Asian history Books

Book SynopsisThe Way That Lives in the Heart is a richly detailed ethnographic analysis of the practice of Chinese religion in the modern, multicultural Southeast Asian city of Penang, Malaysia. The book conveys both an understanding of shared religious practices and orientations and a sense of how individual men and women imagine, represent, and transform popular religious practices within the time and space of their own lives. This work is original in three ways. First, the author investigates Penang Chinese religious practice as a total field of religious practice, suggesting ways in which the religious culture, including spirit-mediumship, has been transformed in the conjuncture with modernity. Second, the book emphasizes the way in which socially marginal spirit mediums use a religious anti-language and unique religious rituals to set themselves apart from mainstream society. Third, the study investigates Penang Chinese religion as the product of a specific history, rather than presenting an overgeneralized overview that claims to represent a single "Chinese religion."Trade Review"This is an excellent study on Chinese spirit medium and on Chinese popular religion in Malaysia."—Asian Folklore Studies"I wholeheartedly endorse the text; its most powerful quality for me is that it is a superbly crafted piece of ethnography that transcends the merely descriptive capacity. The theorizing is sophisticated and self-reflexive, and it offers for reflection a number of critical questions and problematics about how to theorize the persistence of folk/popular religious practices... in an urban, modern capitalist society."—Pacific Affairs"This richly detailed study of spirit mediums manages at once to portray an ethnically mixed society in the throes of modern change, and to illuminate the millennial role of spirit-medium performance in Chinese popular cultural traditions."—Donald S. Sutton, Carnegie Mellon University"Except for the detailed observations of de Groot made in the southern provinces in the late nineteenth century, few reports of spirit mediumship in modern China have appeared in print Jean DeBernardi now contributed a richly detailed ethnographic analysis of the practice of Chinese popular religion and spirit mediums in Penang, Malaysia. This newly added title regarding Malaysian Chinese spirit mediumship is most welcome, and will be beneficial to both the general reader and the specialist." —Journal of Chinese Religions

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Book SynopsisThe popularity of pornography is predicated on the idea that those participating have given their consent. That is what allows the porn industry to dominate the media economy today, generating staggering sums of money. Looking at behind-the-scenes negotiations and abuses in Japan's adult video industry, author Akiko Takeyama challenges this pervasive notion with the idea of "involuntary consent." This phenomenon, she argues, is ubiquitous, not only in the porn industry, but in our everyday lives. And yet modern society, built on beliefs of autonomy, free choice, and equality, renders it all but invisible. Japan's AV industry alone generates a conservatively estimated $5 billion a year. In recent years, it has drawn public attention, and criticism, because of a series of arrests and trials of former talent agency owners and executives. This led to a report calling for a systematic investigation of the industry over the issue of "forced performance." This report has had ripple effects beyond Japan, as the US Department of State subsequently also cited forced performance as a human rights violation. Using this moment as an entry point, Takeyama argues that contract-making writ large is based on fundamentally dualistic terms, implying consent and pleasure on the one hand, and coercion and pain on the other. Because sex workers are employed on a contract basis, they fall outside of the purview of standard labor and employment laws. As a result, they are frequently pressured to comply with what production companies (mostly run by men) expect and often demand. In this ethnography of Japan's porn industry, Akiko Takeyama investigates the paradox of involuntary consent in modern liberal democratic societies. Taking consent as her starting point, Takeyama illustrates the nuances of contract making and the legal structures, or lack thereof, that govern Japan's adult video and sex entertainment industries.Trade Review"Takeyama elegantly sifts through and complicates the seemingly straightforward, transparent, and transactional nature of relations in this industry by arguing for what she calls 'involuntary consent.' In doing so, she is able to sketch the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in Japanese porn's various interactions. Amidst the emergence of porn studies, this book exemplifies the value of an incisive anthropological inquiry, a sensitive eye, and a compassionate yet trenchant analysis. The book provides a valuable case study that can pave the way to comparative, transnational and global scholarly inquiries into porn industries."—Martin F. Manalansan, University of Minnesota"Involuntary Consent is not only a fine-grained ethnography of porn work in Japan, but also a brilliant analysis of the increasingly ambiguous nature of the work contract that Takeyama astutely theorizes as symptomatic of late liberalism in crisis. Scholars who do not work narrowly on labor, pornography, or Japan will also find this book relevant."—Gabriella Lukacs, University of Pittsburgh"Offering the concept of 'involuntary consent,' Takeyama masterfully taps into the space once illegible, that which falls in between consent and coercion. She uses the Japanese adult video industry, a compelling work environment to examine in its own right, as a case study. In a world where we are fixated with "consent" and are taught to make sure to express it or obtain it from others, we have yet to critically unpack it. This is why Takeyama's work is necessary and important. It is theoretically influential, engagingly written, and will easily become a classic. A must read."—L. Ayu Saraswati, author of Scarred: A Feminist Journey Through Pain"A provocative and insightful addition to anti-porn vs. sex-positive feminist debates."—Publishers Weekly"In this extraordinary book, Takeyama pulls the reader into a billion-dollar industry that is often hidden in plain sight, using Japanese pornography to theorize the intersection of gender, labor, power, and consent. With vivid and empathetic writing, she sidesteps any simplistic notion of exploitation or empowerment, and instead describes complex social structures that simultaneously promise and foreclose opportunities. Involuntary Consent provides a brilliant and recognizable portrait of laborers seeking opportunities from compromised positions. Takeyama's balance of insightful analysis and evocative ethnographic writing are a stunning achievement."—Allison Alexy, University of Michigan"Involuntary Consent offers a sharp analysis of the labor politics of Japan's adult video industry that pushes far beyond stale pornography debates centered on questions of representation. Rigorously researched and a highly compelling read, the book challenges dualistic understandings of coercion and consent in liberal democratic societies and introduces fresh questions of gender and sexuality into discussions of precarious labor."—Lieba Faier, University of California, Los Angeles"Choice and consent are often pitted against force and violence in debates and studies about sex work. In this study, Akiko Takeyama reminds us that this binarism misses the point. Through ethnographic research amongst adult video performers in Japan, Involuntary Consent skillfully demonstrates that individual decisions and choices are inseparable from contexts of structural inequality and liberal contractual relations. This is an invaluable study, not only for nuancing and complicating the intersections of coercion and consent/ structure and agency but also for delivering profound insights into the muddle of gendered sexual labour in the pornography industry. An important new contribution to the field of global sex work studies."—Kamala Kempadoo, York University"Involuntary Consent is an ethnographic tour de force. Takeyama offers a masterful and nuanced analysis of consent within Japan's adult video industry, drawing from voices of AV performers, agents, directors, videographers and fans. Anyone interested in voluntary versus forced labor debates, or with legal illusions of rational choice, must read this book. It provides critical insights about liberalism, precarity, and gendered compromises."—Nicole Constable, University of Pittsburgh"This monograph's worth of thick anthropological description is both enlightening and appalling. In the end,Involuntary Consent is at its best when it shows howunremarkable the sex work of the AV industry is—just another lousy gig in a society intractably structured by sexism, widening economic inequality, and neoliberal democracy where no truly good options for individuals exist in the first place. Highly recommended."—C. Brienza, CHOICETable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Involuntary Consent 2. The Actress 3. The Management of Girls 4. The Industry 5. The Male Fan Epilogue

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Book SynopsisDrawing on a rich set of original oral histories conducted with retired factory workers from industrial centers across the country, this book provides a bottom-up examination of working class participation in factory life during socialist and reform-era China. Huaiyin Li offers a series of new interpretations that challenge, revise, and enrich the existing scholarship on factory politics and worker performance during the Maoist years, including the nature of the Maoist state as seen in the operation of power relations on the shop floor, as well as the origins and dynamics of industrial enterprise reforms in the post-Mao era. In sharp contrast with the ideologically driven goal of promoting grassroots democracy or manifesting workers' status as the masters of the workplace, Li argues that Maoist era state-owned enterprises operated effectively to turn factory workers into a well-disciplined labor force through a complex set of formal and informal institutions that functioned to generate an equilibrium in power relations and work norms. The enterprise reforms of the 1980s and 1990s undermined this preexisting equilibrium, catalyzing the transformation of the industrial workforce from predominantly privileged workers in state-owned enterprises to precarious migrant workers of rural origins hired by private firms. Ultimately, this comprehensive and textured history provides an analytically astute new picture of everyday factory life in the world's largest manufacturing powerhouse.Trade Review"The Master in Bondageis not a simple history. In each chapter,HuaiyinLisystematically—and convincingly—makes a substantial contribution to the history of labor in China, challenging key tenets of what have become conventional understandings of industrial relations during the Maoist era."—Joel Andreas, John Hopkins University"Huaiyin Li presents a treasure trove of oral history which can never be collected again, and which goes way beyond the documentary record to add so much that is significant, new, and surprising to our picture of the Chinese working class at a crucial juncture in its re-formation."—Marc Blecher, Oberlin College

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Book SynopsisGuangxi, a region on China's southern border with Vietnam, has a large population of ethnic minorities and a history of rebellion and intergroup conflict. In the summer of 1968, during the high tide of the Cultural Revolution, it became notorious as the site of the most severe and extensive violence observed anywhere in China during that period of upheaval. Several cities saw urban combat resembling civil war, while waves of mass killings in rural communities generated enormous death tolls. More than one hundred thousand died in a few short months. These events have been chronicled in sensational accounts that include horrific descriptions of gruesome murders, sexual violence, and even cannibalism. Only recently have scholars tried to explain why Guangxi was so much more violent than other regions. With evidence from a vast collection of classified materials compiled during an investigation by the Chinese government in the 1980s, this book reconsiders explanations that draw parallels with ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, Bosnia, and other settings. It reveals mass killings as the byproduct of an intense top-down mobilization of rural militia against a stubborn factional insurgency, resembling brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in a variety of settings. Moving methodically through the evidence, Andrew Walder provides a groundbreaking new analysis of one the most shocking chapters of the Cultural Revolution.Trade Review"The world's leading expert on China's Cultural Revolution has written another breathtaking book. By examining one of the darkest episodes of human history, Andrew Walder not only provides a new explanation for conflict in China but also advances general theories on violence during civil war."—Yuhua Wang, author of The Rise and Fall of Imperial China"This important and unsettling study of the Cultural Revolution in Guangxi lays bare the dark side of China's authoritarian political system. Through careful analysis of newly available primary sources, Walder convincingly connects the horrific violence of that time and place not to ideological or ethnic differences, but to military-civilian factionalism that permeated all levels of government. A party-state known for exerting control, when pressed, could spawn untold conflict and cruelty."—Elizabeth J. Perry, Harvard University"Andrew Walder is one of the world's most distinguished analysts of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and his new book breaks apart numerous myths. Drawing on extraordinarily rich sources from Guangxi province, Walder shows that violence tore apart the countryside as well as the city, and that factionalism could give way to deeper splits within the party. Above all, he adds analysis of ethnic division to our knowledge of this period. This is disturbing, field-making reading."—Rana Mitter, Oxford University"This work is yet another vital contribution to the study of the Cultural Revolution by the sociologist Andrew Walder.... It will be essential reading for scholars of the People's Republic and an accessible source, for informed lay readers and students, on the horrors of the Cultural Revolution."—Donald S. Sutton, China Quarterly"What is unique about Civil War in Guangxi... is its refreshing emphasis on the geopolitical dimension of the Cultural Revolution's complex twists and turns, concretely tying the tragic unfolding of political processes in China to the war operation in Vietnam. As such, this book is not only of pivotal interest to scholars of collective mobilization, political violence, and Chinese communism, but also firmly places itself in conversation with global and transnational sociology and scholarship on the US empire in the post-war era."—Yueran Zhang, Social ForcesTable of ContentsPrologue 1. Puzzles 2. Origins 3. Spread 4. Stalemate 5. Escalation 6. Suppression 7. Narratives 8. Analysis Epilogue: Epilogue Appendix: The Sources and Dataset

