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Asian history, Philosophy, Religion
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This book examines the academic legacy of the Han dynasty. It explicates the line between the explaining of a classical…
text (训诂) and the study of classical texts and their interpretation (训诂学). The study of hermeneutics was developed already, including the Chinese specific figure, meaning, sound, interpretation, and rites and systems. It details analyses of the Confucian School, Daoist School, Yin-Yang School, Legalist School, Terminologist School, Mohist School, Political Strategist School, Syncretist School, Agriculturalist School, and Literalist School. Among important classical works of the Han Dynasty examined throughout the book Shiji, Hanshu and Hanji are deeply analysed. Referring to various works during the Earlier and Later Han Dynasty, the author details categories of historiographical writing, i.e., the category of classical, official, and miscellaneous history, and different branches of analysis and interpretation.The book expatiates chapters on astronomy, mathematics, geography, agriculture, and medicine. Among these are the three theories on sky, the mathematics, map drawing, ox-plowing, an agricultural treatise, water project examinations, and the process of knowledge transfer and advancement in medicine during the Han Dynasty.
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History, Asian history, War, Politics and government
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This book examines the relationship between Britain and Oman since the end of the Second World War up until the…
Iranian revolution. Particular focus is given to the political and economic development of the state, together with Britain’s various overt and covert interventions, principally in the three decades between 1945 and 1975. The author addresses themes which have previously been unexplored in the literature on Oman and British Imperialism in the Arabian Peninsula, such as the establishment of the Sultan’s Armed Forces, and the impact of the oil industry. The book shows that Sultan Said bin Taymur (r. 1932-1970) enjoyed considerable ‘agency’ in his relations with the British who found it very difficult to persuade him to implement economic development and establish relations with his neighbours. Britain’s relations with successive sultans were deliberately concealed, including the contribution of special forces in fighting Oman’s insurgencies. It is widely argued that when Qaboos bin Said became Sultan in 1970, a ‘renaissance’ occurred, however many newly discovered documents have called this into question. They reveal how an inexperienced Sultan came to power with covert British support, and Whitehall’s direction of the war in Dhofar from afar. These documents highlight the extent of British intelligence cooperation and psychological warfare planning to counter the insurgents in Dhofar. However, as this book demonstrates, the Sultan also relied on non-British advisors, known as the ‘mafia’, to secure financial assistance and establish diplomatic ties across the Middle East. Finally, the book details how British defence assistance continued well beyond the retreat from empire in the Persian Gulf.
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Biography, Literature biography, Journals and memoirs, Asian history
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From the Franz Kafka Prize–winning author. “Full of love, sorrow, and tenderness . . . a deeply heartfelt account of his family in…
the 1960s and 70s.” —Xiaolu Guo, award-winning author of Nine ContinentsWith lyricism and deep emotion, Yan Lianke chronicles the extraordinary lives of his father and uncles, as well as his own during the Cultural Revolution. Living in a remote village, Yan’s parents are so poor that they can only afford to use wheat flour on New Year and festival days, and while Yan dreams of fried scallion buns, and even steals from his father to buy sesame seed cakes. He yearns to leave the village, however he can, and soon novels become an escape. He resolves to become a writer himself after reading on the back of a novel that its author was given leave to remain in the city of Harbin after publishing her book. In the evenings, after finishing back-breaking shifts hauling stones at a cement factory, sometimes sixteen hours long, he sets to work writing. He is ultimately delivered from the drudgery and danger of manual labor by a career in the Army, but he is filled with regrets as he recalls these years of scarcity, turmoil, and poverty.A philosophical portrait of grief, death, home, and fate that gleams with Yan’s quick wit and gift for imagery, Three Brothers is a personal portrait of a politically devastating period, and a celebration of the power of the family to hold together even in the harshest circumstances.“This engaging book asks readers to consider the nature of life and death, city versus country, and the impact generations can have on each other.” —Winnipeg Free Press
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Arts and entertainment, Asian history, Politics and government, General non-fiction
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This book addresses one of the key issues of our time, the process of sustainable transition in modern, industrial societies,…
by looking at the dynamics associated with this objective at the decentralised local level in South Korea.The creation of eco-cities is a crucial aspect in the ongoing urbanisation of East Asia, and this book investigates specific examples of Korean local governments embarking on the path towards sustainable urban development and assesses their achievements. Making use of a wide range of sources and data collection methods, the book studies two diverse cases in great depth: Suwon City and Jeju Province. By systematically comparing the aims, strategies and decision-making processes in these two examples, the book illuminates the relative roles played by local leaders, central government, civil society representatives, and even international organisations.Highlighting the challenges, driving forces and limitations impacting sustainable transition at the local level, this book will be a valuable resource to students and scholars of Korean politics, decentralisation, urban governance, sustainable development and city planning.
