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.

ANDREA GEVURTZ ARAI is interim chair of Korea Studies and assistant professor at The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at The University of Washington, Seattle. She is 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; she is also the author of The Strange Child: Education and the Psychology of Patriotism in Recessionary 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