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Book SynopsisOnce the capital of the five-hundred-year Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1897) and the Taehan Empire (1897–1910), the city of Seoul posed unique challenges to urban reform and modernization under Japanese colonial rule in the early twentieth century, constrained by the labyrinthian built environment of the old Korean capital. Colonial authorities attempted to employ a strategy of "erasure"—monumental Japanese architecture was, for instance, superimposed upon existing palace structures—to articulate to colonized Korean subjects the transition from the pre-modern to the modern, and the naturalization of colonial rule as inevitable historical change. Drawing from and analyzing a wide range of materials, from architecture and photography to print media and sound recordings, City of Sediments shows how Seoul became a site to articulate a new mode of time—modernity—that defined the place of the colonized in accordance with the progression of history, and how the underbelly of the city, latent places of darkness filled with chatters of the alleyway, challenged this visual language of power. To do so, Se-Mi Oh builds an inventive new model of history where discrete events do not unfold one after the other, but rather one in which histories layer atop each other like sediment, allowing a new map of colonial Seoul to emerge, a map where the material traces of the city are overlapping, with vibrant residues of earlier times defiantly visible among the superimposed signs of modernity and colonial domination.Trade Review"City of Sediments assembles its kaleidoscope of colonial Seoul from ever-more-surprising shards: from renovations and ruins, cacophonous sign boards and comedians' banter, a streetcar's blurring speed and the metronome sound of a night patrol's wooden batons. Oh conjures the lost city while dissolving every prior notion of how history should be written and read, and leaves us with a revivified way of not only meeting the past, but our own place and time."—Susan Choi, author of Trust Exercise and Winner of the 2019 National Book Award"Bold and ambitious, beautifully written and rigorously argued, City of Sediments is a pathbreaking book that provides a new framework to explore the history of Seoul. Crisscrossing the vast range of fields—cultural history, visual arts, architecture, film, and media—it also builds an archive of extraordinarily rich and diverse materials, that include those that experiment with new forms of writing, those that capture the fleeting moments of new experiences, and those that have usually been considered inconsequential and insignificant."—Namhee Lee, author of Memory Construction and the Politics of Time in Neoliberal South Korea"City of Sediments is one of the most sophisticated pieces of scholarship on the colonial period in Korea that has been written in the past two decades. It eloquently captures the nuances and dynamics of the history of colonial life in Seoul through the lens of sedimentary history, paving the way for rethinking how history should be represented and studied."—Albert L. Park, author of Building a Heaven on Earth: Religion, Activism and Protest in Japanese Occupied Korea"City of Sediments does an eloquent job of situating colonial Seoul in various theoretical contexts to scrutinize the uneven textures of urban landscape and the emotional commodification of everyday objects. Se-Mi Oh's voluminous reflections of the past, and her creative analysis of photography, signages, and aural sensibilities, set the gold standard for future historians."—Suk-Young Kim, author of K-pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia PerformanceTable of ContentsIntroduction: Introduction 1. Figuring History through Architecture: An Urban Synesthesia 2. Ritual, History, Memory: Photographing Kojong's Funeral of 1919 3. Signage and Language: Reading Hanja/Kanji 4. Oral/Aural Community: Sin Pul-ch'ul's Language Play and Deception 5. The City on the Move: The Ordinary and the Infraordinary 6. Nightly Reports: Playing under Surveillance Epilogue: A Time of Rehearsal

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Book SynopsisReceived wisdom has it that Buddhism disappeared from India, the land of its birth, between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, long forgotten until British colonial scholars re-discovered it in the early 1800s. Its full-fledged revival, so the story goes, only occurred in 1956, when the Indian civil rights pioneer Dr. B.R. Ambedkar converted to Buddhism along with half a million of his Dalit (formerly "untouchable") followers. This, however, is only part of the story. Dust on the Throne reframes discussions about the place of Buddhism in the subcontinent from the early nineteenth century onwards, uncovering the integral, yet unacknowledged, role that Indians played in the making of modern global Buddhism in the century prior to Ambedkar's conversion, and the numerous ways that Buddhism gave powerful shape to modern Indian history. Through an extensive examination of disparate materials held at archives and temples across South Asia, Douglas Ober explores Buddhist religious dynamics in an age of expanding colonial empires, intra-Asian connectivity, and the histories of Buddhism produced by nineteenth and twentieth century Indian thinkers. While Buddhism in contemporary India is often disparaged as being little more than tattered manuscripts and crumbling ruins, this book opens new avenues for understanding its substantial socio-political impact and intellectual legacy.Trade Review"This is the first comprehensive study in any language of the revival of interest in Buddhism in nineteenth and twentieth-century India. It transforms the way we view modern Indian religious and political life. Through careful archival investigation, Douglas Ober uncovers numerous sources and topics that have been ignored or dealt with in piecemeal fashion. He uses this array of materials to create a compelling argument for the vital of importance of Buddhism in modern Indian religious life, politics, intellectual history, and culture. By highlighting the contributions of Indian scholars, advocates, and practitioners to the revival of Buddhism in twentieth-century India, Ober gives us a much more accurate picture of modern global Buddhism. This is a major, foundational contribution to religious and Buddhist history."—Richard Jaffe, author of Seeking Sakyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism"This is a book I've been waiting for—a powerful account of the contestations and challenges that marked the return of Buddhism to the public sphere. It forces us to think of the role of human agency in shaping the present and future in India—perhaps even in the world."—Uma Chakravarti, author of The Social Dimensions of Early Buddhism"It is a fantastic read, almost like a detective novel in parts, and you turn the page wondering how Buddhism was discovered, how it fared in various contexts. Douglas Ober's mastery of sources, his adept linking of various geographies, ideas, and events are so effortlessly done that they belie the immense labor and reading and writing that have no doubt gone into the making of this book."—V Geetha, author of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India "This splendid book overturns the standard but faulty story of Buddhism's supposed disappearance from India by the thirteenth century. It completely recasts our understanding of modern Buddhism and its role in nineteenth and twentieth-century India. A marvelous combination of history, philosophy, and story-telling, Dust on the Throne is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand Buddhism in our world today."—Evan Thompson, author ofWaking, Dreaming, Being andWhy I Am Not a Buddhist"An engrossing and lively account of how modern India 'rediscovered' and re-engaged with Buddhism in the last two centuries, featuring a cast of compelling historical characters.Going far beyond standard assumptions and understandings about the decline and revival of Buddhism in India,Dust on the Throne is a must-read for all who are interested in south Asian history, both recent and ancient."—Tony Joseph, author of Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From"Dust on the Throne offers a new perspective on the history of Buddhism in India during the colonial period and early years of Independence. Marshalling an array of evidence that foregrounds the role of individuals and institutions (some known, some forgotten) in the context of subcontinental and global networks, it dispels many long-cherished notions about Buddhism's decline and revival in its homeland, offering a convincing alternative narrative."—Upinder Singh, author of History of Ancient and Early Medieval India"Douglas Ober's Dust on the Throne weaves a fascinating history of individuals, institutions, and events that animated modern Buddhism. The book provides rare insights into a range offorgotten Indianswhose contributions were as impressive as those of better-known colonials.Its exploration of the footprint of Buddhist discourses among the masses is equally captivating. This will remain a definitive study on the many streams that constituted the quest for Buddhism inModern India."—Nayanjot Lahiri, author of Ashoka in Ancient India"[Dust on the Throne] is vast and dense, shining light on many of the Indian historians, scholars, translators, ethnographers, and laborers whose engagement with ancient and modern Buddhism galvanized 19th- and 20th-century public discourse. Rather than fragmented, however, the confluence of geographies, perspectives, and demographics demonstrate how dynamic and complex local expertise and agency in the resurgence of Buddhism within India have been."—Liesl Schwabe, Los Angeles Review of Books"Ober's exhaustive survey assembles Buddhism's disparate histories from different regions of modern India and contextualizes the formation of its multiple stands. He effectively dismantles the idea of European discovery of Buddhism and challenges the overemphasis on the contribution of Dharmapala and Ambedkar's scholarship."—Abishek Singh Amar, Tricycle"Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India, an erudite study by the historian Douglas Ober, is an exception to the brahmin-centric trend, and an outstanding intervention for many reasons. Right from its thoughtful title – which captures the deep history and 'revival' of the region's Buddhist past – the book tells us a different story than the brahmin-centric narratives of so much other scholarship. Ober shows how the widespread notion that Buddhism in the Subcontinent had died by the thirteenth century or earlier, and showed no trace of life into the modern period, is at most a 'useful fiction', if not a foolish conclusion outright."—Gajendran Ayyathurai, Himal SouthasianTable of Contents0. Introduction 1. The Agony of Memory 2. Dispelling Darkness 3. Banyan Tree Buddhism 4. Brahmanizing Buddhism 5. The Snake and the Mongoose 6. When the Buddha met Marx 7. The Buddha Nation Conclusion: Conclusion

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Book SynopsisDrawing on a rich set of original oral histories conducted with retired factory workers from industrial centers across the country, this book provides a bottom-up examination of working class participation in factory life during socialist and reform-era China. Huaiyin Li offers a series of new interpretations that challenge, revise, and enrich the existing scholarship on factory politics and worker performance during the Maoist years, including the nature of the Maoist state as seen in the operation of power relations on the shop floor, as well as the origins and dynamics of industrial enterprise reforms in the post-Mao era. In sharp contrast with the ideologically driven goal of promoting grassroots democracy or manifesting workers' status as the masters of the workplace, Li argues that Maoist era state-owned enterprises operated effectively to turn factory workers into a well-disciplined labor force through a complex set of formal and informal institutions that functioned to generate an equilibrium in power relations and work norms. The enterprise reforms of the 1980s and 1990s undermined this preexisting equilibrium, catalyzing the transformation of the industrial workforce from predominantly privileged workers in state-owned enterprises to precarious migrant workers of rural origins hired by private firms. Ultimately, this comprehensive and textured history provides an analytically astute new picture of everyday factory life in the world's largest manufacturing powerhouse.Trade Review"The Master in Bondageis not a simple history. In each chapter,HuaiyinLisystematically—and convincingly—makes a substantial contribution to the history of labor in China, challenging key tenets of what have become conventional understandings of industrial relations during the Maoist era."—Joel Andreas, John Hopkins University"Huaiyin Li presents a treasure trove of oral history which can never be collected again, and which goes way beyond the documentary record to add so much that is significant, new, and surprising to our picture of the Chinese working class at a crucial juncture in its re-formation."—Marc Blecher, Oberlin College

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Book SynopsisIn 2014, after a decade of political turmoil, the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) carried out Thailand''s 13th coup since the country''s transformation from absolute to constitutional monarchy in 1932. Though the NCPO promised to restore the rule of law, justicelong tenuous in Thailanddisappeared entirely. The legal system was used to criminalize the thoughts and actions of democratic dissidents, facilitate extrajudicial violence, and guarantee impunity for the coup and crimes by state officials. Combining legal and historical scholarship and long-term courtroom observation, Dictatorship on Trial traces the legal, social, and political impacts of authoritarianism, and foregrounds court decisions as both a history of repression and a site in which to imagine future justice.Organized chronologically across the five years of the NCPO regime, each chapter takes up a different political case and enumerates the ways in which political activists were made vulnerab

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Book SynopsisThe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the turbulent end of China's imperial system, violent revolutionary movements, and the fraught establishment of a republican government. During these decades of reform and revolution, millions of far-flung "overseas Chinese" remained connected to Chinese domestic movements. This book uses rich archival sources and a new network approach to examine how reform and revolution in North American Chinatowns influenced political change in China and the transpacific Chinese diaspora from 1898 to 1918. Historian Zhongping Chen focuses on the transnational activities of Kang Youwei, Sun Yat-sen, and other politicians, especially their mobilization of the Chinese in North America to join reformist or revolutionary parties in patriotic fights for a Western-style constitutional monarchy or republic in China. These new reformist and revolutionary parties, including the first Chinese women's political organization, led transpacific movements against American anti-Chinese racism in 1905 and supported constitutional reform and the Republican Revolution in China around 1911, achieving transpacific expansion through innovative use of cross-cultural political ideologies and intertwined institutional and interpersonal networks. Through network analysis of the origins, interrelations, and influences of Chinese reform and revolution in North America, this book makes a significant contribution to modern Chinese history, Asian American and Asian Canadian history, and Chinese diasporic scholarship.Trade Review"Zhongping Chen has written the most authoritative and excellent work in English on the dynamics of the radical transpacific movements led by Kang Youwei and Sun Yat-sen, challenging misperceptions and misinformation about this period."—Sue Fawn Chung, University of Nevada, Las Vegas"Long overdue, this deeply researched book embeds Kang Youwei and Sun Yatsen's North American journeys in the dynamic networks of overseas Chinese who mobilized amid the fall of the Qing dynasty. Using an authoritative array of Chinese-language records, Zhongping Chen adeptly corrects longstanding myths and recovers into historical visibility the patriotic activists who campaigned to save their homeland."—Madeline Y. Hsu, University of Texas at Austin"Zhongping Chen uses network analysis to shed dramatic new light on how the North American Chinese diaspora interacted with the republican movement in China to help topple the fading Qing dynasty. A new landmark of history and methods in the understanding of the critical post-1911 period in Chinese political life."—Mark Granovetter, Stanford University

