Leo Marx recounts a story, told to him by the eminent British literary historian Richard Hoggart, of an encounter in the mid-1950s between Hoggart and a young Fulbright scholar who identified himself as a teacher of American Studies.

At this point, Hoggart understood completely just what the young man meant, although he also noted that no British scholar would ever be heard saying, “I believe in Britain!”

The anecdote is representative of the degree to which American Studies, as practiced by Americans in the United States at least, developed out of the political (and personal) convictions of its adherents. Although certain aspects of its work could be tied more directly to this or that program that is explicitly in the service of national and international political aims, such as the CIA’s involvement with literary magazines or the operations of UNESCO, it is clear that American Studies as a whole was always already ideological. As a disciplinary (or interdisciplinary) field, American Studies functions not only to study America, but to promote it: it being the idea of “America” itself, something that was not coextensive with the political or geographic entity known as the United States. Contrary to the many accusations by revisionist critics or even apologias by supposed traditionalists, the early practitioners of American Studies were not blind adherents to a particular government or political policy (far from it!). Rather, they were or became something like disciples of a new religion, one whose system of belief they were in fact helping to create.

In “Science Fiction,” a 1965 essay later included in his Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons, Kurt Vonnegut complained of having been unjustly labeled a science-fiction writer. He said that reviewers had placed his work in that generic category primarily because machines featured so prominently in his first book, Player Piano, although Vonnegut himself insisted that the novel was based loosely on the real persons, places, and events he witnessed while working at a General Electric plant in Schenectady, New York, in the early 1950s. True, Player Piano included some extrapolations from then-current technology, and it was set in the near future; as noted in the foreword, it was “not a book about what is, but about what could be.” That distinction itself might be enough to move one’s writings from the genre of literary realism to that of science fiction, but then the postwar period in which Player Piano appeared was time when, in the United States especially, people were very much concerned with the nation’s possibilities, not merely its quotidian realities. Hence, one might argue that the theme of the book was quite timely indeed. But the question is not so much whether a sort of realism or a more speculative form was better suited to capture the spirit of the age; rather, for Vonnegut, the question was whether one form of writing could be taken seriously at all. In his essay, Vonnegut lamented that, by referring to his work as science fiction, literary critics had consigned it to a category which would assure that it could not be viewed or valued as literature. “I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer label ‘science fiction’ ever since,” Vonnegut declared, “and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.”

The humorous, thoroughly Vonnegutian comment reveals his anxieties about being pigeon-holed as a genre writer, and he goes on to concede that, in most science fiction he knows, the actual writing is pretty bad. However, in the same essay, he predicted that so-called science fiction would become increasingly part of the mainstream as more writers incorporated the effects of technology into their literary fiction.

Commonly, those who comment on international politics and diplomacy associate international broadcasting with concepts of soft power and ‘public diplomacy’. Soft power is said to be a form of influence founded on the non-coercive force of attraction (Nye 1990). Joseph Nye proposes that ‘smart power’ arises from the deployment of ‘hard’ military and economic assets and non-coercive ‘soft’ power resources in appropriate combination (Nye 2009). Government-aligned public diplomacy occurs when an international actor seeks to facilitate relationship building with other state or non-state actors (Cull 2009, p. 210; Melissen 2005, p. 176). I argue that both terms – soft power and public diplomacy – are useful as abstractions and for making shorthand references to certain aspects of statecraft. But they have limited operational value when shaping the strategic function and tactical application of international broadcasting.

For a broadcaster, the reliance on such abstraction risks a failure to acknowledge its core function as political communication. The intended effect of political communication is to modify, enable or disable the agency of other actors (Chadwick 2013, p. 207). This constitutes the ‘third face’ of power in shaping, influencing or determining other peoples’ beliefs and desires (Lukes 2005a, pp. 485-486). For a government concerned with media management, the use of imprecise terminology allows it to frame the broadcasting function simplistically, as a form of image promotion akin to international public relations. Neither perspective is adequate in the context of Australia’s geostrategic and geo-economic circumstances in the Indo-Pacific.

