Voiced_and_Voiceless_in_Asia_Zawiszova_Lavicka

in Asia and Voiceless Voiced

Halina Zawiszová, ed. Martin Lavička, ed.

Olomouc Asian Studies

Volume 1

This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund [Sinophone Borderlands – Interaction at the Edges].

Project number: CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000791.

Unauthorized use of this work is a violation of copyright and may establish civil, administrative or criminal liability.

1st edition

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

To view the license terms visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ncnd/4.0/

© edited by Halina Zawiszová, Martin Lavička, 2023

© Palacký University Olomouc, 2023

DOI: 10.5507/ff.23.24462691

ISBN 978-80-244-6269-1 (print)

ISBN 978-80-244-6270-7 (online: iPDF)

Contributors

Annegret Bergmann

University of Tokyo

a.bergmann@icloud.com

Annegret Bergmann is a Research Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, the University of Tokyo, Japan. She studied Japanese Studies, East Asian Art History, and Chinese Studies at Bonn University and Waseda University and obtained her doctorate in Japanese Studies at Trier University. Her research interests include Japanese theater history, Japanese art history, and Japanese cultural politics, focusing on modernity. Her recent publications include “Scenic Beauty – Framing Japanese and European Performing Arts in Landscapes: Scenery by Léonard Foujita” (Art Research, Journal of the Art Research Center, Ritsumeikan University, 2020) and “Impacts of Modernity on Japanese Theater: Actor Ichikawa Sadanji II Between Eastern Tradition and Western Innovation” (Transcultural Intertwinements in East Asian Art and Culture, 1920s–1950s, 2018, co-edited with Jeong-hee Lee-Kalisch).

Pia Eskelinen

University of Turku

pia.eskelinen@hyria.fi

Pia Eskelinen is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Law at the Hyria Education and the University of Turku. Her Ph.D. research focused on rural women’s rights in the Chinese society, particularly land possession. Her latest publications include "Rural Women’s Land Use Rights in China: Acceptance and Enforceability" (Towards Gender Equality in Law: An Analysis of State Failures from a Global Perspective, 2021) and "Back to Family Values: Xi Jinping’s Embracement of Confucianism and its Effect on Chinese Women" (co-authored with Amalia Verdu Sanmartin and Johanna Niemi, Retfærd, 2022). She is currently conducting research on how Xi Jinping’s political discourse affects Chinese society, especially women. She is also interested in the overall equality situation in China and in the ways rural women’s land rights are actualized.

Contributors

Letizia Guarini  Hosei University  guarini.letizia@hosei.ac.jp

Letizia Guarini is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Intercultural Communication of Hosei University, Japan. She received her Ph.D. at Ochanomizu University. Her research examines contemporary Japanese culture and literature from a gender perspective. She has a strong interest in the emergence of new father figures in Japanese society, the father-daughter relationship in contemporary literature, and the representation of childbirth and childcare in works by contemporary women authors. Her recent publications include “Musume wa chichi no shihai kara nogarerareru no ka? Kakuta Mitsuyo no Yūbe no kamisama to Chichi no bōru ni miru chichi musume kankei [Abusive Fathers and Escape Stories: The Father-Daughter Relationship in Kakuta Mitsuyo’s God of the Evening and My Father’s Ball]” (Jendā Kenkyū, no. 23, 2021), “Mothers Who Kill: Motherhood and Loneliness in Mori ni nemuru sakana and Saka no tochū no ie by Kakuta Mitsuyo” (Il Giappone. Studi e Ricerche, vol. 1, 2020), and “An Ustopic Trip to the Country of Amanon: An Analysis of the Father/Daughter Relationship in Kurahashi Yumiko’s Amanonkoku ōkanki” (Orientalia Parthenopea, vol. 19, 2019).