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Book SynopsisJapan's contemporary struggle with low fertility rates is a well-known issue, as are the country's efforts to bolster their population in order to address attendant socioeconomic challenges. However, though this anxiety about and discourse around population is thought of as relatively recent phenomenon, government and medical intervention in reproduction and fertility are hardly new in Japan. The "population problem (jinko mondai)" became a buzzword in the country over a century ago, in the 1910s, with a growing call among Japanese social scientists and social reformers to solve what were seen as existential demographic issues. In this book, Sujin Lee traces the trajectory of population discourses in interwar and wartime Japan, and positions them as critical sites where competing visions of modernity came into tension. Lee destabilizes the essentialized notions of motherhood and population by dissecting gender norms, modern knowledge, and government practices, each of which played a crucial role in valorizing, regulating, and mobilizing women's maternal bodies and responsibilities in the name of population governance. Bringing a feminist perspective and Foucauldian theory to bear on the history of Japan's wartime scientific fascism, Lee shows how anxieties over demographics have undergirded justifications for ethnonationalism and racism, colonialism and imperialism, and gender segregation for much of Japan's modern history.Trade Review"The pronatalist slogan, Umeyo! Fuyaseyo! (Give birth! Grow [the Nation]!), was ubiquitous during the heyday of Japanese imperialism, and the targeted population of 100 million was reached a half century later in 1970. Today, Japan has one of the fastest aging and shrinking populations among post-industrial countries, and the postwar democratic state can no longer exercise autocratic control over citizens' reproductive lives. Through her careful analysis of early 20th century birth-control 'research societies' and their discursive matrices, Lee complicates the socio-political construction of marriage, motherhood, and modernity in Japan that continues to shape the intersecting discourses of demography today in Japan."—Jennifer Robertson, University of Michigan"Sujin Lee's Wombs of Empire provides a brilliant analysis of interwar and wartime Japan's biopolitics with a focus on the discourse on birth-control and its pivotal role in the problematization of population. Deftly interweaving a Foucauldian analysis and the intricacies of modern Japanese history,Lee illuminates the centrality of biopolitics for Japan's modernity or modernity at large. A tour de force."—Katsuya Hirano, University of California, Los Angeles"Wombs of Empire is a compelling and rigorous study of the politics of population control offering a multi-scalar analysis that traverses discourses of gendered and racialized sexual practices, linking individualized morality and hygiene to national population control through eugenics policies and the criminalization of birth control. With erudition and eloquence, Sujin Lee forwards an illuminating and fascinating analysis of Japanese biopolitics within a transnational context which spans debates ranging from neo-Malthusianism, leftist birth control movements, eugenic feminism and calls for proletarian birth strikes."—Setsu Shigematsu, University of California, RiversideTable of ContentsIntroduction: Population: A Discursive Site of En-gendering Life 1. The Population Problem and Utopian Remedies 2. Voluntary Motherhood: The Feminist Politics of Birth Control 3. Scientific and Imperialist Solutions to Overpopulation 4. Building a Biopolitical State: The Mobilization of Health for Total War 5. "Fertile Womb Battalion": The Gender and Racial Politics of Motherhood Epilogue: The Continued Politics of the "Population Problem"

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Book SynopsisFrom the 1850s until the mid-twentieth century, a period marked by global conflicts and anxiety about dwindling resources and closing opportunities after decades of expansion, the frontier became a mirror for historically and geographically specific hopes and fears. From Asia to Europe and the Americas, countries around the world engaged with new interpretations of empire and the deployment of science and technology to aid frontier development in extreme environments. Through a century of political turmoil and war, China nevertheless is the only nation to successfully navigate the twentieth century with its imperial territorial expanse largely intact. In Birth of the Geopolitical Age, Shellen Xiao Wu demonstrates how global examples of frontier settlements refracted through China's unique history and informed the making of the modern Chinese state. Wu weaves a narrative that moves through time and space, the lives of individuals, and empires' rise and fall and rebirth, to show how the subsequent reshaping of Chinese geopolitical ambitions in the twentieth century, and the global transformation of frontiers into colonial laboratories, continues to reorder global power dynamics in East Asia and the wider world to this day.Trade Review"Wu's Birth of the Geopolitical Age is the most exciting study in the history of science, empire, and nation I have read in recent years. The book is brilliantly conceptualized, tracing the circulation and translation of geographical and agricultural sciences among the United States, Germany, Japan, and particularly China. Its central idea, geo-modernity, is an illuminating concept that will be widely referenced. Based on extensive research in multiple languages, Birth of the Geopolitical Age tells a rich narrative about a wide range of historical actors, institutions, and discourses. The book is a marvel of scholarly ambition, erudition, and compression. Despite its impressive scope, the narrative is exceptionally clear and readable. This superb book is a model study in global and comparative history. I can't wait to recommend it to every historian interested in the topic."—Fa-ti Fan, Binghamton University"By recounting the roles of academic disciplines and individual intellectuals in forming a spatial awareness of agricultural development and natural resource exploitation occurring in places distant from the corridors of power, Shellen Xiao Wu presents the pursuit of geopolitical power by economic and political elites through the construction of new forms of empire. Comparing and connecting her narrative of China's twentieth-century transformation with those in the U.S., Germany, and Japan, she offers a new global historical perspective on the emergence of China's contemporary importance."—R. Bin Wong, University of California, Los Angeles"Shellen Wu has written an eye-opening study that centers China in the history of expansion into the great inland spaces by the world powers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Readers will see the age of empire anew."—Charles S. Maier, Harvard UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction: Why Empires Matter in the Age of the Nation-State 1. 1852 and the Afterlife of Revolutions 2. The Experimental Grounds of New Imperialism 3. In Search of New Frontiers 4. Versailles and the Birth of the Geopolitical Age 5. Rural Development and Its Discontents 6. The Devil's Handwriting 7. Cold War New Empires

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Book SynopsisThis book focuses on the lives, struggles, and contrasting perspectives of the 60,000 workers, military administrators, and technical staff employed in the largest, most strategic industry of the Nationalist government, the armaments industry based in the wartime capital, Chongqing. The author argues that China's arsenal workers participated in three interlocked conflicts between 1937 and 1953: a war of national liberation, a civil war, and a class war. The work adds to the scholarship on the Chinese revolution, which has previously focused primarily on rural China, showing how workers’ alienation from the military officers directing the arsenals eroded the legitimacy of the Nationalist regime and how the Communists mobilized working-class support in Chongqing. Moreover, in emphasizing the urban, working-class, and nationalist components of the 1949 revolution, the author demonstrates the multiple sources of workers’ identities and thus challenges previous studies that have exclusively stressed workers’ particularistic or regional identities.Trade Review"Howard does not outright refute existing interpretations but rather convincingly demonstrates that Chinese arsenal workers developed regional, class-based, and national identities simultaneously."—CHOICE"...[T]his readable work provides important insight into the Nationalist defence sector during the Sino-Japanese War, and is a significant contribution to the study of Chinese labour in wartime Nationalist China."—The International History Review"Altogether, this is a fine achievement that succeeds in significantly redrawing the lines of debate within the now quite extensive historiography of Chinese labor."—American Historical Review"Workers at War is a finely researched and richly documented book based on extensive archive research and oral interviews....[Howard]'s skillful documentary research of using many unexplored archives, local, national, and international, sources, his integration of social and political theories, and his adoption of interdisciplinary approaches make his book an exemplary work of scholarship."—International Labor and Working Class History"The book makes a valuable contribution to the literature on labor history but will also appeal to those who are interested more generally in the history of modern China. It provides rich documentation about the political struggles between the Guomingdang and Chinese Communist Party in the periods before and after the War of Resistance against the Japanese invaders....One cannot be but impressed by the author's achievement in assembling such voluminous historical data."—Labor History"This major new contribution brings both theoretical sophistication and imaginative use of sources to the study of a particular, but important, segment of China's working class."—xJOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY HISTORY"This is a landmark work."—Journal of Social History

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Book SynopsisOne of the most durable figures in modern history, the peasant has long been a site of intense intellectual and political debate. Yet underlying much of this literature is the assumption that peasants simply existed everywhere, a general if not generic group, traced backward from modernity to antiquity. Focused on the transformation of Panjab during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book accounts for the colonial origins of global capitalism through a radical history of the concept of "the peasant," demonstrating how seemingly fixed hierarchies were in fact produced, legitimized, and challenged within the preeminent agricultural region of South Asia. Navyug Gill uncovers how and why British officials and ascendant Panjabis disrupted existing forms of identity and occupation to generate a new agrarian order in the countryside. The notion of the hereditary caste peasant engaged in timeless cultivation thus emerged, paradoxically, as a result of a dramatic series of conceptual, juridical, and monetary divisions. Far from archaic relics, this book ultimately reveals both the landowning peasant and landless laborer to be novel political subjects forged through the encounter between colonialism and struggles over culture and capital within Panjabi society. Questions of progress, exploitation and knowledge come to animate the vernacular operations of power. With this history, Gill brings difference and contingency to understandings of the global past in order to re-think the itinerary of comparative political economy as well as alternative possibilities for emancipatory futures.Trade Review"In creative and challenging ways, Gill leads postcolonial analyses of colonial governmentality into an engagement with the history of capitalism, thereby opening the histories of capitalism and histories beyond the North Atlantic to each other."—Andrew Sartori, New York University"Labors of Division is an outstanding investigation of colonial market governance seen through the pivotal Punjabi peasant, elaborating postcolonial readings of political economy, the historiography of capitalism, and vernacular modernities. Gill compellingly illuminates the transformation of agrarian life-worlds through the workings and inhabitings of economic logics, from processes of caste standardization and hierarchization to the problem of indebtedness."—Ritu Birla, University of Toronto"A luminous contribution to the itineraries of global capitalism! Gill upends agrarian political economy by dislodging the sedimented figure of the "peasant", revealing with rigor and verve how colonial categories of rule petrified amorphous social relations to land in British India, producing a caste-based division of labor and laborers with lasting and pernicious consequences for Panjab's subaltern classes."—Vinay Gidwani, University of MinnesotaTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction In Pursuit of Peasant Histories and Futures in Colonial Panjab 1. A Rule of Benevolence? Revenue, Knowledge, and the Accumulation of Difference 2. Naming the Peasant: Colonial Jurisprudence and the Binding of Identity and Occupation 3. The Logic and Illogic of Debt: Reason and Capitalist Volatility in the New Agrarian Market 4. Horizons of Hierarchy: Caste, Landlessness, and the Limits of Religious Conversion 5. Producing a Theory of Inadequacy: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and the Political Economy of Comparison Conclusion: Global History and the Impermanence of Hierarchy Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisJapan's contemporary struggle with low fertility rates is a well-known issue, as are the country's efforts to bolster their population in order to address attendant socioeconomic challenges. However, though this anxiety about and discourse around population is thought of as relatively recent phenomenon, government and medical intervention in reproduction and fertility are hardly new in Japan. The "population problem (jinko mondai)" became a buzzword in the country over a century ago, in the 1910s, with a growing call among Japanese social scientists and social reformers to solve what were seen as existential demographic issues. In this book, Sujin Lee traces the trajectory of population discourses in interwar and wartime Japan, and positions them as critical sites where competing visions of modernity came into tension. Lee destabilizes the essentialized notions of motherhood and population by dissecting gender norms, modern knowledge, and government practices, each of which played a crucial role in valorizing, regulating, and mobilizing women's maternal bodies and responsibilities in the name of population governance. Bringing a feminist perspective and Foucauldian theory to bear on the history of Japan's wartime scientific fascism, Lee shows how anxieties over demographics have undergirded justifications for ethnonationalism and racism, colonialism and imperialism, and gender segregation for much of Japan's modern history.Trade Review"The pronatalist slogan, Umeyo! Fuyaseyo! (Give birth! Grow [the Nation]!), was ubiquitous during the heyday of Japanese imperialism, and the targeted population of 100 million was reached a half century later in 1970. Today, Japan has one of the fastest aging and shrinking populations among post-industrial countries, and the postwar democratic state can no longer exercise autocratic control over citizens' reproductive lives. Through her careful analysis of early 20th century birth-control 'research societies' and their discursive matrices, Lee complicates the socio-political construction of marriage, motherhood, and modernity in Japan that continues to shape the intersecting discourses of demography today in Japan."—Jennifer Robertson, University of Michigan"Sujin Lee's Wombs of Empire provides a brilliant analysis of interwar and wartime Japan's biopolitics with a focus on the discourse on birth-control and its pivotal role in the problematization of population. Deftly interweaving a Foucauldian analysis and the intricacies of modern Japanese history,Lee illuminates the centrality of biopolitics for Japan's modernity or modernity at large. A tour de force."—Katsuya Hirano, University of California, Los Angeles"Wombs of Empire is a compelling and rigorous study of the politics of population control offering a multi-scalar analysis that traverses discourses of gendered and racialized sexual practices, linking individualized morality and hygiene to national population control through eugenics policies and the criminalization of birth control. With erudition and eloquence, Sujin Lee forwards an illuminating and fascinating analysis of Japanese biopolitics within a transnational context which spans debates ranging from neo-Malthusianism, leftist birth control movements, eugenic feminism and calls for proletarian birth strikes."—Setsu Shigematsu, University of California, RiversideTable of ContentsIntroduction: Population: A Discursive Site of En-gendering Life 1. The Population Problem and Utopian Remedies 2. Voluntary Motherhood: The Feminist Politics of Birth Control 3. Scientific and Imperialist Solutions to Overpopulation 4. Building a Biopolitical State: The Mobilization of Health for Total War 5. "Fertile Womb Battalion": The Gender and Racial Politics of Motherhood Epilogue: The Continued Politics of the "Population Problem"

