Chapter 3 continues to explore the question of masquerade and its risks to body and identity. It turns to East Asian novels from the postwar to contemporary eras by Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, Taiwanese author Qiu Miaojin and Hong Kongese novelist Hon Lai-chu, which all involve queer (auto)fictional narratives. The chapter reads comparatively Mishima’s Confessions (1949), Qiu’s Notes of a Crocodile (1994) and Hon’s Empty Faces (2017), showing that the masquerader is equally present in East Asian life-writing, mediated by the translation and reception of European avant-garde writing in East Asia and by Japan–Taiwan postcolonial relations. Here, masquerade is located in the precarious relations between the mask and the face. The self is brought ’en jeu’ (at stake/at risk) and queered by performances of otherness. Queer autofiction is a masquerade that dismantles rather than determines identity, risking the complete collapse of identity categories. The chain of mimeses shown by the French writers in Chapter 2 is thus mirrored and extended in the East Asian texts.

This chapter connects the threads from the preceding two chapters by examining representations of “India” as part of the social, cultural, and physical landscape of Eastern Africa in fictional works by African authors of Indian descent. In Sophia Mustafa’s In the Shadow of Kirinyaga (2002) and Barlen Pyamootoo’s Bénarès (1999), the diasporic imagination cites and sites symbolic Indian spaces within local African contexts hierarchized by race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Placing these texts in a shared but differentiated discourses of race, colonialism, and nationalism in Mauritius and East Africa, the chapter demonstrates that they inscribe Indian cultural spaces in diasporic locations not to express nostalgia for a distant homeland or to make cultural claims on the locality; but instead, their diasporic imagination moves through local, unresolved histories of colonial, racial, and gendered violence, uniquely sustained by ongoing forms of displacement and dispossession. Anarchival movements in these texts uncover Black migration histories as entangled and interdependent with Indian diasporic insinuation of transnational ties.

The presence in society of people who secretly supply information to a domestic state security agency is seen as a necessary evil by some, while others question whether the potential benefit to society of this suspicionless investigation outweighs its cost. In modern history, successfully upheld contracts between governments and silent citizen majorities have inclined the latter to accept what their national press often insists is the true state of affairs – that while such things may indeed go on there, they do not as a rule go on here. When something altogether out of the ordinary then does come to light, perceptions of it are managed meaningfully with the help of a framework of interpretation that sees uncomfortable facts merely as the exception that ‘proves the rule’. Perhaps the best-known example from the Cold War Anglosphere are the extrajudicial disruptions that in 1971 became the FBI COINTELPRO scandal. In Sweden, the so-called Information Bureau Affair of 1973 exposed a similar programme of covert agent infiltration of leftist, but entirely legal, NGOs and communist labour activity, on behalf of Sweden’s ruling Social Democratic Party leadership and armed forces.

According to Dazai Shundai, ritual and music are essential elements of the government of the sages. They complement each other, with ritual drawing strict distinctions of status and establishing ethical standards for different types of human relationships, while music functions as a gentle force for bringing people together in harmony. Compared with other methods of governing, the superiority of ritual and music lies in their ability to enter people on a deep level and transform their customs, creating long-lasting stability without the need to rely solely on explicit laws. In order for ritual and music to work properly, though, they must be established by rulers who look back to the traditions of the ancient Chinese sage kings. In earlier times, Japan learned such ritual and music from China and used these to govern, but in recent times, vulgar ritual and music have arisen from among the common people, with detrimental effects for Japanese society. To remedy this situation, vulgar ritual and music need to be suppressed and replaced with proper ritual and music.

At 1 p.m. on Friday, 6 January 1956, at the premises on Third Street, [Political Protection] Division Chief Lu Bo and [Political Intelligence] Section Chief Lu Junjie met with Agent 371.

At this meeting, Division Chief Lu issued instructions in preparation for the agent’s upcoming visit to Tianjin.

Chapter 5 turns to intermedial comparison between word and image, taking the image-text as an example to examine how ludic strategies of representation create intermedial experiences of risk. In the chapter I compare Xi Xi with contemporary French poet Michèle Métail. Both poets have created a substantial number of image-texts. I first examine how they employ ekphrasis – the verbal representation of images – to explore the tension and complementarity between language and visual media and emphasize the risks of aesthetic experimentation and mediated perception. I then discuss their use of the parergon, understood as the concrete borders of an artwork (the ergon) and, figuratively, as a cognitive framing and recontextualization of literature that questions what the literary work is. Gregory Bateson argued that play is a ‘cognitive frame’ (1972). In this chapter, I argue that the parergon is a ludic method that suggests the transgression of frames and puts the artwork (ergon) at risk. Image-texts show how risk is shaped by medium-specificity and technologies of mediation.

The introduction presents the main theoretical and empirical justifications of the book. It begins by highlighting the longstanding problem governments face as they puzzle over securing adequate amounts of staple foods: either to grow more of the foodstuff or purchase it from abroad. This historical and contemporary food security dilemma sets the stage for introducing the three primary cases of this study, those that struggle to find that ideal balance between promoting expensive domestic rice cultivation and buying cheaper foreign imports. It then explains how success in the Green Revolution radically shifted the views of the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia of their position along this continuum. The introduction establishes the significance of the Green Revolution, substantiates its success, and addresses how this legacy over decades has shaped acute rice policy debates – and hence larger questions about rural development, poverty alleviation, and national food security. The introduction closes with a brief recapitulation of the main argument and an outline of the book’s chapters.