of her avascular necrosis. She described being unable to walk, and how the floor of her apartment was covered in blood as she used her torn hands to move about. She spoke of her activism on behalf of second-generation victims. She voiced her frustration about the refusal of the United States to offer apology or compensation to the victims of the atomic bombings of Japan. She concluded by expressing her hopes for the International People’s Tribunal.

Han Jeongsun’s speech was filled with the sort of epigrammatic brilliance that has made her so important to the movement. She described how the damage of nuclear radiation passes down mercilessly through the generations. “In mybody, the war rages endlessly,” she said. The translation of this speech on the webpage of the International People’s Tribunal, which records her making the statement at an event in March 2025, omits that last, epigrammatic line,⁴ perhaps because she added it later. Whatever the reason, there is a richness missing from the written transcript that leads me to suspect that the entextualization of thought and speech here does more than just flatten both into text; its flattening effect extends to the content of expression as well. Han Jeongsun’s speech was originally text, although it was written to be read aloud and listened to. A written transcript of a read speech thus endures two phases of entextualization, such that few traces of the sound and the sounding body remain. And yet the body, as Han Jeongsun has told us, is the locus of victimization.

Listening to victims’ voices allows for hearing that does not erase, in the entextualization of experience, the human bodies that bear the legacy of the bombs. To listen in this way, it is essential to pay attention to what they say and how they say it as if these two aspects of expression were of equal importance. This means that one can listen to half the story without knowing the languages in which victims are speaking. It is also essential to listen beyond official contexts, to encounter the broad range of expressive practices that constitute the expressive ecology of victims as activists and witnesses to experience.

Victims like Han Jeongsun and Shim Jintae imbue their speech with an unimaginable strength. They offer their voices, phrases, statements, and narrative tapestries to listeners, such that they might educate and energize the movement on behalf of justice for the victims and a nuclear-free world. These voices and their messages are things listeners can learn from; but they are also tools we can all use in pursuit of human flourishing.

References Cited:

Hersey, John. 1946. Hiroshima. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

International People’s Tribunal on 1945 US Atomic Bombings. 2026. “Leaflet: The International People’s Tribunal to hold the US accountable for dropping A-bombs.” Online document, https://abombtribunal.campaignus.me.

Pilzer, Joshua D. 2022. Quietude: A Musical Anthropology of “Korea’s Hiroshima.” New York: Oxford University Press.

Simm, Gabrielle, and Andrew Byrnes. 2013. “International People’s Tribunals in Asia: Political Theatre, Juridical Farce, or Meaningful Intervention?” Asian Journal of International Law 4: 103-24.

Yoneyama, Lisa. 1999. Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Joshua D. Pilzer is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Faculty of Music, and an affiliate faculty of the Centre for the Study of Korea at the University of Toronto.

September 3, 2026

Erin Huang reviews Arnika Fuhrmann, In the Mood for Texture: The Revival of Bangkok as a Chinese City

Fuhrmann, Arnika. In the Mood for Texture: The Revival of Bangkok as a Chinese City. Duke University Press, 2026.

What does it mean to trace and historicize Bangkok as a “Chinese” city? Written at a time when Chinese Thai connections—rooted in nineteenth-century migration and colonial modernity—are subject to ruinous decay and waves of revival under the dual pressures of capitalist urban development and the geopolitical influence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Arnika Fuhrmann’s In the Mood for Texture: The Revival of Bangkok as a Chinese City is a timely and visionary remapping of Chinese Thai history that puts “China,” “Southeast Asia,” and the conventional definitions of “regionalism” in flux.

Based on an original archive—ranging from the Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai’s utilization of Bangkok’s Chinese quarters in In the Mood for Love in Part I, to a tour of Bangkok’s hospitality venues that revive the aesthetics of colonial modernity in Part II, and a deft selection of contemporary Thai literature and films in Part III—Fuhrmann narrates a “dis-appearing” spatial history of Bangkok shaped by Chinese migration to Thailand. Following postcolonial studies scholar Ackbar Abbas’s influential theorization of Hong Kong as a “space of dis-appearance”—by which he means not the literal disappearance of Hong Kong culture at the cusp of the 1997 Handover, but rather a “negative hallucination,” or failing to recognize what is already there—Fuhrmann extends the inquiries into cultural identities under the conditions of (old and new) colonialism and imperialism in Hong Kong to Bangkok and Southeast Asia.

Retracing a modern transnationalism and urban cosmopolitanism that connected East Asia and Southeast Asia through port cities such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Bangkok, the book challenges the conventional method of area studies that divides cultures along the borderlines of modern nation-states. By asking what kinds of histories would be revealed if one followed the transregional network of (semi-)colonial port cities, one of the answers the book provides is the emergence of a “transregional personhood”—often gendered as “female”—that not only brings to light the process of female commodification and fetishization, but also the irreducible excesses of “transregional femininity” as a site for embodying a transnational and potentially oppositional plurality across borders.