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Book SynopsisAfter the trauma of mass violence and massive population movements around the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, both new nation states faced the enormous challenge of creating new national narratives, symbols, and histories, as well as a new framework for their political life. While leadership in India claimed the anti-colonial movement, Gandhi, and a civilizational legacy in the subcontinent, the new political elite in Pakistan were faced with a more complex task: to carve out a separate and distinct Muslim history and political tradition from a millennium long history of cultural and religious interaction, mixing, and coexistence. Drawing on a rich archive of diverse sources, Ali Qasmi traces the complex development of ideas of citizenship and national belonging in the postcolonial Muslim state, offering a nuanced and sweeping history of the country's formative period. Qasmi paints a rich picture of the long, arduous, and often conflict-ridden process of writing a democratic constitution of Pakistan, while simultaneously narrating the invention of a range of new rituals of state—such as the exact color of the flag, the precise date of birth of the national poet of Pakistan, and the observation of Eid as a "national festival"—providing an illuminating analysis of the practices of being Pakistani, and a new portrait of Muslim history in the subcontinent.Trade Review"Complementing the burgeoning scholarly literature on citizenship, Qasmi's insightful and erudite book foregrounds Pakistan's efforts to frame a conception of citizenship through a range of symbolic trappings of national sovereignty such as the anthem, archives, flag, museums and much more. Based on extensive research in the infamously inaccessible national archives, he demonstrates the myriad contestations that continue to shape conceptions of citizenship in post-colonial Pakistan. Notable in this regard is his revealing study of the reasons for the perennial controversy between the state and the ulema over moon sighting to mark the end of the Muslim month of fasting. A must read for students, scholars and anyone interested in the evolution of citizenship in South Asia, this is an especially welcome addition to the historical scholarship on Pakistan."—Ayesha Jalal, Tufts University"Embedding important legal and political decisions about the meaning of sovereignty within the lively debates in civil society that prompted, shaped, and defined them, Qasmi has written one of the liveliest cultural and conceptual histories of Pakistan to date."—Faisal Devji, University of Oxford"Combining theory with empirical 'hard evidence', ...Qaum, Mulk, Sultanatrepresents a veritable game changer in terms of bringing Pakistani developments to bear on wider global theoretical debates, and in the process relocating Pakistan to the heart—rather than languishing on the side-lines—of such discussions."—Sarah Ansari, Bloomsbury PakistanTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1. Noah's Ark? The Making of Pakistan as a Homeland for Muslim Nationals 2. Quilting Islam: Pakistan as an Islamic Republic 3. Making the State National: Symbols, Flag, and Anthem 4. Over the Moon:Ulema, State, and Authority in Pakistan 5. Scripting the National Time and Space: Archive, Calendar, Roads, and Museums Postscript: A New Beginning - My Fellow Countrymen Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisOne of the most durable figures in modern history, the peasant has long been a site of intense intellectual and political debate. Yet underlying much of this literature is the assumption that peasants simply existed everywhere, a general if not generic group, traced backward from modernity to antiquity. Focused on the transformation of Panjab during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book accounts for the colonial origins of global capitalism through a radical history of the concept of "the peasant," demonstrating how seemingly fixed hierarchies were in fact produced, legitimized, and challenged within the preeminent agricultural region of South Asia. Navyug Gill uncovers how and why British officials and ascendant Panjabis disrupted existing forms of identity and occupation to generate a new agrarian order in the countryside. The notion of the hereditary caste peasant engaged in timeless cultivation thus emerged, paradoxically, as a result of a dramatic series of conceptual, juridical, and monetary divisions. Far from archaic relics, this book ultimately reveals both the landowning peasant and landless laborer to be novel political subjects forged through the encounter between colonialism and struggles over culture and capital within Panjabi society. Questions of progress, exploitation and knowledge come to animate the vernacular operations of power. With this history, Gill brings difference and contingency to understandings of the global past in order to re-think the itinerary of comparative political economy as well as alternative possibilities for emancipatory futures.Trade Review"In creative and challenging ways, Gill leads postcolonial analyses of colonial governmentality into an engagement with the history of capitalism, thereby opening the histories of capitalism and histories beyond the North Atlantic to each other."—Andrew Sartori, New York University"Labors of Division is an outstanding investigation of colonial market governance seen through the pivotal Punjabi peasant, elaborating postcolonial readings of political economy, the historiography of capitalism, and vernacular modernities. Gill compellingly illuminates the transformation of agrarian life-worlds through the workings and inhabitings of economic logics, from processes of caste standardization and hierarchization to the problem of indebtedness."—Ritu Birla, University of Toronto"A luminous contribution to the itineraries of global capitalism! Gill upends agrarian political economy by dislodging the sedimented figure of the "peasant", revealing with rigor and verve how colonial categories of rule petrified amorphous social relations to land in British India, producing a caste-based division of labor and laborers with lasting and pernicious consequences for Panjab's subaltern classes."—Vinay Gidwani, University of MinnesotaTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction In Pursuit of Peasant Histories and Futures in Colonial Panjab 1. A Rule of Benevolence? Revenue, Knowledge, and the Accumulation of Difference 2. Naming the Peasant: Colonial Jurisprudence and the Binding of Identity and Occupation 3. The Logic and Illogic of Debt: Reason and Capitalist Volatility in the New Agrarian Market 4. Horizons of Hierarchy: Caste, Landlessness, and the Limits of Religious Conversion 5. Producing a Theory of Inadequacy: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and the Political Economy of Comparison Conclusion: Global History and the Impermanence of Hierarchy Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisAfter the trauma of mass violence and massive population movements around the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, both new nation states faced the enormous challenge of creating new national narratives, symbols, and histories, as well as a new framework for their political life. While leadership in India claimed the anti-colonial movement, Gandhi, and a civilizational legacy in the subcontinent, the new political elite in Pakistan were faced with a more complex task: to carve out a separate and distinct Muslim history and political tradition from a millennium long history of cultural and religious interaction, mixing, and coexistence. Drawing on a rich archive of diverse sources, Ali Qasmi traces the complex development of ideas of citizenship and national belonging in the postcolonial Muslim state, offering a nuanced and sweeping history of the country's formative period. Qasmi paints a rich picture of the long, arduous, and often conflict-ridden process of writing a democratic constitution of Pakistan, while simultaneously narrating the invention of a range of new rituals of state—such as the exact color of the flag, the precise date of birth of the national poet of Pakistan, and the observation of Eid as a "national festival"—providing an illuminating analysis of the practices of being Pakistani, and a new portrait of Muslim history in the subcontinent.Trade Review"Complementing the burgeoning scholarly literature on citizenship, Qasmi's insightful and erudite book foregrounds Pakistan's efforts to frame a conception of citizenship through a range of symbolic trappings of national sovereignty such as the anthem, archives, flag, museums and much more. Based on extensive research in the infamously inaccessible national archives, he demonstrates the myriad contestations that continue to shape conceptions of citizenship in post-colonial Pakistan. Notable in this regard is his revealing study of the reasons for the perennial controversy between the state and the ulema over moon sighting to mark the end of the Muslim month of fasting. A must read for students, scholars and anyone interested in the evolution of citizenship in South Asia, this is an especially welcome addition to the historical scholarship on Pakistan."—Ayesha Jalal, Tufts University"Embedding important legal and political decisions about the meaning of sovereignty within the lively debates in civil society that prompted, shaped, and defined them, Qasmi has written one of the liveliest cultural and conceptual histories of Pakistan to date."—Faisal Devji, University of Oxford"Combining theory with empirical 'hard evidence', ...Qaum, Mulk, Sultanatrepresents a veritable game changer in terms of bringing Pakistani developments to bear on wider global theoretical debates, and in the process relocating Pakistan to the heart—rather than languishing on the side-lines—of such discussions."—Sarah Ansari, Bloomsbury PakistanTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1. Noah's Ark? The Making of Pakistan as a Homeland for Muslim Nationals 2. Quilting Islam: Pakistan as an Islamic Republic 3. Making the State National: Symbols, Flag, and Anthem 4. Over the Moon:Ulema, State, and Authority in Pakistan 5. Scripting the National Time and Space: Archive, Calendar, Roads, and Museums Postscript: A New Beginning - My Fellow Countrymen Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisTribes appear worldwide today as vestiges of a pre-modern past at odds with the workings of modern states. Acts of resistance and rebellion by groups designated as tribal have fascinated as well as perplexed administrators and scholars in South Asia and beyond. Tribal resistance and rebellion are held to be tragic yet heroic political acts by subaltern groups confronting omnipotent states. By contrast, this book draws on fifteen years of archival and ethnographic research to argue that statemaking is intertwined inextricably with the politics of tribal resistance in the margins of modern India.Uday Chandra demonstrates how the modern Indian state and its tribal or adivasi subjects have made and remade each other throughout the colonial and postcolonial eras, historical processes of modern statemaking shaping and being shaped by myriad forms of resistance by tribal subjects. Accordingly, tribal resistance, whether peaceful or violent, is better understood vis-à-vis negotiation

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Book SynopsisWhile anxiety abounds in the old Cold War West that progress whether political or economic has been reversed, for citizens of former-socialist countries, murky temporal trajectories are nothing new. Grounded in the multiethnic frontier town of Hunchun at the triple border of China, Russia, and North Korea, Ed Pulford traces how several of global history''s most ambitiously totalizing progressive endeavors have ended in cataclysmic collapse here. From the Japanese empire which banished Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynastic histories from the region, through Chinese, Soviet, and Korean socialisms, these borderlands have seen projections and disintegrations of forward-oriented ideas accumulate on a grand scale. Taking an archaeological approach to notions of historical progress, the book''s three parts follow an innovative structure moving backwards through linear time. Part I explores post-historical Hunchun''s diverse sociopolitics since high socialism''s demise. Part I