Noriko Hiraishi

University of Tsukuba

hiraishi.noriko.gn@u.tsukuba.ac.jp

Noriko Hiraishi is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Tokyo and was awarded the Japan Comparative Literature Association Prize and the Shimada Kinji Academic Prize in 2013 with Hannon seinen to jogakusei no bungakushi: “Seiyō” o yomikaete [Angst-Ridden Youths and Girl Students in Modern Japan: A Literary Reinterpretation of the West] (2012). In addition to her ongoing interest in European fin-de-siècle literature and modern Japanese literature, her current research includes studies of contemporary Japanese literature and culture, focusing on intercultural dialogues. Her recent publications include “Manga and Fukushima: Subjectivity/Objectivity and Political Messages” ( L’art séquentiel et les catastrophes: Bande dessinée, manga, roman graphique , 2022), “Japanese Sound-Symbolic Words in Global Contexts: From Translation to Hybridization” (F1000Research, 2022), and “Gendai bungaku no kazoku hyōshō ni okeru bunkateki bunmyaku to <Naimen no kyōdōtai>: Shigematsu Kiyoshi ‘Kareraisu’ o megutte [Cultural Context and <Inner Community> in Family Representations in Modern Literature: A Case Study of Kiyoshi Shigematsu’s ‘Curry and Rice’]” (Hikaku Bunka, no. 145, 2021).

Contributors

Kamila Hladíková

Palacký University Olomouc

kamila.hladikova@upol.cz

Kamila Hladíková is an Assistant Professor of Chinese literature at Palacký University Olomouc, the Czech Republic. She studied Sinology at Charles University in Prague and completed her Ph.D. in 2011. In her doctoral thesis, she focused on the representation of Tibet in Chinese and Tibetan literature of the 1980s and examined questions of identity in modern Tibetan short stories (The Exotic Other and Negotiation of Tibetan Self: Representation of Tibet in Chinese and Tibetan Literature of the 1980s, 2013). Her publications include an article on Tibet-related cinema, “Shangri-la Deconstructed: Representation of Tibet in Pema Tseden’s Films” (2016), a chapter on Tsering Woeser published in Tibetan Subjectivities on the Global Stage (2018), and a chapter on literary censorship and self-censorship in China for The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Studies (2021). She also translates Chinese and Sinophone Tibetan literature into Czech. She co-translated and co-edited, for example, an anthology of short stories from Tibet, The Lure of Kailash (Vábení Kailásu, 2005), Tsering Woeser’s non-fiction book Notes on Tibet (Zápisky z Tibetu, 2015), and Sheng Keyi’s novel Northern Girls (Holky ze severu, 2018). She wrote the first Czech language teaching material on modern Chinese literature and co-authored the first Czech lexicon of Sinophone cinema.

Fumi Inoue

Waseda University Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies

finoue.ng@gmail.com

Fumi Inoue is an Assistant Professor at the Waseda University Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, Japan. She is the author of a doctoral dissertation entitled The Politics of Extraterritoriality in Post­Occupation Japan and U.S.­Occupied Okinawa, 1952–1972 (Boston College, 2021) and a winner of the 2017 Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Samuel Flagg Bemis Dissertation Research Grant. As a historian of the Okinawa-Japan-U.S. relationship, she is currently working on a book manuscript, to be published in English and Japanese, that examines the workings and manifestations of the postwar American military legal regime of exception in Japan and Okinawa as well as local and transnational reactions to it in the stated period. Her research interests include the postwar Japan-U.S. security relationship, base politics, and social movements related to peace and human rights.

Contributors

Bhavana Kumari  Jawaharlal Nehru University  bhavanajnu12@gmail.com

Bhavana Kumari is a multidisciplinary research scholar. She completed her bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in Chinese language, literature, and cultural studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. She is currently pursuing her doctoral degree in International Relations at Jawaharlal Nehru University, focusing on China, Taiwan, and the U.S. strategic triangular relations. She also has a keen interest in the political and social aspects of India.

Martin Lavička  Palacký University Olomouc  martin.lavicka@upol.cz

Martin Lavička received his bachelor’s degree in Chinese and Japanese philology at Palacký University Olomouc, the Czech Republic, master’s degree in International Relations at National Chengchi University in Taiwan, and Ph.D. in Political Science at Palacký University Olomouc. He is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Asian Studies at Palacký University Olomouc, where he teaches modern Chinese history and Chinese politics. His research focuses on the socio-legal aspects of China’s ethnic policies.

Madhu  Miranda House, University of Delhi  madhu@mirandahouse.ac.in

Madhu is an Associate Professor of Modern Indian History at Miranda House, the University of Delhi, India. In her teaching and research, she focuses on the social and political thought of Gandhi and Ambedkar, the histories of marginalized people, environmental issues, and visual culture.