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Asian history, Politics and government
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This book offers an in-depth exploration of the early history of Palestine, providing a rigorous analysis of pivotal events and…
underlying dynamics. The study begins with examining the emergence of Zionist movements and their proposals, the period of Ottoman governance in the Levant, and the influence of Western imperialism, concluding with the critical era surrounding the Second World War, specifically from 1939 to 1948. The following four chapters adopt a chronological and analytical approach to address topics of lasting significance. These chapters critically examine the development of ideological currents originating from early Zionist initiatives, the progression of Jewish settlement projects in Palestine from 1891 to 1917, and their contemporary relevance. Furthermore, they investigate the international political responses to the Palestine issue during the First and Second World Wars, with particular emphasis on the interactions between the Zionist movement and Western imperialism. In the final section, the book scrutinizes the foundational principles of the Zionist movement and the challenges encountered by the Arab population during the interwar period, offering valuable insights into the complex socio-political realities of the time.
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Asian history, Politics and government, Islam, General non-fiction
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This book provides a survey of the political situation in 15 Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa…
and provides overviews of associated post-Arab Spring politics, with an emphasis of political Islamist movements. A translation from its original in Bahasa Indonesia, the book critically assesses the concept of post-Islamism from an Indonesian perspective. It argues that the wave of democratization in the Middle East following the Arab Spring failed to create an open democratic life in the region, except in the country where the Arab Spring began, Tunisia. Rather, it has left growing conflicts and destabilization in the region, with the rise of new authoritarianism. The authors simultaneously show that Islamic political movements in general are adaptive in the face of the changing political environment post-Arab Spring. They present the example of the Muslim Brotherhood as a movement with distinctive characteristics and high levels of adaptability in changing socio-political environments. It is relevant to advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying and researching contemporary Arab or Islamist movements and to scholars look for a neat comparative survey of countries after the Arab Spring.
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Asian history, History, Philosophy, Religion
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This book is a readable and insightful analytical work that steadily traces and analyzes the historical development of Confucianism in…
China. This book is structured chronologically and discusses the developing positions of Confucianism across different periods in the Chinese history. Each chapter focuses on a number of key questions and perspectives pertaining to Confucian thoughts and ideas, for example, &‘Benevolence&’ and &‘Propriety&’ in Pre-Qin Confucianism, studies of Mencius and Xunzi, and Dong Zhongshu of the Han Dynasty . In addition, this book pays special and extensive attention to ideas of New Confucianism, its concepts, and formation. This book is written in a simple yet comprehensible style. It aims to broaden and deepen studies of Confucianism via its stage-by-stage discussion about the historical development of Confucian thoughts. Both academic specialists and ordinary readers will find the book helpful and inspiring in its clear and vivid delineation, analysis, and debate about the essence, function, and role of Confucianism in traditional and modern societies alike.
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War, History, European history, Police and military, World War II, Asian history
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Some violence and some strong language
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Asian history, Criticism, Politics and government
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Liron Mor’s book queries what conflict means in the context of Palestine–Israel. Conflict has long been seen as singular and…
primary: as an “original sin” that necessitates the state and underwrites politics. This book problematizes this universal notion of conflict, revealing its colonial implications and proposing that conflicts are always politically constructed after the fact and are thus to be understood in their various specific forms. The book explores sites of poetic and political strife in Palestine–Israel by combining a comparative study of Hebrew and Arabic literature with political and literary theory. Mor leverages an archive that ranges from the 1930s to the present, from prose and poetry to film and television, to challenge the conception of the Palestinian–Israeli context as a conflict, delineating the colonial history of this concept and showing its inadequacy to Palestine–Israel. Instead, Mor articulates locally specific modes of theorizing the antagonisms and mediations, colonial technologies, and anticolonial practices that make up the fabric of this site. The book thus offers five figurative conflictual concepts that are derived from the poetics of the works: conflict (judgment/ishtibāk), levaṭim (disorienting dilemmas), ikhtifāʾ (anti/colonial disappearance), ḥoḳ (mediating law), and inqisām (hostile severance). In so doing, Conflicts aims to generate a historically and geographically situated mode of theory-making, which defies the separation between the conceptual and the poetic.