Historicizing and theorizing the hypervisibility of “transregional femininity” as it appears in films, hospitality venues, and the transformation of Bangkok through urban development and financial capital, In the Mood for Texture is an unconventional gender history focused on “transregional Chinese femininity” as the interplay between reality and fantasy. Tracking the palimpsestic evolution of the “Modern Girl” from 1930s Shanghai, the fashion show of women’s cheongsam in Wong Kar-wai’s depiction of 1960s Hong Kong in In the Mood for Love, and the revival of early twentieth-century aesthetics of “colonial modernity” in Bangkok’s contemporary hospitality venues, the book argues that “femininity” can no longer be understood solely as a site of “recoding”—a concept introduced by historian Tani Barlow to describe the process of redefining “femininity” according to the demands of the superstructure. Rather, “femininity” needs also to be read for its multilayered excesses that are equipped with the potential to disrupt dominant assumptions about ethnicity and gender.

In Fuhrmann’s gender history, the socio-cultural fantasies of a “Chinese femininity” in “Southeast Asia”— “ornamentalized” according to the aesthetics and fashions of (semi-)colonial Asian port cities—complicate and extend the conventional approach to “orientalism” (premised on the power relations between the East and the West) and “self-orientalism” (that Rey Chow provocatively theorizes as the East’s return of the West’s gaze). Often mediated through gendered and racialized bodies, orientalism has created an array of representations of what race studies scholar Anne Cheng describes as “Asiatic femininity,” or “yellow femininity.” Parsing orientalism as the West’s feminizing invention of the “Orient” as ornaments, porcelain, and silk—in other words, thing-like objects—Cheng theorizes “yellow femininity” as synthetic personhood in a long genealogy of “not-yet or no-longer subjecthood” that is entangled in the history of thingness and objectification. Whereas Cheng’s Ornamentalism contends with power relations between the East and the West, In the Mood for Texture shifts focus to inter-Asia relations and the power dynamics between Southeast Asia and the newly expansionist PRC.

The book boldly theorizes a “trans-Asia,” or “trans-regional” Asian femininity that has become a site of contest between neoliberal capitalism and its dissents. As Fuhrmann argues, the revival of a transregional Chinese femininity in Thailand can be mapped along a spectrum of visibility bracketed by neoliberal commodification and consumer desires on the one hand, and an experimental platform of social plurality on the other. Through the transcendent and transgressive positionality of social plurality—creating a transregional personhood that “detemporalizes and deterritorializes identity” (157)—Fuhrmann expands the focus on femininity to unpack a range of trans-Asia socio-cultural phenomena that otherwise are not legible in a nation-centered framework.

To contextualize the emergence of trans-Asia imaginaries, the book begins with post-Handover Hong Kong cinema and Wong Kar-wai’s frenzied film In the Mood for Love (2000), where Hong Kong is connected to parts of Southeast Asia—Thailand, Cambodia, and Singapore—through the ruins of (semi-)colonialism and imperialism, or what Ann Laura Stoler calls “imperial debris.” Central to the book’s argument is the complexity of the “nostalgia” for colonial modernity that reanimates Southeast and East Asia as an integrated cultural and trading network. This nostalgia cannot be simply dismissed as neoliberal commodification. Rather, the book interprets the desire for alternative temporalities and a different spatial configuration for understanding Southeast Asia as a region as the result of an accumulation of discontents toward notions of “Chineseness” that become homogenized under the PRC’s national policies.

Methodologically, rather than combing through population statistics, Fuhrmann’s book centrally highlights “texture”—architecture, design, and women’s fashion—as the primary lens of sensing, feeling, and preserving history. Citing Eve Sedgwick, Fuhrmann highlights the haptic quality of texture—through which touch is performed visually, acoustically, or by other multi-sensorial extensions—as a channel of intersubjective communication and perception. Implicit in her methodology is the importance of the histories and memories that things, objects, and the built environments hold, for which the human subject only plays the agent of activation. The focus on “texture” and “touch” also experiments with assembling racial histories through the (re)built environments—e.g., Bangkok’s 1880s Customs House, Chinatown, and Lhong 1919—by asking how space produced lived histories, habitats, and gendered and racialized embodiments and relationalities that are important primary materials in compiling the history of racial formation. At a moment when Bangkok becomes a literal “city of disappearance” due to the speed of urban expansion, In the Mood for Texture is on the one hand a crucial archive that preserves the city’s Chinese pasts, and on the other hand, it is an “archaeology of the future,” as each chapter skillfully unpacks the desires and wishes for a Chinese Thai futurity that transcends the ethos of both the PRC and populist-authoritarian or military-led Thailand.

