Jie Yang is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, Canada

While scholars of East Asia have often focused on the significance of culture and Confucianism for economic growth, this book examines the affective or emotional dimension of capitalist development in the region. Here, affect is defined as felt quality that gives meaning and imagination to social, political, and economic processes, and as this work demonstrates, it can provide an analytical tool for a nuanced and enriched analysis of social, political, and economic transformations in East Asia.

Crucially, this book addresses four key issues, namely the relationship between affect and power; the relationship between affect and ideology; the relation of the body to subjectivity; and the link between affective labour and biopolitical economy. The contributors pay particular attention to the way that potentiality and imagination become animated by affect (i.e., happiness, anger), resulting in new modes of governance and creating new sites for value extraction among particular groups (such as unemployed workers in China, Southeast Asian care workers in Japan and South Korea, etc.) Conversely, resistive affects (i.e., anger, tears, unhappiness) are deployed by those marginal groups to counter reigning hegemonies, and the chapters highlight these strategies and the complexity and unevenness of the political technology of affect.

The interdisciplinary nature of this book means it will have a broad appeal across a number of fields of study, including anthropology, sociology, media studies, communications, history, cultural studies, Asian studies, and gender and women’s studies.