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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisJapan, anchored by its traditions, transformed by American post-war Occupation, and globally recognized for its technological innovations, manufacturing prowess, and pop culture, faces powerful challenges from within and without. How Japan chooses to handle these problems and opportunities will determine its future for decades to come. In this book, Jeff Kingston – one of the most lucid analysts of Japan today – takes readers on a fascinating journey through this country's contemporary history, exploring the key developments and forces, both at home and abroad, that are shaping Japan in the twenty-first century. Whether Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s transformative agenda of “Abenomics” and “proactive pacifism” toward a rising China and a belligerent North Korea can set Japan on the path to greater prosperity and security remains to be seen. But having won a third term as president of the Liberal Democratic Party in 2018, Japan’s ongoing transformation is very much in Abe’s hands.Trade Review“There is no better way to understand where this always intriguing, vitally important, and often pioneering country is heading than to read this book.” Bill Emmott, Chairman, Japan Society of the UK and author of The Fate of the West. “Much of the world seems to have forgotten Japan, being mesmerized by the spectacular rise of China. Jeff Kingston’s informative and remarkably entertaining book reminds us that, despite its many problems, Japan still matters deeply, rebounding in many fields in unexpected ways.”Arthur Stockwin, Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies, Oxford "Scholar Jeff Kingston has penned a new 'compact and lively book' looking at Japan in the 21st century. Japan promises to be a must-read for anyone concerned about the future of this country."The Japan Times ‘A concise, highly readable overview of Japan’s political evolution from 1945 to the present’ The Japan Times Table of ContentsMap Chapter 1 Bouncing Back? Chapter 2 Japan, Inc. Chapter 3 American Alliance Chapter 4 Lost Decades and Disasters Chapter 5 Dissent Chapter 6 Abe's Japan Further Reading Notes

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Book SynopsisChina is poised to become the world's largest economy in the next decade. But its great struggle to modernise has been one of tragedy, conflict, and challenge. From the first attempts to introduce Western ideas into the country two centuries ago, China's long march to global primacy has been above all an epic fight to renew an ancient country and culture. Leading Sinologist Kerry Brown traces this quest for renewal through the major moments of China’s modern history. Taking the reader on a journey that includes war, revolution, famine and finally regeneration, he describes concisely and authoritatively where China has come from, and where it is heading as it achieves great power status. This is a story that is no longer just about China, but concerns the rest of the world.Trade Review'Written by a leading China scholar, the book provides a concise, compelling and cutting-edge analysis of 70 years of the PRC history.'Yanzhong Huang, Seton Hall University and Council on Foreign Relations 'Professor Brown’s highly accessible and insightful analysis of the historical antecedents of China’s post-1978 development helpfully contextualizes the momentous changes that have transformed China into a global superpower.'Robert Ash, SOAS 'Kerry Brown always seems to have an apt anecdote or telling quote to enliven this narrative of China’s rise. Not unexpectedly, nationalism lies at the core.'Joseph Fewsmith, Boston University"Kerry Brown’s insightful book is an essential read for whoever seeks to understand the real intentions of the decision-makers in Beijing."BookmarcTable of ContentsChapter One: China’s Arduous March to ModernityChapter Two: China Reconstructs (1949-1958) Chapter Three: The Years of Dissent (1956 -1966) Chapter Four: The Great Cultural Revolution (1966-1976)Chapter Five: Reform and Opening Up (1978-1989)Chapter Six: Starting Over after Tiananmen (1989-2001) Chapter Seven: The Hu Jintao Era (2001-2012)Chapter Eight: China’s Dream Realised under Xi Jinping? Further Reading Notes Index

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Book SynopsisThis book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.Trade Review"This superbly written study of a portentous incident in midnineteenth-century Bengal is a welcome addition to the meager store of competent monographs in modern Indian history. . . . Professor Kling ably analyzes the interaction of political, economic, and social change within a changing administrative framework." * Journal of Asian Studies *

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Book SynopsisA catalogue of Chinese belt toggles in the Bieber collection.

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Book SynopsisSituated between the 1970s Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan and the post–2001 War on Terror, Refugee Cities tells the story of how global wars affect everyday life for Afghans who have been living as refugees in Pakistan. This book provides a necessary glimpse of what ordinary life looks like for a long-term refugee population, beyond the headlines of war, terror, or helpless suffering. It also increases our understanding of how cities—rather than the nation—are important sites of identity-making for people of migrant origins. In Refugee Cities, Sanaa Alimia reconstructs local microhistories to chronicle the lives of ordinary people living in low-income neighborhoods in Peshawar and Karachi and the ways in which they have transformed the cities of which they are a part. In Pakistan, formal citizenship is almost impossible for Afghans to access; despite this, Afghans have made new neighborhoods, expanded city boundaries, built cities through their labor in construction projects, and created new urban identities—and often they have done so alongside Pakistanis. Their struggles are a crucial, neglected dimension of Pakistan’s urban history. Yet given that the Afghan experience in Pakistan is profoundly shaped by geopolitics, the book also documents how, in the War-on-Terror era, many Afghans have been forced to leave Pakistan. This book, then, is also a documentation of the multiple displacements migrants are subject to and the increased normalization of deportation as a part of “refugee management.”Trade Review"Refugee Cities is a micro-history and narrative of lived experiences of Afghan refugees and Pakistani citizens alike. The book covers the struggles of these people in place-making in urban Pakistan and will be of great interest to anyone who wishes to know more about informal settlements and the urban and national politics of the Pakistani state in dealing with the poor and the non-citizens." * Dawn *"Alimia has provided a book that is long overdue, on a topic that has been chronically understudied. Refugee Cities provides detailed ethnographic accounts of Afghans living in the coastal mega city of Karachi and the border city of Peshawar to construct how their lives have been shaped – and more importantly are shaping – urban Pakistan today...The monograph is sublime in how it works from the ground up to create a picture of the functioning of the Pakistani state, and any stakeholder who works in or around the status of Afghans in Pakistan would greatly benefit from it." * Anthropology Book Forum *

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Book SynopsisSituated between the 1970s Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan and the post–2001 War on Terror, Refugee Cities tells the story of how global wars affect everyday life for Afghans who have been living as refugees in Pakistan. This book provides a necessary glimpse of what ordinary life looks like for a long-term refugee population, beyond the headlines of war, terror, or helpless suffering. It also increases our understanding of how cities—rather than the nation—are important sites of identity-making for people of migrant origins. In Refugee Cities, Sanaa Alimia reconstructs local microhistories to chronicle the lives of ordinary people living in low-income neighborhoods in Peshawar and Karachi and the ways in which they have transformed the cities of which they are a part. In Pakistan, formal citizenship is almost impossible for Afghans to access; despite this, Afghans have made new neighborhoods, expanded city boundaries, built cities through their labor in construction projects, and created new urban identities—and often they have done so alongside Pakistanis. Their struggles are a crucial, neglected dimension of Pakistan’s urban history. Yet given that the Afghan experience in Pakistan is profoundly shaped by geopolitics, the book also documents how, in the War-on-Terror era, many Afghans have been forced to leave Pakistan. This book, then, is also a documentation of the multiple displacements migrants are subject to and the increased normalization of deportation as a part of “refugee management.”Trade Review"Refugee Cities is a micro-history and narrative of lived experiences of Afghan refugees and Pakistani citizens alike. The book covers the struggles of these people in place-making in urban Pakistan and will be of great interest to anyone who wishes to know more about informal settlements and the urban and national politics of the Pakistani state in dealing with the poor and the non-citizens." * Dawn *"Alimia has provided a book that is long overdue, on a topic that has been chronically understudied. Refugee Cities provides detailed ethnographic accounts of Afghans living in the coastal mega city of Karachi and the border city of Peshawar to construct how their lives have been shaped – and more importantly are shaping – urban Pakistan today...The monograph is sublime in how it works from the ground up to create a picture of the functioning of the Pakistani state, and any stakeholder who works in or around the status of Afghans in Pakistan would greatly benefit from it." * Anthropology Book Forum *"This book is an engaging read for those interested in how multiple structural conditions intersect and how they are positioned vis-à-vis historical periods of colonialism, postcolonial nation building, and global warfare. Whilst being ethnographically situated with Afghans who fled to Pakistan, this book invites the reader to draw acute parallels with the dismantling of hospitality towards refugees in the post-2015 crisis in European refugee reception, the hostile governing of uprooted people who experience oppressions at the intersections of ethnicity and class, and the effects of the nationalist territorialization of spaces across the globe." * Politics, Religion & Ideology *"[A] valuable contribution to the scholarship on urban citizenship, migration, and the politics of belonging. In it, Alimia provides a nuanced and sympathetic account of Afghan lives in urban Pakistan...Refugee Cities is a valuable political intervention in a time when the global policy environment relating to migration is increasingly hostile" * Bloomsbury Pakistan *Table of ContentsContents List of Abbreviations Preface Introduction. Refugee Cities Part I. Background Chapter 1. Ghosts of Empire: The Afghan Question in Pakistan Part II. Claiming Rights Chapter 2. The Right to Water in an Informal Refugee Camp Chapter 3. Bulldozers and Violence in a Pakistani Settlement Chapter 4. Peshawar's Afghan Transformation Part III. Pushing Out Afghans Chapter 5. Surveillance, Documents, and Repatriation Conclusion Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisAtmospheric Violence grapples with the afterlife of environmental disasters and armed conflict and examines how people attempt to flourish despite and alongside continuing violence. Departing from conventional approaches to the study of disaster and conflict that have dominated academic studies of Kashmir, Omer Aijazi's ethnography of life in the borderlands instead explores possibilities for imagining life otherwise, in an environment where violence is everywhere, or atmospheric.Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the portion of Kashmir under Pakistan's control and its surrounding mountainscapes, the book takes us to two remote mountainous valleys that have been shaped by recurring environmental disasters, as well as by the landscape of no-go zones, army barracks, and security checkpoints of the contested India/Pakistan border. Through a series of interconnected scenes from the lives of five protagonists, all of whom are precariously situated within their families