In this chapter, therefore, I examine critically the concept of non-coercive power before identifying the function and properties of international broadcasting in relation to other agents of foreign policy propagation. Whether described as ‘soft’, ‘hard’, ‘smart’ (Nye 2009), or ‘sweet’, ‘sticky’, ‘sharp’ and ‘hegemonic’ (Mead 2009), the operative word in service of the state’s foreign policy is power. In Australia, references to soft power often preference the word ‘soft’ over ‘power’, thus trivialising the concept or limiting it to certain forms of attraction. With regard to the latter, for example, the nation’s screen development agency asserts the soft power relevance of Australian film and television industry exports, which, it argues, forge ‘a sense of relatability as they communicate Australian culture and values to the world’ (Screen Australia 2016).

This volume aims to address, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, the following philosophical question: ‘How are we to understand other cultures?’ (hereafter, the question of intercultural understanding). In so doing, it brings into conversation Wittgensteinian and other cultural and philosophical traditions, stemming notably from Japan, China, the West African Yoruba people or India. The book is therefore not just about intercultural understanding; it also brings together, under the umbrella of Wittgensteinian philosophy, a plurality of cultural voices and philosophical cultures.

We set out to develop an approach to addressing the question of intercultural understanding that emphasizes the connection between its epistemological, ethical and political aspects. The Wittgensteinian tradition – spanning not only Ludwig Wittgenstein’s own corpus but also the work of other prominent and up-and-coming philosophers directly influenced by Wittgenstein – is ideally suited to this task. The contributions to this volume build on a wealth of Wittgensteinian strategies and methodologies to develop an imaginative, fresh portfolio of philosophical responses to the intercultural question, as well as strategies to address the special challenges it poses. The book is divided into two parts, each of which includes six chapters. Part I presents a series of new proposals on how best to model intercultural understanding after Wittgenstein. Part II examines a new set of challenges to intercultural understanding, stemming from relativism, the philosophy of disagreement and the problem of cultural exclusion, among others.

Constantine Sandis launches Part I with ‘Understanding Other Cultures (Without Mind-Reading)’. In this chapter, Sandis draws on the analogy with historical understanding to argue that understanding contemporary cultures that may appear alien to us involves a form of thinking with that does not require any agreement in opinion but, instead, a parallel sharing of thought processes. This idea is explored in relation to recent attempts to make sense of the ghost narratives that emerged in Japan in the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Drawing partly from Wittgenstein and Clifford Geertz, Sandis suggests that understanding the thoughts of another culture is not a question of mind-reading but rather of conceptual immersion.

Chon Tejedor, in ‘Intercultural Understanding, Epistemic Interaction and Polyphonic Cultures’, revisits three central Wittgensteinian views: philosophy understood as an activity of interactively engaging with a real or imaginary interlocutor; nonsense as self-stultification; and perspicuous representation.

This book is a unique transdisciplinary study on animals and plants in medieval Chinese religions and science, especially in today’s critical era of environmental crisis. In recent years, environment historians have written intensively on China. Yet, the study of animals and plants in medieval China was less developed, not much about the role of religions, more precisely. This book aims to bridge the gaps between religious studies and environmental studies, the history of science and religious studies, and animal studies and plant studies. It examines the biological, cultural, and spiritual encounters of animals and plants with humans in the medieval period through the analysis of changing roles and images of animals and plants in the historical, psychological, and imaginative experiences of human life, which are often overlooked in conventional scholarship.

