Spaces of Creative Resistance

Social Change Projects in Twenty-First-Century East Asia

Edited by Andrea Gevurtz Arai; Foreword by Christopher T. Nelson

Rutgers University Press

Spaces of Creative Resistance: Social Change Projects in Twenty-First-Century East Asia brings together an exciting cross-regional interdisciplinary group of scholars, scholar activists, artists, and others for a collection that addresses the last two decades' hollowing out of social connections, socioeconomic income gaps, and general precarity of life in East Asian societies. Written by authors from China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, each chapter is focused on people making a difference together in socially sustainable ways, particularly in the areas of gender, labor, and environments—both built and natural. These projects all constitute acts of creative resistance to neoliberal development, and each act of creative resistance demonstrates how individuals and communities across East Asia are making new worlds and lifeways in the small and everyday. Taking on larger political and economic forces that affect their lives and communities, each project and group of individuals featured here is focused on making more liveable presents and more possible futures.

Reviews

The force of this volume lies as much in the collection of essays as a whole as it does in the individual arguments; diverse, sometimes uncertain, they present a true politics of the everyday. Above all, it insists on the endurance of particularity—of a potentiality not defined by, or contained by, the seemingly totalizing ubiquity of global capital; these are stories of our time. Thomas Looser, associate professor and chair of East Asian Studies at New York University

Editor

ANDREA GEVURTZ ARAI is a cultural anthropologist and acting assistant professor in The Henry M Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of The Strange Child: Education and the Psychology of Patriotism in Recessionary Japan and the coeditor of Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times and Spaces of Possibility: In, Between, and Beyond Korea and Japan.

CHRISTOPHER T. NELSON is a cultural anthropologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Dancing with the Dead: Memory, Performance, and Everyday Life in Okinawa and the forthcoming When the Bones Speak: The Living, the Dead, and the Sacrifice of Okinawa.

Contents

Foreword by Christopher T. Nelson
Introduction: Shifting Contexts, Creative Responses by Andrea Gevurtz Arai

Section I: Creative Acts of Resistance
1 DiY Sensibilities, Eco-Aesthetics, and Women’s Projects in Post 3.11 Japan by Andrea Gevurtz Arai
2 Ma-eul Sal-i of Korean Young People: Making Spaces for a Different Lifestyle by Hyein Chae
3 Regaining Autonomy at Work in Hong Kong’s “Alternative Communities” by Chor-See Chan
4 “I Want to Lie Flat Like a Dead Fish”: A Form of Young People’s Creative Resistance in 21st- Century China by Jinyue Xu and Yue Wu

Section II: Cultural Spaces and Community Places
5 “I Refuse to Live in a Town Without a Cinema!”: Rebuilding a Cultural Space and Social Infrastructure in Toyooka, Japan by Hidehiko Ishibashi
6 Rebuilding a Vacant Space and Regaining My Place in Kanazawa Japan by Keisuke Sugano
7 706 Youth Space: A Collective Response to Social Issues by Urban Elite Youth in China by Summer Xuan Dai
8 Creative Resistance and Social Isolation in Japan by Yumi Matsubara

Section III: Environments of Creative Resistance
9 The Case of the Yuanli Hi Home: Revitalizing Community and “Gathering” Spaces in Taiwan by Hsiu Fan Lin and Yu Liu
10 The Tale of a Transitional Site for Self-Organized Civic Life in South Korea (Bibil Base) by Yeonjung Ahn
11 Urban Poverty and Spaces of Community Action in Wan-hua, Taipei by Liling Huang and Jeff Hou

Teaching Appendix

Bibliography
Index

Foreword by Christopher T. Nelson vii
Introduction: Shifting Contexts, Creative Responses 1
andrea gevurtz arai
part i: creative acts of resistance
1 DIY Sensibilities, Eco-Aesthetics,
and Women’s
Projects
after
3.11 in Japan 13
andrea gevurtz arai
2 Maeul Sari for Young Korean People:
Making Spaces
for a Different
Lifestyle 24
Hyein Chae
3 Reinventing Faan Gung: Regaining Autonomy at Work
in Hong Kong’s Alternative Communities 43
chor-see
chan
4 “I Want to Lie Flat Like a Dead Fish”: A Form of Young
People’s
Creative Resistance
in Twenty-First-
Century
China 57
jinyue xu and yue wu
part ii: cultural spaces and community places
5 “I Refuse to Live in a Town without a Cinema!”: Rebuilding
a Theater and Cultural Space in Toyooka, Japan 77
hidehiko ishibashi
6 Rebuilding a Vacant Space and Regaining My Place
in Kanazawa, Japan 88
keisuke sugano
7 706 Youth Space: A Collective Response to Social Issues
by Urban Elite Youth in China 102
summer xuan dai
8 Creative Resistance
and Social Isolation in Japan 119
yumi matsubara
part iii: environments of creative resistance
9 The Case of the Yuanli Hi Home: Revitalizing Community
and “Gathering” Spaces in Taiwan 135
hsiu fan lin and yu liu
10 A Transitional Site for Self-Organized
Civic Life in
South Korea
(Bibil Base) 143
yeonjung ahn
11 Urban Poverty and Spaces of Community Action in
Wanhua, Taipei 148
liling huang and jeffrey hou
Teaching Appendix: For the Instructor Thinking of
Adopting This Volume 165
andrea gevurtz arai with miriam timson
Acknowledgments
169
Notes on Contributors 171
Index 000

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