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Science Fiction Research Association Book Award​A groundbreaking, alternate history of information technology and information discourses Although the scale of the information economy and the impact of digital media on social life in China today could pale that of any other country, the story of their emergence in the post-Mao sociopolitical environment remains untold. Information Fantasies offers a revisionist account of the emergence of the “information society,” arguing that it was not determined by the technology of digitization alone but developed out of a set of techno-cultural imaginations and practices that arrived alongside postsocialism.Anticipating discussions on information surveillance, data collection, and precarious labor conditions today, Xiao Liu goes far beyond the current scholarship on internet and digital culture in China, questioning the limits of current new-media theory and history, while also salvaging postsocialism from the persistent Cold War structure of knowledge production.Ranging over forgotten science fiction, unjustly neglected films, corporeal practices such as qigong, scientific journals, advertising, and cybernetic theories, Information Fantasies constructs an alternate genealogy of digital and information imaginaries—one that will change how we look at the development of the postsocialist world and the emergence of digital technologies.Trade Review"Xiao Liu’s creative, erudite, and richly researched book entirely reconfigures our understanding of the media landscape in 1980s China. Her dense explorations of how new media emerged, coalesced, and interacted in this crucial period range over multiple formats—forgotten science fiction stories, neglected films, photographs, videotapes, computers, television and teletext, qigong, scientific journals, advertising, and cybernetic theories—to draw science and aesthetics into a charged and illuminating encounter. The result is unquestionably one of the most original works to appear in Chinese cultural studies since the millennium."—Margaret Hillenbrand, University of Oxford"Liu solidly connects a very unique system with the IT perceptual revolution, essential for understanding the present futuristic scenario."—Neural"Information Fantasies strives to maintain a balance between the liberatory excitement around digital media and the constant crises of postsocialist precariousness (p. 10) and will surely prove a fundamental resource for an audience of readers as interdisciplinary as this volume’s author."—Asiascape"Information Fantasies shows that the close reading of signs, symptoms and systems need not be at odds with descriptions of materiality and technicity."—Critical Inquiry"An ambitious academic dream turned into reality. The book shows the author’s diligence in research and skills in organizing extensive and dispersive materials with a clear focus. . . . A valuable work in the study of communication and humanity."—China Review International"The site-specific and historically situated cases, along with brilliant interpretations, will interest researchers in media, literature, and modern China studies as well as historians of technology."—Technology and Culture Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: “Information Pot” and Postsocialist Politics of Mediation1. Extrasensory Powers, Magic Waves, and Information Explosion: Imagining the Digital2. The Curious Case of a Robot Doctor: Rethinking Labor, Expert Systems, and the Interface3. The “Ultrastable System” and the New Cinema4. Affective Form: Advertising, Information Aesthetics, and Experimental Writing in the Market Economy5. Liminal Mediation and the Cinema RedefinedEpilogue: The Virtual Past(s) of the Future(s)AcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisJapan’s postwar urban imagination through the Metabolism architecture movement and visionary science fiction authors The devastation of the Second World War gave rise to imaginations both utopian and apocalyptic. In Japan, a fascinating confluence of architects and science fiction writers took advantage of this space to begin remaking urban design. In The Metabolist Imagination, William O. Gardner explores the unique Metabolism movement, which allied with science fiction authors to foresee the global cities that would emerge in the postwar era.This first comparative study of postwar Japanese architecture and science fiction builds on the resurgence of interest in Metabolist architecture while establishing new directions for exploration. Gardner focuses on how these innovators created unique versions of shared concepts—including futurity, megastructures, capsules, and cybercities—making lasting contributions that resonate with contemporary conversations around cyberpunk, climate change, anime, and more.The Metabolist Imagination features original documentation of collaborations between giants of postwar Japanese art and architecture, such as the landmark 1970 Osaka Expo. It also provides the most sustained English-language discussion to date of the work of Komatsu Sakyō, considered one of the “big three” authors of postwar Japanese science fiction. These studies are underscored by Gardner’s insightful approach—treating architecture as a form of speculative fiction while positioning science fiction as an intervention into urban design—making it a necessary read for today’s visionaries.Trade Review"A compelling and visionary analysis. William O. Gardner traces shared imaginations of the future city in postwar Japanese fiction, film, and architecture, brilliantly demonstrating the originality of Japanese visions of cities and societies to come. At the same time, he shows how even the most innovative urban visions of recent novels and anime are anchored in ancient Japanese aesthetic and building traditions. A must-read for anyone interested in urban studies, architecture, and science fiction—or, quite simply, the future."—Ursula K. Heise, author of Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species"The Metabolist Imagination is an ambitious and meticulously researched study of the intersections of science fiction and architectural discourse in postwar through contemporary Japan, an innovative pairing that leads to numerous insights across disciplines."—Seiji Lippit, author of Topographies of Japanese Modernism"William O. Gardner is a splendid scholar-critic of Japanese cityscape. The Metabolist Imagination brilliantly foregrounds the postmodern transactions between cutting edge architecture and emergent Japanese science fiction. No one has ever succeeded in exploring so provocatively the singular point between Metabolist works exhibited at EXPO70 and hardcore science fiction novels as represented by Sakyo Komatsu, one of the producers of the very exposition."—Takayuki Tatsumi, Keio University"The Metabolist Imagination—dense and scholarly but highly enjoyable and revealing, especially for someone who likes Japanese architecture and the occasional anime."—Daily Dose of Architecture"Eye-opening in more ways than one."—ArchiECHO"The Metabolist Imagination is a thrilling new contribution that disentangles Japan’s complex 1960s and 1970s from the vantage of interdisciplinary insight."—Journal of Asian Studies "The significant contribution of this book is to invite us to consider our relationship to the ever-changing natural/cultural environment by exploring the interrelationship between future-oriented architecture (and the city) and science fiction."—Journal of Japanese Studies "The Metabolist Imagination is an important contribution to Japanese urban studies and to the burgeoning scholarly discussion of Japan’s 1960s and 1970s. In its attention to architecture, popular literature, film, anime, collage, performance, and the ferment among those, it admirably demonstrates the rewards of an intermedial approach."—Monumenta NipponicaTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. City Visions: Metabolism and Science Fiction2. Ruined Cities: Isozaki Arata and Komatsu Sakyô3. Planetary Cities: Komatsu Sakyô’s Disaster Fiction4. Future City: The 1970 Osaka Expo5. Liquid Cities: The Technopolis from Expo to Cyberpunk6. Metabolist Echoes: Akira, Patlabor, and Yanobe KenjiNotesSelected FilmographyBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisA revelatory reclaiming of five iconic Chinese artists and their place in art history During the 1980s and 1990s, a group of Chinese artists (Zhang Xiaogang, Wang Guangyi, Sui Jianguo, Zhang Peili, and Lin Tianmiao) ascended to new heights of international renown. Even as their fame increased, they came to be circumscribed by simplistic Western interpretations of their artworks as social and political critiques, a perspective that privileged stories of dissidence over deep engagement with the art itself. Through in-depth case studies of these five artists, Peggy Wang offers a corrective to previous appraisals, demonstrating how their works address fundamental questions about the forms, meanings, and possibilities of art. By the end of the 1980s, Chinese artists were scrutinizing earlier waves of Western influence and turning instead to their own heritage and culture to forge their own future histories. As the national trauma of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre converged with the mounting expansion of the global art world, these artists turned to art as a profoundly generative site for grappling with their place in the world. Wang demonstrates how they consciously and energetically sought to make their own ideas about art and art history visible in contemporary art. Wang’s argument is informed by extensive primary research, including close examination of the artworks, analysis of Chinese language documents and archives, and deeply personal interviews with the artists. Their words uncover layers of meaning previously obscured by the popular and often recycled assessments that many of these works have received until now. Beyond Wang’s reinterpretation of these individual artists, she contributes to an urgent conversation on the future direction of art history: how do we map engagements between art from different parts of the world that are embedded within different art histories? What does it mean for histories of contemporary art—and art history more generally—to be inclusive? The new understandings offered in this book can and should be engaged when considering current hierarchies in histories of Chinese art, the global art world, and the intersections between them. Trade Review"Deftly slicing through both cliché and convention, Peggy Wang refreshes our sense of the ‘world’ by showing how Chinese art since the 1980s has as much to say about the very nature of art history as it does about art's role in the creation and critique of a new Chinese ‘century.’"—Joan Kee, University of Michigan"With a synthetic and focused point of view, Peggy Wang ardently advocates for listening to artists and looking at their artwork on its own terms, rather than through general preconceptions about China. She sensitively explores the most deeply personal struggles with the meaning of art-making that lie behind the distinctive individual resolutions these men and women achieve. The Future History of Contemporary Chinese Art is a significant and much needed contribution to the history of Chinese and global contemporary art."—Kuiyi Shen, University of California, San Diego

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Book SynopsisA revelatory reclaiming of five iconic Chinese artists and their place in art history During the 1980s and 1990s, a group of Chinese artists (Zhang Xiaogang, Wang Guangyi, Sui Jianguo, Zhang Peili, and Lin Tianmiao) ascended to new heights of international renown. Even as their fame increased, they came to be circumscribed by simplistic Western interpretations of their artworks as social and political critiques, a perspective that privileged stories of dissidence over deep engagement with the art itself. Through in-depth case studies of these five artists, Peggy Wang offers a corrective to previous appraisals, demonstrating how their works address fundamental questions about the forms, meanings, and possibilities of art. By the end of the 1980s, Chinese artists were scrutinizing earlier waves of Western influence and turning instead to their own heritage and culture to forge their own future histories. As the national trauma of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre converged with the mounting expansion of the global art world, these artists turned to art as a profoundly generative site for grappling with their place in the world. Wang demonstrates how they consciously and energetically sought to make their own ideas about art and art history visible in contemporary art. Wang’s argument is informed by extensive primary research, including close examination of the artworks, analysis of Chinese language documents and archives, and deeply personal interviews with the artists. Their words uncover layers of meaning previously obscured by the popular and often recycled assessments that many of these works have received until now. Beyond Wang’s reinterpretation of these individual artists, she contributes to an urgent conversation on the future direction of art history: how do we map engagements between art from different parts of the world that are embedded within different art histories? What does it mean for histories of contemporary art—and art history more generally—to be inclusive? The new understandings offered in this book can and should be engaged when considering current hierarchies in histories of Chinese art, the global art world, and the intersections between them. Trade Review"Deftly slicing through both cliché and convention, Peggy Wang refreshes our sense of the ‘world’ by showing how Chinese art since the 1980s has as much to say about the very nature of art history as it does about art's role in the creation and critique of a new Chinese ‘century.’"—Joan Kee, University of Michigan"With a synthetic and focused point of view, Peggy Wang ardently advocates for listening to artists and looking at their artwork on its own terms, rather than through general preconceptions about China. She sensitively explores the most deeply personal struggles with the meaning of art-making that lie behind the distinctive individual resolutions these men and women achieve. The Future History of Contemporary Chinese Art is a significant and much needed contribution to the history of Chinese and global contemporary art."—Kuiyi Shen, University of California, San Diego

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Book Synopsis“The likeness of form between Chinese and English sentences,” writes the American Sinologist Ernest Fenollosa around 1906, “renders translation from one to the other exceptionally easy.” If Babel Had a Form asks not if his claim may be true, but what its phantasmic surprise may yet do. In twentieth-century intersections of China and Asia with the United States, translations did more than communicate meaning across politicized and racializing differences of language and nation. Transpacific translation breached the regulative protocols that created those very differences of human value and cultural meaning. The result, Tze-Yin Teo argues, saw translators cleaving to the sounds and shapes of poetry to imagine a translingual “likeness of form” but not of meaning or kind. At stake in this form without meaning is a startling new task of equivalence. As a concept, equivalence has been rejected for its colonizing epistemology of value, naming a broken promise of translation and false premise of comparison. Yet the writers studied in this book veered from those ways of knowing to theorize a poetic equivalence: negating the colonial foundations of the concept, they ignited aporias of meaning into flashpoints for a radical literary translation. The book’s transpacific readings glean those forms of equivalence from the writing of Fenollosa, the vernacular experiments of Boxer Scholar Hu Shi, the trilingual musings of Shanghai-born Los Angeles novelist Eileen Chang, the minor work of the Bay Area Korean American transmedial artist Theresa Cha, and a post-Tiananmen elegy by the exiled dissident Yang Lian. The conclusion returns to the deconstructive genealogy of recent debates on translation and untranslatability, displacing the axiom of radical alterity for a no less radical equivalence that remains—pace Fenollosa—far from easy or exceptional. Ultimately, If Babel Had a Form illuminates the demanding force of even the slightest sameness entangled in the translator’s work of remaking our differences.Table of ContentsNote on Translation, Transliteration, and Transcription | vii Introduction: Equivalence beyond Value | 1 1 Transpacific Abstraction | 31 2 Sound Translation: Eileen Chang | 67 3 Concrete Translation: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha | 95 4 Translingual Erasure: Yang Lian | 126 Conclusion: If Babel Had a Form | 151 Acknowledgments | 165 Notes | 167 Works Cited | 205 Index | 219

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Book Synopsis“The likeness of form between Chinese and English sentences,” writes the American Sinologist Ernest Fenollosa around 1906, “renders translation from one to the other exceptionally easy.” If Babel Had a Form asks not if his claim may be true, but what its phantasmic surprise may yet do. In twentieth-century intersections of China and Asia with the United States, translations did more than communicate meaning across politicized and racializing differences of language and nation. Transpacific translation breached the regulative protocols that created those very differences of human value and cultural meaning. The result, Tze-Yin Teo argues, saw translators cleaving to the sounds and shapes of poetry to imagine a translingual “likeness of form” but not of meaning or kind. At stake in this form without meaning is a startling new task of equivalence. As a concept, equivalence has been rejected for its colonizing epistemology of value, naming a broken promise of translation and false premise of comparison. Yet the writers studied in this book veered from those ways of knowing to theorize a poetic equivalence: negating the colonial foundations of the concept, they ignited aporias of meaning into flashpoints for a radical literary translation. The book’s transpacific readings glean those forms of equivalence from the writing of Fenollosa, the vernacular experiments of Boxer Scholar Hu Shi, the trilingual musings of Shanghai-born Los Angeles novelist Eileen Chang, the minor work of the Bay Area Korean American transmedial artist Theresa Cha, and a post-Tiananmen elegy by the exiled dissident Yang Lian. The conclusion returns to the deconstructive genealogy of recent debates on translation and untranslatability, displacing the axiom of radical alterity for a no less radical equivalence that remains—pace Fenollosa—far from easy or exceptional. Ultimately, If Babel Had a Form illuminates the demanding force of even the slightest sameness entangled in the translator’s work of remaking our differences.Table of ContentsNote on Translation, Transliteration, and Transcription | vii Introduction: Equivalence beyond Value | 1 1 Transpacific Abstraction | 31 2 Sound Translation: Eileen Chang | 67 3 Concrete Translation: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha | 95 4 Translingual Erasure: Yang Lian | 126 Conclusion: If Babel Had a Form | 151 Acknowledgments | 165 Notes | 167 Works Cited | 205 Index | 219

