Duke University Press announced today that positions: asia critique had won the 2015 CELJ (Council of Editors of Learned Journals) Award for Best Special Issue for “reconsidering the 2006 MIT visualizing cultures controversy” in volume 23, issue 1, co-edited by Winnie Won Yin Wong and Jing Wang. This award is given to the best special issue published in 2015. The awards were announced on January 9, 2016, during the 2016 Modern Language Association annual meeting in Austin, TX.
The statement read, in part, that “In April 2006, Chinese students at MIT mounted a protest over the appearance, on an MIT website, of historical Japanese war propaganda…Rather than frame the controversy as Chinese student censorship of US scholarship, contributors turn their attention to a broad interrogation of wartime imagery and the representation of violence, student activism and image-driven nationalism in cyberspace, digital pedagogy and the impact of the Internet on knowledge production. “