Rafael Vinícius Martins  Kyushu University  rafael.vinicius.martins@gmail.com

Rafael Vinícius Martins researches Japanese contemporary literature and pop culture at Kyushu University, Japan. During his master’s degree studies, he specialized in light novel studies and gender theories. In his Ph.D. research, he scrutinized the forms of realisms and expressions of gender in the oeuvre of the contemporary Japanese novelist Sakuraba Kazuki.

Contributors

Mavropoulos  Southern University of Science and Technology

Nikolaos

nikolaos.mavropoulos@eui.eu

Nikolaos Mavropoulos is a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences at the Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China. He studied Balkan Studies (B.A.) and European History (M.A.) in Greece. As a Ph.D. candidate, he carried out a research project entitled The Japanese Expansionism in Asia and Italian Expansion in Africa: A Comparative Study of the Early Italian and the Early Japanese Colonialism. His doctoral thesis was based on research in libraries and archival collections in Italy, Japan, Netherlands, and England over a period of three years, and uncovered important parallels in the early colonial endeavors of two latecomers to the drive for imperial expansion, Italy and Japan. He received his doctoral degree from Sapienza University of Rome, Department of History, Culture, Religion in September 2018 and joined the European University Institute in Florence in 2019. He has been a visiting scholar at SOAS University of London (2016), Kyushu University (2017), and Leiden University (2021). His research interests revolve around imperial antagonisms, migration, colonialism, and contemporary and modern history in a global context.

Robert Ono  Hosei University

Robert Ono is an Associate Professor at Hosei University, Japan. After receiving his Ph.D. from International Christian University in 2014 with his dissertation on Ki no Tsurayuki, a 10th century Japanese poet, he has continued to explore various works of literature and cultures of Japan, especially from a comparative and theoretical perspective. Apart from his contributions to Recent Scholarship on Japan (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020) and The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (Routledge, 2018), his publications include a monograph Ki no Tsurayuki (Tokyo-dō, 2019) and an edited volume Butoh Nyūmon [Introduction to Butoh] (Bungaku Tsūshin, 2021). He also translates extensively both academic volumes and works of fiction.

Silvia Picchiarelli  Independent Researcher  silviapicchiarelli@hotmail.it

Silvia Picchiarelli received her Ph.D. in Civilizations of Asia and Africa from the University of Rome “Sapienza” in 2018. She worked as an Associate Lecturer in East Asian History at Roma Tre University in 2019. During her studies, she carried out research at important libraries and archives in the People’s Republic of China.

Contributors

In 2021, she published her first monograph La resistenza contadina nella Cina dei primi anni Cinquanta [Peasant Resistance in Early 1950s China].

André Pinto Teixeira  Independent Researcher

André Pinto Teixeira is an independent researcher currently based in Lisbon, Portugal. During his master’s degree program in Contemporary Sociocultural Studies at Niigata University, Japan, he explored the topic of Buraku discrimination in northeast Japan, conducting fieldwork and interviewing local communities that were working on solving the issue. His academic interests include discrimination and multiculturalism in Japan and East Asia and translation studies in the context of East-West cultural relations. He currently works as a Japanese language translator, having translated novels, movies, comic books, and other content into Portuguese, and as a Japanese language specialist for an IT company based in Portugal. He is also a poet and a literary author.

Martina R. Prosperi  Roma Tre University  martina.r.prosperi@gmail.com

Martina R. Prosperi received her bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in Asian Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. She then moved to Taipei and spent one year as a visiting student of the National Taiwan University Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature. She obtained her Ph.D. in Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Roma Tre University in 2022. She currently works as a teacher of Chinese language and literature, and as a literary translator. She is a member of professor Rosa Lombardi's research group focusing on “Sinophone Literature from the 19th Century to the Contemporary Ages” (https://acrossthestraitromatre.wordpress.com). Her research fields include contemporary Sinophone literature, modern and contemporary Taiwanese literature, Taiwanese aboriginal literature, Sinophone studies, Nature Writing and Ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, and ethnographic research.

Tenha Seher

Tenha Seher is an Uyghur scholar based in Europe. Her personal details cannot be disclosed.

Contributors

Rune Steenberg  Palacký University Olomouc  rune.steenberg@upol.cz

Rune Steenberg is an anthropologist specializing in Xinjiang, Uyghurs, kinship, and economic anthropology. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in China and Central Asia and published on marriage, border trade, informality, corruption, local categories, and mass incarceration. He received his Ph.D. from Freie Universität Berlin and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Palacký University Olomouc, the Czech Republic.

