The concept of counterculture is often associated with a 1960s American movement that had distinct sociopolitical, economic, and cultural characteristics. The concept has, however, also circulated globally, and has been used to describe a wide variety of counterhegemonic movements and interventions. Although discussions of counterculture, in both an American and global context, often focus primarily on transgressive cultural content, our session on East Asian countercultures instead considers how transgression can be located within the cultural form itself—through provocative innovations of familiar cultural forms or the development of new ones. We argue, in short, that the form itself of a cultural production can often makes as much of an intervention as the content that the cultural production conveys.

Featuring presenters ranging from a graduate student to senior faculty and who work on a variety of different East Asian regions and periods from the early modern to the contemporary moment, our proposed session considers an array of different cultural media, from early modern Chinese literature and drama to contemporary trans-Asian girl metal bands and pop groups, Chinese crypto art and other block-chain-based cultural artifacts, as well as contemporary social practices that challenge dominant logics of capitalist productivity and reproductive futurism. In each instance, the cultural formations in question represent either a significant innovation vis-à-vis preexisting cultural forms, or they can be seen as provocative new forms of cultural expression that sometimes push the boundaries of what is perceived to be cultural expression in the first place.

First, Tina Lu takes inspiration from Fredric Jameson’s understanding of narrative as a staging ground for ideological conflict that cannot be resolved, and she examines strategies of formal innovation in early modern Chinese fiction and drama, with a focus on the eighteenth-century classic novel Dream of the Red Chamber. In doing so, she seeks to propose a theory for why the novel could not be concluded, or rather why the counterculture could not be enfolded within mainstream cultural values. Next, Katherine Mezur examines the deep umwelten, or surrounding worlds, of kawaii (cute) girl culture in contemporary East Asian girl metal and pop groups, together with an array of related media art. Through a detailed consideration of several Asian artists and bands, Mezur argues that the figure of the kawaii girl continues to evolve in this eclectically multimedia environment. Qianxiong Yang then turns to Chinese crypto art and asks how this novel cultural form uses blockchain technology to present a challenge to state centralization of economic policies. Yang contends that Chinese crypto artists and critics remediate a conventional Western libertarianism through the language that draws on poststructuralism, European conceptual art, and cyber-utopianism, producing a discourse of decentralization and democracy only to give a new cultural legitimacy to market participation. Finally, Shana Ye examines how various types of contemporary Chinese social practices reject a normative emphasis on reproductive futurism. Through an analysis of figures of “Asian (no)bodies” ranging from Gen Z Chinese who reject state policies encouraging marriage and reproduction, to this generation’s future-rejecting forerunners such as day-laboring migrants, Ye argues that contemporary East Asian counterculture is no longer defined by underground utopian resistance but rather through a shared struggle over whether—and how—life itself should continue at all.

Finally, we would recommend that this session be considered as part of this year’s presidential theme. Although countercultural formations can take a wide variety of forms, many of these formations are intrinsically emancipatory in nature. This session’s papers examine the emancipatory implications of East Asian countercultural formations positioned in opposition to hegemonic systems ranging from Chinese late imperial orthodoxies to Asian patriarchal regimes, cyber-capitalist logics, and reproductive futurism imperatives.