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The Era of Great Disasters examines modern disaster response in Japan, from the changing earthquake preparations and regulations, to immediate…
emergency procedures from the national, prefectural, and city levels, and finally the evolving efforts of rebuilding and preparing for the next great disaster in the hopes of minimizing their tragic effects. This book focuses on three major earthquakes from Japan’s modern history. The first is the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, which struck the capital region. The second is the 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, affecting the area between Kobe and Osaka. The third is the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, the magnitude 9.0 quake that struck off the Pacific coast of the Tohoku region, causing a devastating tsunami and nuclear accident. While the events of (and around) each of these earthquakes are unique, Professor Iokibe brings his deep expertise and personal experience to each disaster, unveiling not only the disasters themselves but the humanity underneath. In each case, he gives attention and gratitude to those who labored to save lives and restore the communities affected, from the individuals on the scene to government officials and military personnel and emergency responders, in the hope that we might learn from the past and move forward with greater wisdom, knowledge, and common purpose.Hindutva as Political Monotheism
By Anustup Basu. 2020
In Hindutva as Political Monotheism, Anustup Basu offers a genealogical study of Hindutva—Hindu right-wing nationalism—to illustrate the significance of Western…
anthropology and political theory to the idea of India as a Hindu nation. Connecting Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt's notion of political theology to traditional theorems of Hindu sovereignty and nationhood, Basu demonstrates how Western and Indian theorists subsumed a vast array of polytheistic, pantheistic, and henotheistic cults featuring millions of gods into a singular edifice of faith. Basu exposes the purported “Hindu Nation” as itself an orientalist vision by analyzing three crucial moments: European anthropologists’ and Indian intellectuals’ invention of a unified Hinduism during the long nineteenth century; Indian ideologues’ adoption of ethnoreligious nationalism in pursuit of a single Hindu way of life in the twentieth century; and the transformations of this project in the era of finance capital, Bollywood, and new media. Arguing that Hindutva aligns with Enlightenment notions of nationalism, Basu foregrounds its significance not just to Narendra Modi's right-wing, anti-Muslim government but also to mainstream Indian nationalism and its credo of secularism and tolerance.Sandya Hewamanne's Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone analyzed how female factory workers in Sri Lanka's free trade zones…
challenged conventional notions about marginalized women at the bottom of the global economy. In Restitching Identities in Rural Sri Lanka Hewamanne now follows many of these same women to explore the ways in which they negotiate their social and economic lives once back in their home villages. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over fifteen years, the book explores how the former free-trade-zone workers manipulate varied forms of capital—social, cultural, and monetary— to become local entrepreneurs and community leaders, while simultaneously initiating gradual changes in rural social hierarchies and gender norms.Free trade zones introduce Sri Lankan women to neoliberal ways of fashioning selves, Hewamanne contends. Her book illustrates how varied manifestations of neoliberal attitudes within local contexts result in new articulations of what it is to be an entrepreneur as well as a good woman. By focusing on how former workers decenter neoliberal market relations while using their entrepreneurial and civic activities to reimagine social life in ways more satisfying to them and their loved ones—what the author calls a politics of contentment—the book sheds light on new political possibilities in contexts where both reproduction of neoliberal economic relations and implementation of alternatives co-exist.The Calcutta Kerani and the London Clerk in the Nineteenth Century: Life, Labour, Latitude
By Sumit Chakrabarti. 2021
This book examines the location and representation of the colonial clerk or the kerani within the cultural and social space…