This book can be viewed as a sibling of my recent book, In the Land of Tigers and Snakes: Living with Animals in Medieval Chinese Religions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023), and its discussions move beyond animals to cover plants. This new book will look at how religious agents responded to the challenges of animals and plants as material culture in the mundane world. It will also look at how religious writers developed their various discourses about animals and plants from state ideology, and how the spiritual and natural worlds mutually enriched each other in China’s medieval world. In particular, this book aims to analyze ordering nature and supernature in medieval China. This study has benefited tremendously from many historians of Chinese science and technology, such as Joseph Needham, Ho Peng Yoke, Nathan Sivin, and others on science and religions in China, and Berthold Laufer and Edward H. Schafer on plants and animals and material culture in medieval China along the Silk Road. In the meantime, this study attempts to raise new questions with the rise of animal and plant studies in contemporary scholarship. Many other readers in the domains of history of science and technology, Chinese history, Chinese literary culture, Chinese ideas and religions, animal studies, and material culture, in general, might find some interesting themes in my discussion.

In the past few decades, what has been called “the spatial turn” in the arts, humanities, and social sciences has been marked by an enhanced awareness of the significance of space, place, mapping, spatial relations, and so on, in those fields. According to the research influenced by this turn, space has been revealed to maintain an active and productive presence in society and culture, as well as in various art forms, rather than functioning as mere setting, an empty container, or a backdrop in front of which the matters of “real” significance unfold. More recently, but perhaps relatedly, a planetary turn in many of these disciplinary fields has reoriented spatial critical theory and practice toward a more global frame of reference, owing much to the imperatives of the worldwide ecological crisis and the prospects of apparently inevitable climate change, as well as to the realities of multinational capitalism and globalization, along with the diffuse, specific, and often local effects of all of this. The conception of the “world,” which can be closely related to both spatiality and planetarity, profoundly influences the ways we imagine space and place. Worlds may be either vaster or more limited than other spatial frameworks, and the negotiation of worldly spaces presents challenges to traditional means of mapping or making sense of one’s place. In this chapter, I discuss the effects of worlding on spatiality studies, beginning with a discussion of the spatial and planetary turns, then focusing on the crises of representation and of lived experience connected with a global frame of reference.

The Spatial Turn

Although such spatial or geographical considerations have no doubt always been a part of literary and critical practice, the recent resurgence of spatiality and the explosion in the number of spatially oriented books and articles in literary studies follows what has been referred to as the “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences. The spatial turn has no particular date of inception, but one may perceive more and more critical attention being paid to matters of space in the 1970s and 1980s. For example, Denis Cosgrove has explicitly connected the spatial turn to poststructuralist theory, and so it is not surprising that Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and other theorist of their time have been closely associated with the spatial turn.

Under the ABC Act (1983), which stipulated the corporation’s editorial and administrative independence from government, the state exercised its interests through budgetary interventions and allocative priorities. In this way, the state and its agent (the charter-enabled ABC) differentiated the sometimes-clashing requirements of international broadcasting operating in the liberal tradition: political purpose and performance. Purpose embodied the material interests of the state, given expression at the level of high strategy, public asset investment priorities and their intended deployment. The broadcaster’s performance in serving the national interest took form through its capacity to reach designated audiences, its editorial and programme decisions, and its production norms and style.

Government ministers and their departments, especially Foreign Affairs, advised the ABC as to which foreign publics should be targeted, in what languages and over which defined geographical zones. Government decisions on capital investment, especially those related to transmission capacity, substantially determined the sphere of effective audience reach that Radio Australia could achieve. This chapter examines the relationship between the ABC and government when setting international broadcasting targets and priorities, a relationship in which the broadcaster sought to reconcile state interests with the values of a liberal media model.

Prior to the re-constitution of the national public broadcaster in 1983, its then-chief executive, Keith Jennings, said Radio Australia serviced ‘primary’ targets comprising 13 Asian nations as well as Papua New Guinea and Pacific Island countries (Jennings 1983). Its ‘secondary’ targets were listed as the Middle East, Africa, Europe, North America and South America. At the time, Radio Australia broadcast in six Asian languages (including both Standard Chinese/Mandarin and Cantonese) as well as French and Tok Pisin, which meant it relied largely on English to reach most countries designated as primary or secondary targets. In the 1980s, the international service recalibrated its strategic focus as an Asia Pacific regional broadcaster, partly in acknowledgement of the ‘parlous state’ of its transmission capability (ABC 1989, p. 1). This recalibration also reflected a shift in the Australian government’s outlook in a changing geostrategic environment. It demonstrated the interplay of circumstance, political purpose and performance.