Freya Terryn  KU Leuven  freya.terryn@kuleuven.be

Freya Terryn is a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven, Belgium, where she specializes in Japanese visual and print culture of the 19th century. She holds a Ph.D. in Japanese Studies from KU Leuven (2021). Her research has been funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders (2017–2021, 2022) and the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (2022). Her primary research interests lie in the arts and material cultures of 18th and 19th century Japan, with a particular focus on prints, illustrated books, and paintings. She also explores issues related to artistic and commercial collaboration, the interaction between governing bodies and artists, pictorial quotation, exhibition culture, Japonisme, and the formation of Japanese art collections in Europe. Her publications include re-evaluations of the print artist Utagawa Hiroshige III and a discussion on the reception of Japanese art in Belgium during the 1920s.

Robert Tsaturyan  Chinese University of Hong Kong  rtsaturyan@link.cuhk.edu.hk

Robert Tsaturyan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He obtained his master’s degree in Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature from Renmin University of China in 2018. His research focuses on contemporary Chinese poetry, the transnational and translingual connections between Chinese, Russian, and Eastern European authors, and the interface between poetry and history. His essays and translations in English and Chinese have appeared in Chinese Literature Today and Fleurs des Lettres. He has also translated Lu Xun and other writers into Armenian.

Contributors

Jessica Uldry

Independent Researcher

jess.uldry@gmail.com

An independent researcher, Jessica M. Uldry is an art historian, holding a master’s degree in the field. Her research interests in Japanese art span from the Muromachi to the Edo period with a special focus on contacts with the West (namba art, yōga art, early photography, and the history of Japanese collections preserved in the West). She has also explored the blossoming of Japanese art collections in the early 20th century in Chile where she is currently based. She has curated exhibitions in public institutions and collaborated on a major exhibition, Mundo flotante del periodo Edo, at the National Museum of Fine Art in Chile.

Halina Zawiszová

Palacký University Olomouc  halina.zawiszova@upol.cz

Halina Zawiszová is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Asian Studies at Palacký University Olomouc, the Czech Republic. She is formally trained in Japanese philology, English philology, and linguistics. Her main research foci revolve around topics related to social interaction, language, affect/emotion, and the construction of social relations and identities. Her recent book publications include a monograph On ‘Doing Friendship’ in and through Talk: Exploring Conversational Interactions of Japanese Young People (2018) and an edited volume Interests and Power in Language Management (2021, co-edited with Marek Nekula and Tamah Sherman).

Foreword

The work on this volume began with the 14th Annual Conference on Asian Studies (ACAS) which took place on November 20–21, 2020 online due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The ACAS conference series is organized annually by the Department of Asian Studies at Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic. Over the years, a system of each conference edition dedicated to a particular theme has developed. The title of this publication is, consequently, the same as was the general theme of the conference that year. The Call for Chapters that we issued following the conference with the support of the Sinophone Borderlands – Interaction at the Edges project was, however, open not only to those who participated in the conference, but to anyone working on an issue that could be subsumed under the general theme. The very high number of proposals that we received in response to the Call proves the importance as well as complexity of questions that in one way or another pertain to the overarching issue of “voice” situated into the Asian context.

This volume is the first in the Department of Asian Studies’ newly established Olomouc Asian Studies (OLAS) publication series. While we were eventually able to accept only a handful of the submitted proposals, the volume still boasts 19 chapters that develop the general theme from a wide range of angles as well as scholarly disciplines and perspectives. In doing so, we hope that this volume will set the standard for the volumes to come in that they will involve a variety of approaches and connect scholars working across different fields and focusing on different geographical areas in Asia.

To conclude, we would like to express our gratitude to those who have played a role in making the publication of this volume a reality. We would like to thank the authors whose chapters make up this volume for their contributions, active cooperation, and kind understanding of the fact that the production process took us longer than what we initially expected. We would also like to express our gratitude to the reviewers of individual chapters, including those that were not selected for publication, who – as the anonymous peer-review process requires – cannot be named here.