of nineteenth century colonial India. It provides a comparative history of the clerk in Calcutta vis-à-vis the clerk in contemporary London in order to understand the manifestations of modernity in these two disparate but intimately related spaces. The volume traces the socio-historical life of the clerk in the newly emerged city-space of Calcutta and reveals how the Bengali kerani became a complex and distinct figure of bureaucratic and colonial modernity. It analyses the techniques of surveillance and ethical training given to the native clerks and offers insights into the role of education in the production and dissemination of knowledge and hegemony in the colonial setting. The author, through a reading of clerk manuals, handbooks and literary representations, highlights the class and cultural identity of the English educated colonial clerk in the new city-space. He also focuses on the ambivalence and unreliability of the clerk or colonial babu who became complicit and gave legitimacy to the empire while personifying a complex modernity within the networks of the colonial administration. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers of colonial and imperial history, literature, cultural studies, city studies, British studies, area studies, commonwealth studies and South Asian studies, particularly those interested in colonial Bengal.In the early twentieth century, Chinese Buddhists sought to strengthen their tradition through publications, institution building, and initiatives aimed at…
raising the educational level of the monastic community. In The Huayan University Network, Erik J. Hammerstrom examines how Huayan Buddhism was imagined, taught, and practiced during this time of profound political and social change and, in so doing, recasts the history of twentieth-century Chinese Buddhism.Hammerstrom traces the influence of Huayan University, the first Buddhist monastic school founded after the fall of the imperial system in China. Although the university lasted only a few years, its graduates went on to establish a number of Huayan-centered educational programs throughout China. While they did not create a new sectarian Huayan movement, they did form a network unified by a common educational heritage that persists to the present day. Drawing on an extensive range of Buddhist texts and periodicals, Hammerstrom shows that Huayan had a significant impact on Chinese Buddhist thought and practice and that the history of Huayan complicates narratives of twentieth-century Buddhist modernization and revival. Offering a wide range of insights into the teaching and practice of Huayan in Republican China, this book sheds new light on an essential but often overlooked element of the East Asian Buddhist tradition.The Emperor’s New Road: China and the Project of the Century
By Jonathan E Hillman. 2020
A prominent authority on China&’s Belt and Road Initiative reveals the global risks lurking within Beijing&’s project of the century…
China&’s Belt and Road Initiative is the world&’s most ambitious and misunderstood geoeconomic vision. To carry out President Xi Jinping&’s flagship foreign-policy effort, China promises to spend over one trillion dollars for new ports, railways, fiber-optic cables, power plants, and other connections. The plan touches more than one hundred and thirty countries and has expanded into the Arctic, cyberspace, and even outer space. Beijing says that it is promoting global development, but Washington warns that it is charting a path to global dominance. Taking readers on a journey to China&’s projects in Asia, Europe, and Africa, Jonathan E. Hillman reveals how this grand vision is unfolding. As China pushes beyond its borders and deep into dangerous territory, it is repeating the mistakes of the great powers that came before it, Hillman argues. If China succeeds, it will remake the world and place itself at the center of everything. But Xi may be overreaching: all roads do not yet lead to Beijing.The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur’s Painted Lands and India’s Eighteenth Century
By Dipti Khera. 2020
A look at the painting traditions of northwestern India in the eighteenth century, and what they reveal about the political…
and artistic changes of the eraIn the long eighteenth century, artists from Udaipur, a city of lakes in northwestern India, specialized in depicting the vivid sensory ambience of its historic palaces, reservoirs, temples, bazaars, and durbars. As Mughal imperial authority weakened by the late 1600s and the British colonial economy became paramount by the 1830s, new patrons and mobile professionals reshaped urban cultures and artistic genres across early modern India. The Place of Many Moods explores how Udaipur’s artworks—monumental court paintings, royal portraits, Jain letter scrolls, devotional manuscripts, cartographic artifacts, and architectural drawings—represent the period’s major aesthetic, intellectual, and political shifts. Dipti Khera shows that these immersive objects powerfully convey the bhava—the feel, emotion, and mood—of specific places, revealing visions of pleasure, plenitude, and praise. These memorialized moods confront the ways colonial histories have recounted Oriental decadence, shaping how a culture and time are perceived.Illuminating the close relationship between painting and poetry, and the ties among art, architecture, literature, politics, ecology, trade, and religion, Khera examines how Udaipur’s painters aesthetically enticed audiences of courtly connoisseurs, itinerant monks, and mercantile collectives to forge bonds of belonging to real locales in the present and to long for idealized futures. Their pioneering pictures sought to stir such emotions as love, awe, abundance, and wonder, emphasizing the senses, spaces, and sociability essential to the efficacy of objects and expressions of territoriality.The Place of Many Moods uncovers an influential creative legacy of evocative beauty that raises broader questions about how emotions and artifacts operate in constituting history and subjectivity, politics and place.Japanese Culture (Fourth Edition)
