Abstract On April 7, 1989, on the north side of Taipei, magazine editor, free speech activist, and democracy advocate Nylon Cheng ignited himself on fire, defying the authoritarian KMT's attempt to arrest him. The immolation rocked Taiwan and triggered waves of revulsion against the Chiang dynasty, helping to move the nation toward freedom. Thirty-plus years later, Nylon is immortalized in the Nylon Cheng Liberty Foundation Memorial Museum, a site that merges history, activism, and myth-making. Situating our analysis within the Communication sub-fields of museum studies and memory activism, and celebrating Taiwan's transition from authoritarianism to democracy, we argue that Nylon's sacrifice shaped Taiwan's national identity and evolving democratic habits. We approach Nylon's contested legacy by addressing the representational complications driving questions about the roles of free speech and communication in political advocacy, the ways power is embedded in different notions of bravery, how the living co-opt the actions of the dead, how postcolonial legacies impact contemporary Taiwan, and how memory activism perpetuates necessary myths in the name of social justice. While tackling these questions about the representational challenges of memory activism, we introduce Nylon to western readers, for we believe he deserves inclusion in the pantheon of global activists working for justice.

Abstract Russian disinformation activities imitate divisive U.S. political discourse within a polarized social media ecosystem. As part of a multipronged response, U.S. citizens have been urged to increase their personal vigilance and to identify inauthentic messages, hence flagging foreign-made disinformation by studying its content. However, by applying Taylor's concept of “imitation (in)security” to a set of Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency (IRA) Facebook and Instagram advertisements, this article explains why content-centered approaches to combatting disinformation need to be reimagined. Building upon imitation (in)security, we propose that the strength of the IRA disinformation campaign was not its ability to foist falsehoods upon unsuspecting Americans, but, rather, its uncanny imitation of prevalent themes, images, and arguments within American civic life. Our analysis of IRA-generated advertisements targeting U.S. military veterans demonstrates how IRA “trolls” were imitating American communication patterns to amplify existing positions within a deluge of messages marked by polysemy. Our analysis suggests readers should be less concerned by such Russian-made imitations than was suggested in much of the breathless 2016 post-election coverage, for the traction of such disinformation hinges on domestic crises and injustices that long predate Russian interference. Pointing to foreign-made social media content stokes a sense of threat and crisis—the essence of national insecurity and a main objective of the IRA's efforts—yet our actual security weaknesses are homemade.

Abstract The South China Sea is the world’s busiest and most important waterway, serving as the crossroads of global capitalism and the connective tissue of Southeast Asia. With shipping routes, underwater resources, and hundreds of small islands claimed by Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and others, the area stands among the world’s most contested regions. Since 1945, the United States Navy has dominated the area, but that hegemony is now in question as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) becomes more assertive as a rising power. In efforts to justify their clashing claims over the region, the United States and the PRC have launched campaigns against each other, producing a rhetorical crisis that may foreshadow war. To try to make sense of the rhetoric driving this crisis, the first part of this essay unpacks some of the colorful history of the South China Sea—its legacy of rogues, pirates, opium wars, and so on—to argue that it has always been less of a governed and ordered place and more of a transitory and heterodox space crisscrossed by overlapping intentions, designs, and dreams. From this perspective, any nation’s claims to sovereignty are fictions that aspire to be constitutive, albeit by erasing the constitutive claims of others. The second section of the essay then addresses the PRC’s use of “traumatized nationalism” to advocate for its rights in the South China Sea, while the third section tackles the United States’ use of “belligerent humanitarianism” to justify its actions. The essay concludes with an appeal for a postnational version of shared governance, called for in the name of defending the global commons from the militarized encroachments of nation-states.