The editors

Introduction: In Voice is Power

Halina Zawiszová and Martin Lavička

To have a voice is to have power. People strive to have a voice, to be heard and be seen, to have their interests taken into account and have the capacity to have them fulfilled, to have representation and be represented in a way that is favorable to them and reflects their identity, to be in the position that allows them to feel safe, valued, and free. Voice is instrumental for achieving one’s goals. The interests of one may, however, be in conflict or even in direct opposition to those of another. Therefore, those higher up in any kind of a power hierarchy may – and indeed often do – use their voice to construct complex ideological as well as actual systems that promote and legitimize their values, beliefs, behaviors, and social positions, while marginalizing, excluding, silencing, and even demonizing those that they view as their Other.

The voiced set normative standards and define what is important, meaningful, desirable, and justifiable, what should be supported, nurtured, and fostered, and what should be eliminated, hidden, and suppressed. The unequal distribution of power in our cultures and societies consequently establishes voice as something valuable which is scalar, dynamic, and emergent, hence as something that social actors – individuals, communities, institutions, or states – in particular contexts and moments in time possess or not, are given or denied, are trying to preserve, looking for, finding, gaining, discovering, losing, acknowledging, depriving others of, fighting for, and so on.

Viewed in this way, the question of voice is as central to individuals’ daily lives, their well-being, and personal relationships, as it is to the very workings of societies and the development of cultures, their policies, economies, systems of justice and education, art, sciences, technologies, media, housing, public health, etc. It is fundamental to the construction of social and political hierarchies and the attendant power dynamics, such as the establishment of dominant social groups as opposed to minorities, mainstream cultures as opposed to subcultures, and standard or official languages as opposed to regional and social varieties. It is key to the construction and perpetuation of hegemonic ideologies and realization of

all systems of government, but also to the attempts to dismantle, reject, and subvert them, that is, to the attempts to change the status quo

Voice – albeit referred to by various terms – has long been acknowledged as an important topic across the humanities and social sciences (e.g., Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, Norman Fairclough, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, Steven Lukes, among many). The present volume contributes to this tradition, narrating the multifaceted relationship between voice and power – although seldom mentioning the term itself – through the lens of scholarly fields, such as political science, history, international relations, cultural studies, media studies, literary studies, art history, or anthropology.

The volume consists of 19 chapters, broadly divided into two parts, which emerged organically in the process of preparing this publication based on the approaches and central foci that the authors of the texts adopt. The first part, entitled “Politics and Society,” includes nine chapters, while the second part consists of ten chapters and is called “Arts and Literature,” although the studies that it contains also deal with social themes. The publication brings together authors associated with universities in Europe and Asia as well as independent researchers, from senior academics to early career scholars.

Probing into a wide range of topics and adopting various methods and perspectives, collectively, the chapters discuss ‘voice’ in Asia – or more specifically, East Asia (China, Japan, Taiwan, and Tibet) and South Asia (India) – as closely intertwined with other social, political, and cultural issues. Those that resonate most prominently include human rights, equality, institutionalized inequality, ideology, justice, (systemic) oppression, discrimination, suppression, violence, resistance, activism, empowerment, liberation, freedom, non-conformity, identity, representation, access to rights and resources, social media, propaganda, censorship, gender and sexuality, the power of art and literature, construction of narratives or discourses, social, cultural, political, and economic domination and control.

We have sketched out below some of the concerns and findings that the individual chapters included in this volume provide.

In the first chapter of the first part of this volume, Madhu discusses contemporary attempts at online activism of the Dalit community or the so-called untouchable caste in modern India. Although the Indian government banned the caste system in the last century, the socio-economic disadvantages and discrimination against the Dalits remain even today. Madhu analyzes how social media help this disadvantaged group voice their grievances and gain support for their plea for human rights, justice, democracy, and equality, within as well as outside of India,

allowing Dalits to forge connections with other economically marginalized, socially stigmatized, and oppressed communities, such as the burakumin in Japan or the Roma in Central Europe. Importantly, the chapter shows that through social media, Dalits themselves can construct their identity as empowered people, all the while challenging the mainstream narratives and misconceptions.

In the following chapter, written by Bhavana Kumari, we remain on the Indian peninsula. Kumari discusses the migrant labor crisis that occurred because of the imposition of lockdown policies during the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic. In her case study, Kumari focuses on the central eastern state Bihar. The author illustrates how the long overlooked and ignored situation of domestic migrant daily wage laborers began to pose serious problems during the lockdown, but failed to result in any substantial change. Extremely vulnerable even in normal times, they were left voiceless without money and without adequate help from their contractors, recruiters, states, as well as civil societies, and the Indian government, which did not provide sufficient relief measures to mitigate their dire situation. The socially and economically disadvantaged are revealed as lacking voice as well as a means for gaining it.