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Asian history, Politics and government, General non-fiction
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The Mother, the Politician, and the Guerrilla intervenes in discussions on decolonialism and feminism by introducing the example of the…
Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement. Üstündağ shows how the practices and the concepts of the movement contribute to debates on how the past, present, and future can be critically rethought in revolutionary ways.In the movement’s images, figures, voices, bodies, and their reverberations Üstündağ elaborates a new political imagination that has emerged in Kurdistan through women’s acts and speech. This political imagination unfolds between flesh, body, voice, language. It is the result of Kurdish women’s desire to find new ways of being and becoming, between the necessary and the possible.Focusing on the figures of the mother, the woman politician and woman guerilla, Üstündağ argues that the Kurdish Women’s Freedom Movement changes what politics consists of, including its matter, relationality, temporality, and spatiality. Although anchored in the specific Kurdish experiences, the book puts the movement into conversation with feminist political theory, psychoanalysis, Black Studies, Queer Studies, and Decolonial Studies. In solidarity with the Kurdish Movement’s tradition of resistance to History with a capital H that Kurds have built through reiterated performance, the book seeks to establish what new entanglements with wide-ranging thought the movement offers as a provocation for contemporary politics.
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Asian history, Politics and government
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India is witnessing a unique moment in populism, with sentiments divided between economic reforms that promise fast industrialization and protests…
that thwart such industrialization. This book offers an ethnographic study of divergent local responses to the proposed construction of a Tata Motors factory in eastern India that would have produced the Nano, the so-called people’s car. Initial excitement was followed by long protests among the villagers whose agricultural land was being acquired for the project. After these protests secured the relocation of the factory, further demonstrations followed, sometimes involving the same participants, seeking to bring the factory back.People’s Car explores this ambivalence concerning industrialization, asking why long drawn resistances against corporate industrialization coexist with political rhetoric and slogans promoting fast-paced industrialization. Majumder argues that such contradictory rhetoric and promises target divided sentiments in rural India where land is incommensurable with money and a site specially marked by desire for middle caste small landowners aspiring to futures beyond agriculture.Previous studies of industrialization have generally focused on either demands for development or populist critiques. Moving beyond romantic clichés about urban/rural divisions, People’s Car offers a single analytical and ethnographic framework demonstrating how pro- and anti-industrialization forces feed off each other.
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Asian history, Psychology
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Just before India’s independence, a young Punjabi woman, ill at ease in her marriage and eager for personal and national…
freedom, sat down with psychiatrist Dev Satya Nand for an experiment in his new method of dream analysis. The published analysis documents a surge of emotion and reflections on sexuality, gender, marriage, ambition, trauma, and art. “Mrs. A.” (as she is known) turned to female figures from Hindu myth to reimagine her social world and its ethical arrangements, envisioning a future beyond marriage, colonial rule, and gendered constraints.This book explores the conversation between Mrs. A. and Satya Nand, its window onto gender and sexuality in late colonial Indian society, and the ways Mrs. A. put ethics in motion, creating alternatives to ideals of belonging, recognition, and consciousness. It finds in Mrs. A.’s musings repertoires for the creative transformation of ideals and explores the possibilities of thinking with a dynamic concept of counter-ethics. An unconventional history of gender and sexuality in late colonialism, this book reminds us that the west did not invent feminism, that psychiatry’s history of innovation and creativity is global, and that ethical thinking does not need to center on western myths or paradigms.
