Author: M. Johnson, F. Y. L. Chiu.

This special issue of positions turns on a great irony of the postcolonial world: as the colonialists vacate their spaces of control, the colonial has gone native in the bodies of a stratum of the colonized. Nested within the posi- tional structure of the imperial, the original and continuing power of the core states, a subimperial relation between the dominant of the dominated and their periphery emerges. The domination of the core powers over East Asia is replicated as a fractal imperial relation between forces in Hong Kong and Taiwan, on one hand, and a new domination franchise involuted within Taiwan and Hong Kong and exvoluted to China and Southeast Asia. Under the continuing sign of orientalism, a suboriental space of rep- resentation re-creates the symbolic violence of orientalism on another scale. Understanding the coming into being and the negation of this system of nationalist domination is this issue’s project.