André Pinto Teixeira’s chapter is of a more theoretical nature. It concerns burakumin in contemporary Japanese society, that is, marginalized people traditionally defined as people of (perceived) outcast ancestry, born or residing at particular locations, and/or engaged in particular occupations considered ‘polluted’ or ‘unclean.’ The author addresses questions related to identity, discrimination, and empowerment, stressing that the discriminatory practices are rooted in discourses, traditional historiographies, and imposed labeling, rather than genealogies, actual physical spaces, or occupations. He argues that the people discriminated against as burakumin can gain their voice only through reflexive and conscientious self-identification and presentation.

The chapter by Silvia Picchiarelli looks closely at China’s countryside in the 1950s, when the so-called “unified purchase and sale” system was introduced. Based on her examination of archival sources in Shanxi province, Picchiarelli paints a compelling picture which shows that Chinese peasants were not completely submissive and, as it were, voiceless in their resistance against Mao Zedong’s plan of the socialist transformation of agriculture, which they saw as highly problematic and endangering their existence. The author describes the ‘soft methods’ they employed in order to protest and express their opposition to the state without provoking the authorities.

Rural China is also the concern of the study by Pia Eskelinen. Eskelinen focuses on the contemporary issue of gender inequality regarding land tenure rights related to the hukou household registration system. Based on her field research and interviews with members of the All China Women’s Federation in Central

and Eastern China, the author argues that the efforts of the Federation were not in vain and actually led to important legislative changes to the system. Women are still more likely, however, to become landless and slip into poverty after changing their hukou. This is, the author insists, due to the gendered decision-making processes, Chinese rural women’s historically disadvantaged socio-economic position compared to rural men, as well as women’s general acceptance of their less privileged position. More substantial reforms, which would deal with the core problem of gender equality, are therefore needed.

With the next chapter, we remain in mainland China but move to its westernmost part, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). In the first of two studies that focus on this region, Martin Lavička illuminates how normative documents are transmitted and adjusted into various channels to reach their target audience in the XUAR. Specifically, Lavička analyzes one of the propaganda channels, the officially published Uyghur-written booklet Din esebiyliki ademni nabut qilidu (Religious extremism kills/destroys people), which is about the fight against religious extremism and terrorism in the XUAR. He compares the booklet’s content with provisions in the Regulations of the XUAR on Religious Affairs and the Regulations on De-radicalization of the XUAR. Lavička identifies the most common propaganda strategies utilized by the Chinese government to enforce the restrictive policies and laws on the Uyghur population, whose voice has been not just unheard, but actively suppressed by China’s political leadership.

The second of the chapters dealing with Chinese propaganda in the XUAR is written by Rune Steenberg and Tenha Seher. The authors analyze vlogs made by popular young minority vloggers from the XUAR at a time when the region has been under massive pressure by the government and security apparatus. In the videos, they study the explicitly political content and close alignment with the Chinese Communist Party’s narratives and suggest that there is direct involvement of the government apparatus in the design of the vlogs. The authors argue that the videos provide invaluable insights into the workings of the propaganda practices in the People’s Republic of China as well as into the daily life in the XUAR when approached critically and with adequate epistemological care.

Nikolaos Mavropoulos’s chapter takes us back to the time when imperial China lost in the First Sino-Japanese War and Taiwan became a Japanese colony. Mavropoulos zooms in on two Japanese men who went against the military establishment, the First Chief Justice of the High Court of Taiwan Takano Takenori and the first Chief of the Education Bureau Osawa Shūji, in order to contribute to the debates on Japanese colonization of Taiwan by showing the struggle between the civil or political and the military voices in administering the colony. The author describes how both men’s voices were silenced by the military establishment and – using their cases to explain the Japanese colonial strategies – argues that

as a Japanese colony, Taiwan was destined to become a place of military rule that offered no place for civil rights and dissident voices.

The last study in the first part of the volume is by Fumi Inoue and takes us to Okinawa after the Japanese war endeavors ended in failure and the U.S. began to occupy the Ryūkyū Islands. The author reflects on the Okinawans’ 1955 uprising following the murder of a local girl by a U.S. military service member and describes it as a critical milestone in the development of popular human rights activism in Okinawa, as it involved the Okinawans collectively raising their voices to seek legal justice under the U.S. military occupation. Significantly, Inoue points out the importance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for the empowerment of the Okinawans in their daily fight against injustice and other issues that were caused by the U.S. military presence.