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Book SynopsisAn ethnography of terrorism trials in Delhi, India, this book explores what modes of life are made possible in the everyday experience of the courtroom. Mayur Suresh shows how legal procedures and technicalities become the modes through which courtrooms are made habitable. Where India’s terror trials have come to be understood by way of the expansion of the security state and displays of Hindu nationalism, Suresh elaborates how they are experienced by defendants in a quite different way, through a minute engagement with legal technicalities. Amidst the grinding terror trials—which are replete with stories of torture, illegal detention and fabricated charges—defendants school themselves in legal procedures, became adept petition writers, build friendships with police officials, cultivate cautious faith in the courts and express a deep sense of betrayal when this trust is belied. Though seemingly mundane, legal technicalities are fraught and highly contested, and acquire urgent ethical qualities in the life of a trial: the file becomes a space in which the world can be made or unmade, the petition a way of imagining a future, and investigative and courtroom procedures enable the unexpected formation of close relationships between police and terror-accused. In attending to the ways in which legal technicalities are made to work in everyday interactions among lawyers, judges, accused terrorists, and police, Suresh shows how human expressiveness, creativity and vulnerability emerge through the law.Table of ContentsAbbreviations and Glossary | ix Introduction | 1 1 Custodial Intimacy: Law and the Police in Two Parts | 35 2 Recycled Legality: Doing Things with Legal Language | 71 3 Law and the Vulnerable State | 92 4 Hypertext: Files and the Fabrication of the World | 115 5 Certification and the Fabrication of Truths | 137 6 Petition Writing: Desire, Ethics, Mourning | 169 Conclusion: An Acquittal? | 199 Acknowledgments | 213 Notes | 219 References | 235 Index | 251

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Book SynopsisAn ethnography of terrorism trials in Delhi, India, this book explores what modes of life are made possible in the everyday experience of the courtroom. Mayur Suresh shows how legal procedures and technicalities become the modes through which courtrooms are made habitable. Where India’s terror trials have come to be understood by way of the expansion of the security state and displays of Hindu nationalism, Suresh elaborates how they are experienced by defendants in a quite different way, through a minute engagement with legal technicalities. Amidst the grinding terror trials—which are replete with stories of torture, illegal detention and fabricated charges—defendants school themselves in legal procedures, became adept petition writers, build friendships with police officials, cultivate cautious faith in the courts and express a deep sense of betrayal when this trust is belied. Though seemingly mundane, legal technicalities are fraught and highly contested, and acquire urgent ethical qualities in the life of a trial: the file becomes a space in which the world can be made or unmade, the petition a way of imagining a future, and investigative and courtroom procedures enable the unexpected formation of close relationships between police and terror-accused. In attending to the ways in which legal technicalities are made to work in everyday interactions among lawyers, judges, accused terrorists, and police, Suresh shows how human expressiveness, creativity and vulnerability emerge through the law.Table of ContentsAbbreviations and Glossary | ix Introduction | 1 1 Custodial Intimacy: Law and the Police in Two Parts | 35 2 Recycled Legality: Doing Things with Legal Language | 71 3 Law and the Vulnerable State | 92 4 Hypertext: Files and the Fabrication of the World | 115 5 Certification and the Fabrication of Truths | 137 6 Petition Writing: Desire, Ethics, Mourning | 169 Conclusion: An Acquittal? | 199 Acknowledgments | 213 Notes | 219 References | 235 Index | 251

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Book SynopsisA critical introduction to how the Nagasaki atomic bombing has been remembered, especially in contrast to that of Hiroshima. In the decades following the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, the city’s residents processed their trauma and formed narratives of the destruction and reconstruction in ways that reflected their regional history and social makeup. In doing so, they created a multi-layered urban identity as an atomic-bombed city that differed markedly from Hiroshima’s image. Shadows of Nagasaki traces how Nagasaki’s trauma, history, and memory of the bombing manifested through some of the city’s many post-atomic memoryscapes, such as literature, religious discourse, art, historical landmarks, commemorative spaces, and architecture. In addition, the book pays particular attention to how the city’s history of international culture, exemplified best perhaps by the region’s Christian (especially Catholic) past, informed its response to the atomic trauma and shaped its postwar urban identity. Key historical actors in the volume’s chapters include writers, Japanese- Catholic leaders, atomic-bombing survivors (known as hibakusha), municipal officials, American occupation personnel, peace activists, artists, and architects. The story of how these diverse groups of people processed and participated in the discourse surrounding the legacies of Nagasaki’s bombing shows how regional history, culture, and politics—rather than national ones—become the most influential factors shaping narratives of destruction and reconstruction after mass trauma. In turn, and especially in the case of urban destruction, new identities emerge and old ones are rekindled, not to serve national politics or social interests but to bolster narratives that reflect local circumstances.Table of ContentsNote on Japanese Names | xi Introduction: Imagining Nagasaki: Religion and History in Postatomic Memoryscapes Chad R. Diehl | 1 Part I: Catholic Responses The "Saint" of Urakami: Nagai Takashi and Early Representations of the Atomic Experience Chad R. Diehl | 33 Loving Your Neighbor across the Sea: The Reception of the Work of Nagai Takashi in the Republic of Korea Haeseong Park and Franklin Rausch | 70 Faith, Family, Earth, and the Atomic Bomb in the Art of Nagai Takashi Anthony Richard Haynes | 93 "Love Saves from Isolation": Ozaki ToÅmei and His Journey from Nagasaki to Auschwitz and Back Gwyn McClelland | 112 Part II: Literature and Testimony "Nagasaki" in Akutagawa Ryu±nosuke's Taisho-Era Literary Imagination Anri Yasuda | 131 Lambs of God, Ravens of Death, Rafts of Corpses: Three Visions of Trauma in Nagasaki Survivor Poetry Chad R. Diehl | 151 Listening to the Dead and Filling the Void: The Prayer and Activism of Akizuki Tatsuichiro Maika Nakao | 179 Breaking New Ground in Nagasaki: Seirai Yuichi's Ground Zero Literature Michele M. Mason | 191 Part III: Sites of Memory Fragmented Memory: The Scattering of the Urakami Cathedral Ruins among Nagasaki's Memorial Landscape Anna Gasha | 215 One Fine Day: The Allied Occupation of Nagasaki and "Madame Butterfly House" Brian Burke-Gaffney | 243 The Titan and the Arch:Regulating Public Memory through the Peace Statue Nanase Shirokawa | 264 Part IV: Reflections How I Came to Criticize Nagai Takashi's Urakami Holocaust Theory Shinji Takahashi | 295 On Rereleasing The Bells of Nagasaki to the World Tokusaburo Nagai | 312 Acknowledgments | 319 List of Contributors | 323 Index | 327

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Book SynopsisProvides vivid accounts of commercial and leisure spaces that captivated the public imagination in the past but have since been destroyed, forgotten, or refurbished. Monsoon Marketplace uncovers the entangled vernacular cultures of capitalist modernity, mass consumption, and media spectatorship in two understudied postcolonial Asian cities across three crucial historical moments. Juxtaposing Manila and Singapore, it analyzes print and audiovisual representations of popular commercial and leisure spaces during the colonial occupation in the 1930s, national development in the 1960s, and neoliberal globalization in the 2000s. Engaging with the work of creators including Nick Joaquin, Kevin Kwan, and P. Ramlee, it discusses figures of female shoppers in 1930s Manila, languid expatriates in 1930s Singapore, street hawkers in 1960s Singapore, youthful activists in 1960s Manila, call center agents in 2000s Manila, and super-rich investors in 2000s Singapore. Looking at the historical transformation of Calle Escolta, Avenida Rizal, Raffles Place, and Orchard Road, it focuses on Crystal Arcade, the Manila Carnival, the Great World and New World Amusement Parks, and Change Alley, all of which had once captivated the public imagination but have since vanished from the cityscape. Instead of treating capitalism, media, and modernity as overarching systems or processes, the book examines how their configurations and experiences are contingent, variable, pluralistic, and archipelagic. Diverging from critical theories and cultural studies that see consumerism and spectatorship as sources of alienation, docility, and fantasy, it explores how they create new possibilities for agency, collectivity, and resistance.Table of ContentsPreface | vii Introduction: Methods of Archipelagic Capitalism | 1 Part I: 1930s Manila and Singapore 1. Walled Street of Modernity | 27 2. Between Spaces of Imperial Languor | 53 3. Spectacles beyond the Limits of Exhaustion | 75 Part II: 1960s Singapore and Manila 4. Temporalities of Development and Delinquency | 105 5. Panoramic Popularity in the Neon Streets | 129 6. Public Spheres of Postcolonial Fantasy | 153 Part III: Millennial Southeast Asia 7. Neoliberal Cosmopolitanism in the Tropical World City | 185 Conclusion: Lost Modernities | 215 Notes | 225 References | 255 Index | 277

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Book SynopsisProvides vivid accounts of commercial and leisure spaces that captivated the public imagination in the past but have since been destroyed, forgotten, or refurbished. Monsoon Marketplace uncovers the entangled vernacular cultures of capitalist modernity, mass consumption, and media spectatorship in two understudied postcolonial Asian cities across three crucial historical moments. Juxtaposing Manila and Singapore, it analyzes print and audiovisual representations of popular commercial and leisure spaces during the colonial occupation in the 1930s, national development in the 1960s, and neoliberal globalization in the 2000s. Engaging with the work of creators including Nick Joaquin, Kevin Kwan, and P. Ramlee, it discusses figures of female shoppers in 1930s Manila, languid expatriates in 1930s Singapore, street hawkers in 1960s Singapore, youthful activists in 1960s Manila, call center agents in 2000s Manila, and super-rich investors in 2000s Singapore. Looking at the historical transformation of Calle Escolta, Avenida Rizal, Raffles Place, and Orchard Road, it focuses on Crystal Arcade, the Manila Carnival, the Great World and New World Amusement Parks, and Change Alley, all of which had once captivated the public imagination but have since vanished from the cityscape. Instead of treating capitalism, media, and modernity as overarching systems or processes, the book examines how their configurations and experiences are contingent, variable, pluralistic, and archipelagic. Diverging from critical theories and cultural studies that see consumerism and spectatorship as sources of alienation, docility, and fantasy, it explores how they create new possibilities for agency, collectivity, and resistance.Table of ContentsPreface | vii Introduction: Methods of Archipelagic Capitalism | 1 Part I: 1930s Manila and Singapore 1. Walled Street of Modernity | 27 2. Between Spaces of Imperial Languor | 53 3. Spectacles beyond the Limits of Exhaustion | 75 Part II: 1960s Singapore and Manila 4. Temporalities of Development and Delinquency | 105 5. Panoramic Popularity in the Neon Streets | 129 6. Public Spheres of Postcolonial Fantasy | 153 Part III: Millennial Southeast Asia 7. Neoliberal Cosmopolitanism in the Tropical World City | 185 Conclusion: Lost Modernities | 215 Notes | 225 References | 255 Index | 277

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Book SynopsisAn illuminating story of a Sufi community that sought the revelation of God. In the Afghan highlands of the sixteenth century, the messianic community known as the Roshaniyya not only desired to find God’s word and to abide by it but also attempted to practice God’s word and to develop techniques of language intended to render their own tongues as the organs of continuous revelation. As their critics would contend, however, the Roshaniyya attempted to make language do something that language should not do—infuse the semiotic with the divine. Their story thus ends in a tower of skulls, the proliferation of heresiographies that detailed the sins of the Roshaniyya, and new formations of “Afghan” identity. In Singing with the Mountains, William E. B. Sherman finds something extraordinary about the Roshaniyya, not least because the first known literary use of vernacular Pashto occurs in an eclectic, Roshani imitation of the Qur’an. The story of the Roshaniyya exemplifies a religious culture of linguistic experimentation. In the example of the Roshaniyya, we discover a set of questions and anxieties about the capacities of language that pervaded Sufi orders, imperial courts, groups of wandering ascetics, and scholastic networks throughout Central and South Asia. In telling this tale, Sherman asks the following questions: How can we make language shimmer with divine truth? How can letters grant sovereign power and form new “ethnic” identities and ways of belonging? How can rhyme bend our conceptions of time so that the prophetic past comes to inhabit the now of our collective moment? By analyzing the ways in which the Roshaniyya answered these types of questions—and the ways in which their answers were eventually rejected as heresies—this book offers new insight into the imaginations of religious actors in the late medieval and early modern Persianate worlds.Table of ContentsPreface: First Words | vii Acknowledgments | xi Mountains and Messiahs: An Introduction | 1 1 Bayazid’s Doubles: Hagiography and History in the Messianic Community | 29 2 The Dhikr of the Wretch: Text, Practice, and the Roshani Self | 62 3 Revelation through Repetition: The Roshaniyya Write the Word of God | 90 4 Vernacular Apocalypse: Poetic and Polemical Emergences of Pashto Literature | 118 5 The Vanguard of Disbelief: Afghan Ethnicity and Temporality after the Roshaniyya | 151 Ishmael’s Daydream: A Conclusion | 180 A Note on Sources | 189 Notes | 193 Bibliography | 227 Index | 253