Chapter one, “City Connectivities,” locates the “mood for textures” by reconfiguring the link between Shanghai and Hong Kong; in tracing the aesthetics of colonial modernities in Bangkok, the chapter engages a close examination of the convergence of the three cities’ in Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love. Chapter 2 excavates Wong’s quest for the “textures” of a trans-Asia modernity in Southeast Asia through the film’s iconic displays of women’s cheongsams (qipao), cosmopolitan interiors, and an urban environment shaped by international trade. Here, Fuhrmann expands her research to Bangkok’s hospitality venues (hotels, bars, coffee shops) to tease out the far-reaching influence of the “Wong aesthetics” beyond this single film. Such remapping not only preserves the dis-appearing Chinese Thai histories in the city, as seen in the ruination and revival of historical sites such as the Customs House. More importantly, Fuhrmann illustrates—through interviews, textual analyses, and fieldwork—the limitations of reading In the Mood for Love and its atmospheric and architectural influence as the commodification of nostalgia. Rather, Wong’s film can be read as one iteration of an emergent sentiment for transregional connections that go beyond modern nationalism. Fuhrmann writes, “Viewing In the Mood for Love…. generates an understanding of Bangkok, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and other former treaty port cities as in principle united not only as Chinese locations but also as territories whose inhabitants still desire a different regional imaginary than one that succumbs to contemporary realpolitik” (68).

Whereas Part I explores the circulation and revival of the aesthetics of colonial modernities across three “Chinese” cities, Part II contours the history of Bangkok as a Chinese city. Illustrating the changing perception of the “Chinese”—from a migrant population of laborers that endured anti-Chinese policies to a newly desirable ethnic identity—Fuhrmann draws out dialect cultures and neighborhood projects meant to distinguish and preserve the remnants of Chinese Thai migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Zeroing in on Bangkok’s vanishing Chinatown, Chapter 3 touches on key sites of architecture, such as the Chinatown Gate, the Yaowarat Heritage Center, and the Berlin Museum, that play prominent roles in mediating Chinese history in Thailand. Cautioning against the conflation of Chinese Thai history and the PRC’s narrative of modern history, the chapter visits Chinese heritage sites such as Lhong 1919 that invoke the early twentieth-century treaty port culture to tease out the complex sensory landscape of revival, from commodification to cultural preservation.

Shifting focus to a transgenerational memory that contests the official Thai narratives of Chinese migration (mediated through the Yaowarat Heritage Center), Chapter 4 centers on the 2019 film Happy Old Year, or How to Dump(directed by Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit). By pairing the film with historical sites in the city that are part of an urban revival movement, including the FooJohn Building, As Is Café, and Mother Roaster, Fuhrmann teases out a family’s nuanced struggles with managing the spatial memories of being Chinese in Bangkok. In the film, the protagonist Jean—a Sweden-trained architect undertaking a renovation project on her family’s cluttered music school—finds her minimalist style coming into conflict with the family house’s transgenerational histories and Bangkok’s Chinese pasts. Pairing two nearly forgotten race riots with revived hospitality sites near the riot scenes—the 1945 Yaowarat and 1974 Phlapphla Chai incidents—the chapter recalls the city’s anti-Chinese tenor and the politics of remembering and forgetting through the film’s theme of generational memories.

Extending the politics of remembering and reviving Bangkok’s Chinese history, Part III is comprised of two chapters that rethink “region” from the vantage point of “Southeast Asia.” Featuring the work of the Thai novelist Veeraporn Nitiprapha, such as Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat (originally published in Thai in 2016), Chapter 5 is a soft rebuttal of the framework of “Chinese diaspora” that conventionally centers China as the primary site of origin and belonging. In the novelist’s chronicle of a Chinese Thai family history spanning three generations who experienced China’s Cultural Revolution transnationally, “China” is far from a space of homecoming. Through the novel’s focus on transregional displacement, Southeast Asia serves as a vantage point for narrating the “decentering” of China.

Ending the book with the 2017 heist thriller film Bad Genius (directed by Nattawut Poonpiriya), Chapter 6 expands the critique of “Chinese diaspora” with ruminations on the applicability of the “Sinophone”—the study of Sinitic languages and cultures around the world—as a framework for Chinese Thai histories of Southeast Asia. Through the film’s main female protagonist Lynn, a high school student with an implied Chinese heritage who orchestrates a multinational cheating operation, Fuhrmann highlights the limitations of the Sinophone, as the chapter thinks through a “Chineseness without (much) Chinese language.” In comparison to the textual readings in Part I and the architectural readings in Part II, Part III’s selection of contemporary Thai literature and film homes in on the articulations of Chinese Thai perspectives that challenge “nation” and “language” as the primary sites of identity formation.