The second part of the volume begins with Freya Terryn’s study, in which she explores the satirical depictions of the Boshin War between the pro-imperial and pro-shogunal forces in Japan in the woodblock prints of Utagawa Hiroshige III produced in the second half of the 19th century in the face of the censorship laws that banned depiction of the ruling classes and current events. The author exposes how the artist – aided by the publisher, the engraver, and the printer – made use of images and explanatory inscriptions in the prints in order to offer a commentary on the shifting political power and the dynamics between those who govern and those who are governed against the backdrop of the governmental censorship trying to suppress any dissenting voices.

In the following chapter, Jessica Uldry provides insight into a prominent Swiss diplomat Aimé Humbert’s critical views on the life of female sex workers in the 19th century Japan by analyzing the engravings and textual commentary related to various forms of female prostitution in Japan included in his monograph Le Japon Illustré (1870). The author shows how Humbert used altered images, text, and composition to criticize Japanese society of that time for allowing the trade of women’s bodies as a form of slavery that caused social damage and had to be eradicated. Humbert is thereby shown to be exposing the less alluring and rarely talked about aspects of the lives of Japanese female sex workers and as taking onto himself the role of a speaker for those that may be otherwise left voiceless.

Noriko Hiraishi focuses on Japanese female writers’ search for autonomy in love at the beginning of the 20th century. Hiraishi specifically considers depictions of unfaithful wives and places them in the context of Japanese infatuation with European literary representations of ‘romantic love,’ such as the adulterous love between Paolo and Francesca in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which was idealized at the time as a representation of ‘true love.’ The author describes the paradoxical situation of the female writers’ adaptation of the European literary and philosophical trends in allowing their expression of longing for independence in love,

marriage, and sexuality which went against the laws as well as the traditional values and customs upheld by contemporary Japanese society.

In the ensuing chapter, Robert Ono discusses the emergence of literary voices by leprosy patients in 1920s and 1930s Japan, that is, at the times of thriving eugenics. The author first introduces a collection of ‘confessions’ of leprosy patients, confined to public leprosariums, which was compiled by the government, but casts serious doubt on the authenticity of the represented voices. Ono subsequently portrays the aspiration and efforts of Hōjō Tamio to become the first leprosy patient who would have their literary works published as part of mainstream literature as well as the response of the contemporary literary world to his works. While still censured and manipulated, Hōjō’s writings gave voice to leprosy patients otherwise deprived of humanity. His works, however, contrary to his hopes, were largely considered in light of his condition rather than purely for their literary merit.

With the chapter by Martina Renata Prosperi, we turn our attention to the voices of the sick and the deviant in Chinese literature. Prosperi specifically concerns herself with the role played by the figure of a beggar in Chinese modern and contemporary literature. She discusses how the powerless characters of beggars act as impossible witnesses to their times and to human nature. Prosperi argues that it is only through the process of active readership that their dissenting perspectives and destabilizing testimonies can effectively serve as an alternative and a counterpoint to the dominant narratives.

Robert Tsaturyan’s chapter contemplates broader questions, such as the relationship between witnessing and literature, and the idea of a poet’s role as a witness, as he analyzes the representation of personal as well as collective trauma in the works of the Chinese poet Wang Jiaxin, who represents one of the most prominent voices in contemporary Chinese poetry and translation. The author considers Wang’s poetry as well as his translation-dialogues with other poets, exploring thus the voice of one poet dealing with human life experiences in the face of the absurdities of history.

Kamila Hladíková focuses on a representative of an often-overlooked literary voice coming from within Tibet. More specifically, Hladíková explores Sinophone writings produced by an ethnic Tibetan writer Tsering Norbu and discusses them as an example of a distinct voice of literary self-representation coming from contemporary Tibet as opposed to the authoritative majority Han Chinese discourse. She demonstrates that his short stories give voice to ordinary people of Tibet and employ various narrative strategies that allow the writer to deal with censorship and resist the hegemonic state ideology as well as commercialization.

Letizia Guarini then takes us back to Japan with her chapter on gender discrimination and gender-based violence both in the real world of contemporary