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Book SynopsisToday’s therapy dog handlers recognize the need to be teammates with their dogs, not just supervisors. Teaming with one’s dog involves unobtrusively providing physical and emotional support as well as respectful guidance in what to do. Being a teammate requires attention to the handler’s behavior, not just the dog’s. This book reminds all handlers that being conscious of what they do with their dogs increases the effectiveness of therapy visits as well as providing a more rewarding experience for all involved.Written by a nationally famous practitioner with decades of real-world experience, the book introduces the “STEPs of Teamwork” and how those STEPs fit with a Therapy Dog’s Bill of Rights. These general principles free handlers to apply them in their own way to their therapy dog’s individual personality and work. As the author writes, “The book explores a way of being conscious of what you do with and to your therapy dog to support him in his work. It describes functional principles of behavior you can learn and use immediately, either together as a package or independently.” Using an exciting new methodology, the author guides readers to deepen their relationship with their dogs by acting consciously and respectfully.

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Book SynopsisAround 800 BC, the Eurasian steppe underwent a profound cultural transformation that was to shape world history for the next 2,500 years: the nomadic herdsmen of Inner Asia invented cavalry which, with the use of the compound bow, gave them the means to terrorize first their neighbors and ultimately, under Chingis Khan and his descendants, the whole of Asia and Europe. Why and how they did so and to what effect are the themes of this history of the nomadic tribes of Inner Asia - the Mongols, Turks, Uighurs and others, collectively dubbed the Barbarians by the Chinese and the Europeans. This two-thousand year history of the nomadic tribes is drawn from a wide range of sources and told with unprecedented clarity and pace. The author shows that to describe the tribes as barbaric is seriously to underestimate their complexity and underlying social stability. He argues that their relationship with the Chinese was as much symbiotic as parasitic and that they understood their dependence on a strong and settled Chinese state. He makes sense of the apparently random rise and fall of these mysterious, obscure and fascinating nomad confederacies.Trade Review"An excellent piece of work ... Barfield writes clearly, with a gratifyingly total absence of social scientific jargon ... his case is put with impressive cogency." Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society "Barfield's significant and demanding book brings to a general audience a challenging new interpretation of relations between China and her northern neighbours ... provocative and persuasive ... Highly recommended." Choice "Barfield's study is rich and provocative." Graham E. Johnson, University of British Columbia "A welcome addition to the literature on the relations between Central Asian empires and China in premodern times. Thomas J. Barfield provides us with stimulating interpretations." American Historical Review "Excellent study of Chinese-nomadic relations. Weaves a fascinating and detailed tapestry. This excellent work awakens the reader to another level affected by the emerging world system in the nineteenth century." The International History Review "The appearance in paperback of this book is welcome. Breaking moulds." Asian Affairs "Fine study. A most welcome addition to the literature." Bulletin School of Oriental and African StudiesTable of ContentsEditor's Preface. Preface. Acknowledgements. Notes on Transliterations. 1. Introduction: The Steppe Nomadic World. 2. The Steppe Tribes United: The Hsiung-nu Empire. 3. The Collapse of Central Order: The Rise of Foreign Dynasties. 4. The Turkish Empires and T'ang China. 5. The Manchurian Candidates. 6. The Mongol Empire. 7. Steppe Wolves and Forest Tigers: The Ming, Mongols and Manchus. 8. The Last of the Nomad Empires: The Ch'ing Incorporation of Mongolia and Zungharia. 9. Epilogue: On the Decline of the Mongols. Bibliography. Index.

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Book SynopsisThe Vietnam War, which dominated American life during the 1960s, helped to create, radicalize, and alter social and political life in the US.Trade Review"The Indochina wars have cast a long shadow over world affairs. For the victims, they were a devastating catastrophe. Their legacy for the United States was substantial, interacting in complex ways with internal developments in American society. Buzzanco's study examines these themes with skill and insight, informed by outstanding scholarship and enriched by perceptive understanding." Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyTable of ContentsAcknowledgements vi Introduction: Intersection: The Vietnam War and the Social and Political Movements of the 1960s 1 Part I The Vietnam War 1 Containment, Liberalism, and Vietnam: Background to the American War 13 2 Why (Not) Vietnam? The Vietnamese, the French, and the Americans to 1960 22 3 Destroying the Country to Save It: The American War on Vietnam, 1960-1968 61 4 The Empire Strikes Back: The Vietnam War from 1968 to 1975 101 Part II The Movements of the 1960s 5 “Many Deeds of War”: Hope and Anguish in the 1960s 139 6 Love Me, I’m a Liberal: The Politics of 1960s and Vietnam 150 7 The Struggles at Home: Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation 191 8 “One, Two, Three, What Are We Fightin’ For?” Cultural Politics in the Vietnam Era 234 Notes 252 Bibliography 264 Index 270

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Book SynopsisPreeminant gamelan performer and scholar Sumarsam explores the concept of hybridity in performance traditions that have developed in the context of Javanese encounters with the West. Javanese Gamelan and the West studies the meaning, forms, and traditions of the Javanese performing arts as they developed and changed through their contact with Western culture. Authored by a gamelan performer, teacher, and scholar, the book traces the adaptations in gamelan art as a result of Western colonialism in nineteenth-century Java, showing how Western musical and dramatic practices were domesticated by Javanese performers creating hybrid Javanese-Western art forms, such as with the introduction of brass bands in gendhing mares court music and West Javanese tanjidor, and Western theatrical idioms in contemporary wayang puppet plays. The book also examines the presentation of Javanese gamelan to the West, detailing performances in World's Fairs and American academia and considering its influence on Western performing arts and musical and performance studies. The end result is a comprehensive treatment of the formation of modern Javanese gamelan and a fascinating look at how an art form dramatizes changes and developments in a culture. Sumarsam is a University Professor of Music at Wesleyan University. He is the author of Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java (University of Chicago Press, 1995) and numerous articles in English and Indonesian. As a gamelan musician and a keenamateur dhalang (puppeteer) of Javanese wayang puppet play, he performs, conducts workshops, and lectures throughout the US, Australia, Europe, and Asia.Trade ReviewThis book offers a sweeping overview of Javanese musical and cultural interactions with the rest of the world, providing critique and reconsideration of the prevalent themes and ideas that have fascinated scholars for decades. It will be essential reading, not only for Javanists but for scholars of postcolonialism in general. -- Sarah Weiss, Associate Professor, Department of Music, Yale UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction Performing Colonialism Performing the Nation-State Opera Diponegoro Deterritorializing and Appropriating Gamelan Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Gamelan Theory: Metaphorical Readings of Gamelan Conclusion Notes Glossary Selected Discography Bibliography

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Book SynopsisDrawing on extensive fieldwork, explores the contemporary pop music scene in this little understood Southeast Asian country. Burma's Pop Music Industry is the first book to explore the contemporary pop music industry in a country that is little known or understood in the West. Based on years of fieldwork in Burma/Myanmar, Heather MacLachlan's work explores the ways in which aspiring musical artists are forging a place within the highly repressive social and political context that is Burma today. It deals sensitively with issues such as negotiating local and global styles,performance contexts and practices, and, more importantly, with ethical issues such as the anonymity of informants and the place of Western ethnomusicologists in countries outside the West. Drawn from interviews conducted from 2007 through 2009 with Burmese composers, performers, producers, concert promoters, journalists, recording engineers, radio station employees, music teachers, and censors in Yangon -- Burma's largest city and the locus of all pop music production -- Burma's Pop Music Industry represents a significant contribution both to popular music studies and to Southeast Asian studies. Heather MacLachlan is Assistant Professor of Music, University of Dayton.Trade ReviewA major contribution on a number of fronts. . . drawing on thorough ethnographic work. . . Should figure in the research and teaching of popular music and culture in Asia. * JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES *Burma's Pop Music Industry is significant. . . MacLachlan's analysis is perfectly situated. * JOURNAL OF POPULAR MUSIC STUDIES *Table of ContentsIntroduction The Creators of Burmese Pop Music The Sound of Burmese Pop Songs Learning Music in Burma Today Six Facets of the Burmese Pop Music Industry Musicians and the Censors: The Negotiation of Power Conclusion: The Significance of the Burmese Perspective Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisExplores the complex interactions between French medicine and Vietnamese childbirth traditions, documenting the emergence of a plural system of maternity services that incorporated both biomedical knowledge and local birthing traditions. This book explores the interactions between French medicine and Vietnamese childbirth traditions, examining how these interactions shaped maternal and infant health care in Vietnam. Armed with the language and expertise of modernmedicine, French physicians and administrators set out on a mission to relocate Vietnamese childbirth to a clinical setting. But as the French ventured into indigenous communities, they found themselves negotiating with a myriad of Vietnamese cultural practices relating to childbirth and infant care. Thwarted by local resistance, cultural misunderstanding, and ambiguous policy, the Western model of hospital birth neither displaced nor transformedindigenous birthing traditions in the ways the French had envisioned. Instead, as author Thuy Linh Nguyen demonstrates, the emergence of a plural system of maternity services, many of which were based on local practices and beliefs, served as a testimony to the compromises and adaptations made by both the French and Vietnamese populations. Thuy Linh Nguyen is assistant professor of history at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, NY.Trade ReviewIn this lucid and captivating study, Nguyen draws on a wide range of colonial-era sources in both French and Vietnamese to uncover a never-before told story about the deiversity of everyday experiences that shaped the delivery of infant and maternal health care in early twentieth-century Vietnam. * SOCIAL HISTORY OF MEDICINE *[A] cogently argued and effectively documented study . . . One of the great strengths of this work is the way in which women's own testimony is brought to light. But this is far from being a doctrinaire study of race, exploitation, and resistance. What Nguyen does so effectively is to present a complex and evolving historical and social trajectory in which it is not only the French who moved. Vietnamese society itself became more diverse and pluralistic: the old, the new, and the in-between coexisted. * ISIS *Childbirth, Maternity, and Medical Pluralism in French Colonial Vietnam, 1880-1945 will be of interest to a range of scholars: those interested in the link between colonial medicine and empire building; the tensions inherent in introducing and implementing western biomedical values and practices in non-western medical contexts; how race, class, gender, and religious and cultural values inflect medical practitioners' (both French and Vietnamese) provision of health care; the social and administrative processes through which plural medical systems emerge; how the Vietnamese have incorporated and transformed values and practices from elsewhere for their own benefit; and early examples of how Vietnamese women's personal private reproductive lives became of concern to the state. * MEDICAL HISTORY *This study, which traces the history of the introduction of Western obstetrical medicine in Vietnam, is a timely contribution to the field of colonial gender studies. . . . The strength of the book lies in its use of both French and Vietnamese sources to illustrate the cultural differences between colonizers and colonized over childbirth, mothering, and infant care. * FRENCH STUDIES *Childbirth, Maternity, and Medical Pluralism in French Vietnam, 1880-1945 is well written and grounded with strong empirical sources. . . . I recommend this book for both undergraduate and graduate classes on the history of science, women's health, and imperialism. * JOURNAL OF SOCIAL HISTORY *Table of ContentsIntroduction The First Encounters Maternity Hospitals Colonial Midwives The Bà mu and Childbirth Pluralism Scientific Motherhood and the Teaching of Maternity The Depression Era and the Discovery of the Child Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

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