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Asian history, Criticism, Psychology
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CHOICE: OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLEHow do the literatures and cultures of oppressed societies survive and flourish in spite of the overdetermining…
conditions of precarity and injustice of which they are a product and against which they protest? Might the symptom of oppression become simultaneously the agent of its critique? Melancholy Acts offers richly nuanced reflections on these questions through a series of wide-ranging engagements with Arab thought, literature, and film in the aftermath of the 1948 dispossession of Palestinians and the 1967 military defeat of Arab armies.Melancholy Acts offers a psychoaffective theory of cultural production that arises out of the disjunction between political impoverishment and cultural resistance to colonial and neoliberal oppression. Such a theory allows the author to trace the melancholy disposition of Arabic literary and filmic productions and to discern the precarious rhetorical modes of their critical intervention in a culture that is continually strained to its breaking point. Across six chapters, Melancholy Acts reads with rigor and sensitivity contentious topics of Arab contemporaneity such as secular modernity and manhood, Arab nationalism and leftism, literary and artistic iltizām, or commitment, Islamism, and martyrdom. The book tracks the melancholy politics that inform the literary and cultural projects of a multitude of Arab novelists (Ghassan Kanafani and Naguib Mahfouz); poets and playwrights (Mahmoud Darwish, Nizar Qabbani, and Saadallah Wannous); filmmakers (Nouri Bouzid, Moufida Tlatli, Youssef Chahine, and Hany Abu Assad); alongside the work of such intellectuals as Hussein Muruwwa, Malek Bennabi, Karima Lazali, George Tarabishi, and Fethi Benslama, from within the Arab world, as well as such non-Arab thinkers as Freud, Lacan, Adorno, Fanon, Spivak, Butler, and Žižek.Melancholy Acts charts a fresh and bold new approach to Arabic and comparative literature that combines in interlaced simultaneity a high sensitivity to local idioms, as they swerve between symptom and critique, with nuanced knowledge of the geopolitics of theory and psychoanalysis.
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Asian history, Medicine
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Although Chinese medicine is assumed to be a timeless healing tradition, the encounter with modern biomedicine threatened its very existence…
and led to many radical changes. Prescriptions for Virtuosity tells the story of how doctors of Chinese medicine have responded to the global dominance of biomedicine and developed new forms of virtuosity to keep their clinical practice relevant in contemporary Chinese society.Based on extensive ethnographic and historical research, the book documents the strategies of Chinese medicine doctors to navigate postcolonial power inequalities. Doctors have followed two seemingly contradictory courses of action. First, they have emphasized the unique “Chinese” characteristics of their practice, defining them against the perceived strengths of biomedicine, and producing an ontological divide between the two medical systems. These oppositions have inadvertently marginalized Chinese medicine, making it seem appropriate for clinical use only when biomedical solutions are lacking. Second, doctors have found points of convergence to facilitate the blending of the two medical practices, producing innovative solutions to difficult clinical problems.Prescriptions for Virtuosity examines how the postcolonial condition can generate not only domination but hybridity. Karchmer shows, for example, how the clinical methodology of “pattern discrimination and treatment determination” bianzheng lunzhi, which is today celebrated as the quintessential characteristic of Chinese medicine, is a twentieth-century invention. When subjected to the institutional standardizations of hospital practice, bianzheng lunzhi can lead to an impoverished form of medicine. But in the hands of a virtuoso physicians, it becomes a dynamic tool for moving between biomedicine and Chinese medicine to create innovative new therapies.
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Asian history, Laws and statutes, Politics and government
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Honorable Mention, Bernard S. Cohn Book PrizeAn 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.
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Asian history, Criticism, Christianity
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A 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.
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Asian history, Criticism, Philosophy
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“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.
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Asian history, Islam, General non-fiction
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Winner, Carolina's Outstanding Contribution to Middle East and Islamic Studies Book AwardAn illuminating story of a Sufi community that sought…
the revelation of GodIn 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.
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Asian history, Criticism, Islam
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Who Is a Muslim? argues that modern Urdu literature, from its inception in colonial institutions such as Fort William College,…
Calcutta, to its dominant iterations in contemporary Pakistan—popular novels, short stories, television serials—is formed around a question that is and historically has been at the core of early modern and modern Western literatures. The question “Who is a Muslim?,” a constant concern within eighteenth-century literary and scholarly orientalist texts, the English oriental tale chief among them, takes on new and dangerous meanings once it travels to the North-Indian colony, and later to the newly formed Pakistan. A literary-historical study spanning some three centuries, this book argues that the idea of an Urdu canon, far from secular or progressive, has been shaped as the authority designate around the intertwined questions of piety, national identity, and citizenship.
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Asian history, General non-fiction
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Provides 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.