By Paul H. Varley. 2000
An introduction to Japanese history and culture. This fourth edition includes expanded sections on numerous topics, among which are samurai…
values, Zen Buddhism, the tea ceremony, Confucianism in the Tokugawa period, the story of the 47 ronin, and mass culture in contemporary times.Disability in Contemporary China: Citizenship, Identity and Culture
By Sarah Dauncey. 2020
Sarah Dauncey offers the first comprehensive exploration of disability and citizenship in Chinese society and culture from 1949 to the…
present. Through the analysis of a wide variety of Chinese sources, from film and documentary to literature and life writing, media and state documents, she sheds important new light on the ways in which disability and disabled identities have been represented and negotiated over this time. She exposes the standards against which disabled people have been held as the Chinese state has grappled with expectations of what makes the 'ideal' Chinese citizen. From this, she proposes an exciting new theoretical framework for understanding disabled citizenship in different societies – 'para-citizenship'. A far more dynamic relationship of identity and belonging than previously imagined, her new reading synthesises the often troubling contradictions of citizenship for disabled people – the perils of bodily and mental difference and the potential for personal and group empowerment.Islamic Knowledge and the Making of Modern Egypt
By Hilary Kalmbach. 2020
This historical study transforms our understanding of modern Egyptian national culture by applying social theory to the history of Egypt's…
first teacher-training school. It focuses on Dar al-Ulum, which trained students from religious schools to teach in Egypt's new civil schools from 1872. During the first four decades of British occupation (1882-1922), Egyptian nationalists strove to emulate Europe yet insisted that Arabic and Islamic knowledge be reformed and integrated into Egyptian national culture despite opposition from British officials. This reinforced the authority of the alumni of the Dar al-Ulum, the daramiyya, as arbiters of how to be modern and authentic, a position that graduates Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood would use to resist westernisation and create new modes of Islamic leadership in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Establishing a 130-year history for tensions over the place of Islamic ideas and practices within modernized public spaces, tensions which became central to the outcomes of the 2011 Arab Uprisings, Hilary Kalmbach demonstrates the importance of Arabic and Islamic knowledge to notions of authority, belonging, and authenticity within a modernising Muslim-majority community.The Bhagavad-gītā: A Critical Introduction
By Ithamar Theodor. 2021
This volume is a systematic and comprehensive introduction to one of the most read texts in South Asia, the Bhagavad-gītā.…
The Bhagavad-gītā is at its core a religious text, a philosophical treatise and a literary work, which has occupied an authoritative position within Hinduism for the past millennium. This book brings together themes central to the study of the Gītā, as it is popularly known – such as the Bhagavad-gītā’s structure, the history of its exegesis, its acceptance by different traditions within Hinduism and its national and global relevance. It highlights the richness of the Gītā’s interpretations, examines its great interpretive flexibility and at the same time offers a conceptual structure based on a traditional commentarial tradition. With contributions from major scholars across the world, this book will be indispensable for scholars and researchers of religious studies, especially Hinduism, Indian philosophy, Asian philosophy, Indian history, literature and South Asian studies.The Occupied Clinic: Militarism and Care in Kashmir
By Saiba Varma. 2020
In The Occupied Clinic, Saiba Varma explores the psychological, ontological, and political entanglements between medicine and violence in Indian-controlled Kashmir—the…