Among his other prodigious contributions to literature, a great many of Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings on literary and cultural criticism were published over the course of thirty years in ten volumes, each bearing the title Situations. (We know them as Situations I–X, with individual volumes bearing different subtitles, published between 1947 and 1976.) It is telling, but not surprising, that Sartre would use this title, for his philosophy was rooted in what Fredric Jameson has referred to as “the logic of the situation,” which entails a thoroughgoing recognition of the fundamental situatedness of the individual subject in relation to others at all times and places. We find ourselves, always and already, in a certain situation, which conditions our sense of self and our comportment toward the world. This a fairly basic, existential reality, but by engaging in critical practice, we find ourselves especially attuned to the ways that the situations in which we find both ourselves and the texts under consideration affect the project in innumerable ways. The situation of criticism is, in this sense, doubly situated, for it entails a persistent consciousness of its own situation while assessing other situations. In describing his attraction to the dialectic, for example, which is also to say his sense of how a properly critical practice would work, Jameson has said that “the emphasis on the logic of the situation, the constant changeability of the situation, its primacy and the way in which it allows certain things to be possible and others not: that would lead to a kind of thinking I would call dialectical.” Whether it be explicitly characterized as dialectical or not, criticism is always practiced from and with respect to a given situation, and the awareness and consideration of the situatedness of both the critic’s subjective position and the objects of critique are essential aspects of literary and cultural criticism.

The Critical Situation: Vexed Perspectives in Postmodern Literary Studies comprises a selection of essays that register this sense of situatedness amid various intellectual, institutional, and cultural contexts. The title is, in part, a play on words, for the expression “a critical situation” is well known outside of academic literary studies to refer to matters of great urgency, often alarming and dangerous.

Eyles Irwin was born in Calcutta, India, in 1751. His father, James Irwin, was a merchant in St Helena and Java in the 1730s. In the 1740s, he ‘received direct employment by the [East India] Company’, the historian Barry Crosbie wrote, which allowed him to make fortunes that enabled him to buy the Hazeleigh estate in Essex (Crosbie 2011: 40). At an early age, Eyles Irwin’s father sent him to England to study at a private academy in Chiswick. In 1771, via his family’s connections with the director of the East India Company at the time Laurence Sullivan, Irwin was offered a position in the Madras civil service and a few years later he rose in the EIC ranks to be a ‘superintendent of the company’s grounds within the bounds of Madras’. While in Madras, Irwin succeeded to gain the trust of the governor of Madras, Lord Pigot (George Pigot [1719–1777]), who was appointed to restore the province of Tanjore to the Rajah. Irwin’s ambitions were shaken when Pigot died in his prison in St Thomas Mount in 1777shortly after the Madras Council ousted him. Immediately after Pigot passed away, Irwin was suspended because he didn’t follow the new leadership headed by George Stratton, Henry Brooke and Charles Floyer. Soon after, Irwin returned to Britain by the Red Sea route via Suez, but two years later he was reinstated to the service. In 1783, he returned to India by the Syrian-Mesopotamian routes. In the same year, Lord McCartney (George McCartney), the governor of Madras, endorsed Irwin’s talents to the East India Company. He appointed him to administer the provinces of Tinnivelly and Madurah. In 1793, Irwin was further promoted: he sat on the ‘Secret and Superintending Committee of Supra Cargos for the Company’s Affairs in China’.

Irwin’s colleagues and friends in Madras and Bengal consisted of Britons who had powerful connections and possessed huge wealth both in India and Britain. One such Briton was the rich money speculator Paul Benfield who was stationed in Bengal but was involved with commercial affairs in Madras.