The revolutionary upheaval currently sweeping across Western democracies on parade under the banner term “woke” calls for rethinking the foundations of ethics and politics. The social justice movement challenges us to fundamentally reconceive our being with one another in society and to re-embrace our profoundest traditions. Focus on identities, however, has become divisive and vexatious. In Social Identities and Social Justice, William Franke indicates a way to exit from the current impasse empoisoning politics in Western democracies by thinking the concept of identity through to its grounds in the non-identity (or undelimited human potential) that all share and that unites rather than divides us. The traditions of negative theology (admission of ignorance of God) and apophasis (self-critical unsaying of one’s own certainties) are leveraged for outlining a truly relational approach to public discourse. We must open our concepts of mutually exclusive identities towards their infinite truth rooted in our unlimited interconnectedness. Doing so, we open our ideas beyond their finite content and open ourselves to building a world together.

This volume platforms scholars working in cultural studies in Asia and responds to the recentering of cultural studies along the diaspora axis. Drawing together numerous authors, The Soul of Asia participates in cultural politics at a local level, but with an international agenda. As a collective, the authors aim to construct a “critical inter-Asian subjectivity,” drawing on local critical intellectual traditions while forging global links with other cultural studies networks. In this way, the collection problematizes “Asia” as a concept in the context of the continent’s postwar economic and cultural resurgence layered over its troubled history between colonized and colonizer.

Threads of the East traces the relationships among aesthetic, anthropological, and political-economic aspects of cultural production and reproduction. Cultural studies scholars and practitioners often begin their inquiries by questioning the common understandings, beliefs, and histories that shape our world. This approach helps explain the complexity of day-to-day life and the practice, habits, text, objects, rituals, and beliefs woven in the social matrix and laden with values and meaning. Culture is an umbrella covering many elements and conveying many meanings. In Asian societies, culture connotes value and respect as a religious duty; moreover, in Asian culture respect is centered around the family and formally demonstrated through language and gestures. The Asian concept of respect influences feelings of responsibility within the family and the ways in which Asian parents and children may set about making decisions.  Knowing Asia is only possible from a multidimensional approach, where problems can arise from misunderstandings, especially because we live in a multicultural world. By learning and understanding different cultures, one can understand why people do things the way they do.

“Wokeism” and, before it, “Political Correctness” are attempts to replace traditional privilege with a new privileged class of special interest groups that have supposedly been discriminated against. In Three Pillars of Wisdom, Dr. Michael Arnheim argues that that there are and always have been only two forms of government: monarchy and oligarchy, regardless of the labels placed on them, and that politics, religion, and law are all fields of contention between “in” and “out” groups.