Shaped by feminist historian Tani Barlow’s framework of colonial modernity and the history of “femininity” as a site of social inscription, In the Mood for Texture is at heart a gender history of the feminine mediation of Chineseness in Thailand. Although “femininity” figures prominently as the cultural site where concepts of “Chineseness,” “transnationality,” “plurality,” and “difference” are negotiated and mediated—producing a “trans-Asianness” that pushes back against China-centrism and Southeast Asian nationalism—the book could draw from a more nuanced understanding of the “Sinophone” by recalling the wider range of methodologies of Sinophone studies, such as “minor transnationalism,” “against diaspora,” “transculturation,” and the “creolization of theory.” Emphasizing relational, reciprocal, and intersectional approaches to the historical realities of imperialism and colonialism that de-center the conventional focus on Euro-American empires, Sinophone studies has produced a range of analytical lenses based on the historical and regional specificities of Asia. Put another way, there are more synergies between the book’s careful parsing of a transregional inter-Asia perspective and the Sinophone framework that are better shown than acknowledged.

One example relates to recent interests in Sinophone studies to address the limitation of defining the Sinophone solely through (Sinitic) languages. By locating “Sinophone articulations” in a wide range of disciplines, media, and technologies of expression, new research in Sinophone studies has shown the histories of differences that pluralize “Chineseness” through visual culture, oral history, ethnomusicology, performance, and affect studies. As Fuhrmann’s book provocatively illustrates—through the dis-appearing Chinese quarters of Bangkok and their preservation and revival—the “lived environments,” including architecture, urban rhythm, and infrastructure (such as ports), play a central role in inscribing, creating, and transmitting (old and new) spatial memories and histories across multiple generations. Through Fuhrmann’s elegant reading of contemporary Thai film and literature, Part III congeals the articulation of “transregional Chineseness without China” and a plural personhood not reducible to one location, language, or nationality. The transregional personhood is the result of a long genealogy of transgenerational spatial histories—namely, the haptic memories of transregional Chineseness embedded in the city’s immersive textures. For these reasons, the book offers an important method for illustrating racial history outside a linguistic framework and could be brought into closer dialogue with transmedia Sinophone studies.

In the Mood for Texture pioneers an experiential “psychogeography” of Bangkok—the power of urban environments and geographical locations to shape human behaviors and social norms—as a method of retracing modern regional racial formations. The book opens a new pathway for the study of race in Asia by de-emphasizing dialects, linguistic policies, statistics, education and class, and other conventional means of understanding the history of migration and race. The multiple iterations of “trans-” (transregional and transgenerational) in Chinese Thai history have left behind concrete materialities in the city, requiring different sensing capacities to decode Bangkok as a Chinese city. Thinking through design practices in hospitality venues as well as in film and literature, the book is a nuanced study of howBangkok as a transregional and transgenerational Chinese city is imagined, revived, and lived. As “Chineseness” is incrementally made into a homogenous category under new national policies of the PRC in recent decades, the book attests to a unique iteration of “minor transnationalism”—formed through port cities and the cultures of colonial modernity in Southeast Asia—where the dream for a different Asian cosmopolitanism unfolds.

References

Abbas, Ackbar. Hong Kong: Culture and Politics of Disappearance. University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Barlow, Tani E. “Femininity.” The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, edited by Akira Iriye and Pierre-yves Saunier, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 388-92.

Cheng, Anne Anlin. Ornamentalism. Oxford University Press, 2019.

Chow, Rey. Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Columbia University Press, 1995.

Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu-mei Shih, editors. The Creolization of Theory. Duke University Press, 2011.

Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu-mei Shih, editors. Minor Transnationalism. Duke University Press, 2005.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke University Press, 2003.

Shih, Shu-mei. “Against Diaspora: The Sinophone as Places of Cultural Production.” Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays, edited by Jing Tsu and David Der-wei Wang, Brill, 2010, pp. 29-48.

Shih, Shu-mei. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific. University of California Press, 2007.

Stoler, Ann Laura, editor. Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination. Duke University Press, 2013.

Erin Y. Huang is Associate Professor of Inter-Asia, Sinophone, and gender and sexuality studies in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility. Her current book project, Ocean Worlds: Transpacific Worldmaking Across Sensorial Oceans, is the recipient of a SSHRC Insight Grant (2025-2030), and focuses on American, Chinese, and Taiwanese military and surveillance visual and literary cultures in the Arctic Ocean, the Taiwan Strait, and the South China Sea.

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