world's most densely militarized place. Into a long history of occupations, insurgencies, suppressions, natural disasters, and a crisis of public health infrastructure come interventions in human distress, especially those of doctors and humanitarians, who struggle against an epidemic: more than sixty percent of the civilian population suffers from depression, anxiety, PTSD, or acute stress. Drawing on encounters between medical providers and patients in an array of settings, Varma reveals how colonization is embodied and how overlapping state practices of care and violence create disorienting worlds for doctors and patients alike. Varma shows how occupation creates worlds of disrupted meaning in which clinical life is connected to political disorder, subverting biomedical neutrality, ethics, and processes of care in profound ways. By highlighting the imbrications between humanitarianism and militarism and between care and violence, Varma theorizes care not as a redemptive practice, but as a fraught sphere of action that is never quite what it seems.The Ottoman Empire and Its Successors, 1801-1927
By William Miller. 1827
The Films of Bong Joon Ho (Global Film Directors)
By Nam Lee. 2020
Bong Joon Ho won the Oscar® for Best Director for Parasite (2019), which also won Best Picture, the first foreign film…
to do so, and two other Academy Awards. Parasite was the first Korean film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. These achievements mark a new career peak for the director, who first achieved wide international acclaim with 2006’s monster movie The Host and whose forays into English-language film with Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017) brought him further recognition. As this timely book reveals, even as Bong Joon Ho has emerged as an internationally known director, his films still engage with distinctly Korean social and political contexts that may elude many Western viewers. The Films of Bong Joon Ho demonstrates how he hybridizes Hollywood conventions with local realities in order to create a cinema that foregrounds the absurd cultural anomie Koreans have experienced in tandem with their rapid economic development. Film critic and scholar Nam Lee explores how Bong subverts the structures of the genres he works within, from the crime thriller to the sci-fi film, in order to be truthful to Korean realities that often deny the reassurances of the happy Hollywood ending. With detailed readings of Bong’s films from Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) through Parasite (2019), the book will give readers a new appreciation of this world-class cinematic talent.Democratization and Democracy in South Korea, 1960–Present
By Hyug Baeg Im. 2020
This book analyses democratization and democracy in South Korea since 1960. The book starts with an analysis of the distinctive…
characteristics of bureaucratic authoritarianism and how democratic transition had been possible after inconclusive and protracted “tug of war” between authoritarian regime and democratic opposition. It then goes on to explore what the opportunities and constraints to the new democracy are to be a consolidated democracy, how new democracy had changed the industrial relations in the post-transition period, how premodern political culture such as Confucian patrimonialism and familism had obstructed democratic consolidation, and the improvement of quality of democracy. The author compares empirically, from the perspective of a comparative political scientist, political regime superiority of democracy over authoritarianism with regard to economic development. He concludes that “democratic incompetence” theory has been proven wrong and, in South Korea, democracy has performed better than authoritarian regimes in terms of economic growth with equity, employment, distribution of income, trade balance, and inflation.This book will benefit political scientists, development economists, labor economists, religious sociologists, military sociologists, and historians focusing on East Asian history.This book analyses US and UK efforts to shut down Pakistan s nuclear programme in the 1970s between the…
catalytic Indian nuclear test of May 1974 and the decline of sustained non-proliferation activity from mid-1979 onwards It is a tale of cooperation between Washington and London but also a story of divisions and disputes The brutal economic realities of the decade globalisation and wider geopolitical challenges all complicated this relationship Policy and action were also affected by changes elsewhere in the world Iran s 1979 revolution brought a new form of political Islamic radicalism to prominence The fears engendered by the Ayatollah and his followers coupled to the blustering rhetoric of Pakistani leaders gave rise to the Islamic bomb a nuclear weapon supposedly created by Pakistan to be shared amongst the Muslim ummah This study thus combines cultural diplomatic economic and political history to offer a rigorous deeply researched account of a critical moment in nuclear historyThe Koreas: The Birth of Two Nations Divided
By Theodore Jun Yoo. 2020
What history, pop culture, and diaspora can teach us about North and South Korea today.Korea is one of the last…
divided countries in the world. Twins born of the Cold War, one is vilified as an isolated, impoverished, time-warped state with an abysmal human rights record and a reclusive leader who perennially threatens global security with his clandestine nuclear weapons program. The other is lauded as a thriving democratic and capitalist state with the thirteenth largest economy in the world and a model for developing countries to emulate. In The Koreas, Theodore Jun Yoo provides a compelling gateway to understanding the divergent developments of contemporary North and South Korea. In contrast to standard histories, Yoo examines the unique qualities of the Korean diaspora experience, challenging the master narratives of national culture, homogeneity, belongingness, and identity. This book draws from the latest research to present a decidedly demythologized history, with chapters focusing on feature stories that capture the key issues of the day as they affect popular culture and everyday life. The Koreas will be indispensable to any historian, armchair or otherwise, in need of a discerning and reliable guide to the region.From a former Israeli spy, comes the most realistic and authentic thriller of the year. The Times Number One BestsellerWinner…
of the CWA International Dagger.A Times, Telegraph and FT pick for Summer Reads 2019"The year's best espionage thriller" Daily Telegraph Best Books of 2019"Breathlessly exciting" Marcel Berlins, The Times."Races along with pace and verve" Adam LeBor, Financial Times"A genuinely thrilling espionage novel" John Williams, Mail on Sunday"A deeply enjoyable espionage thriller" Jake Kerridge, Daily Telegraph.When an Israeli tech exec disappears from Charles de Gaulle airport with a woman in red, logic dictates youthful indiscretion. But Israel is on a state of high alert nonetheless. Colonel Zeev Abadi, the new head of Unit 8200's Special Section, just happens to have arrived on the same flight.For Commissaire Léger of the Paris Police, all coincidences are suspect. When a second young Israeli from the flight is kidnapped, this time at gunpoint from his hotel room, his suspicions are confirmed - and a diplomatic crisis looms. As the race to identify the victims and the reasons behind their abductions intensifies, a covert Chinese commando team watches from the rooftops, while hour by hour the morgue receives fresh bodies from around Paris.This could be one long night in the City of Lights.Translated from the Hebrew by Daniela ZamirThis volume presents first editions of a variety of cuneiform tablets from the Old Babylonian period belonging to the collection…
of the late Shlomo Moussaieff. It makes available for the first time three texts representing varying levels of Mesopotamian scribal education. The first is what the authors argue is the most complete copy of the first fifty lines of the standard version of the Sumerian epic Gilgameš and the Bull of Heaven. The second is a hitherto unpublished bilingual (Sumerian-Akkadian) lexical list of unknown provenance, similar to the Proto-Aa syllabary. Each of the 314 entries preserved on this tablet provides a pronunciation gloss, a Sumerian logogram, and an Akkadian translation. A unique feature of this list is that the signs are arranged on the basis of graphic concatenation: each sign contains one of the graphic components of the preceding sign. It also yields a great number of hitherto unknown, synonymous Akkadian translations to the Sumerian logograms. The final chapter contains an edition of two groups of lenticular school tablets, containing thirty-three elementary-level scribal exercises.With this volume, Jacob Klein and Yitschak Sefati preserve and disseminate important artifacts that advance the study of Sumerian literature, Mesopotamian lexicography, and ancient Near Eastern scribal education.Japanese Literature: From Murasaki To Murakami (Key Issues In Asian Studies)
By Marvin Marcus. 2015
Japanese Literature: From Murasaki to Murakami provides a concise introduction to the literature of Japan that traces its origins in…
the seventh century and explores a literary legacy—and its cultural contexts—marked by the intersection of aristocratic elegance and warrior austerity. Coverage extends to the present day with a focus on the complex twists and turns that mark Japan’s literature in the modern period. In under one-hundred pages of narrative, Marcus’s account of Japanese literature ranges from the 712 CE publication of Japan’s first literary work, the Kojiki, to internationally-famous 21st century authors. Readers get a sense of past and contemporary literary themes and well written vignettes of the men and women who produced works that are an integral part of Japan’s literary traditions. Readers are introduced to Japanese literature, but Marcus’s linkages to history and culture increase the likelihood that many readers will be inspired to learn more about Japan and its rich history. Marcus’s compelling interpretations of significant works of Japanese literature and their historical moments complement carefully selected passages of literary prose, poetry, and images from Japan's long literary and cultural history. This small gem of a book is essential for students, teachers, and general audiences interested in Japan and its long literary traditions.