Coconut Milk by
Coconut Milk is a fresh, new poetry collection that is a sensual homage to place, people, love, and lust. The first collection by Samoan writer and painter Dan Taulapapa McMullin, the poems evoke both intimate conversations and provocative monologues that allow him to explore the complexities of being a queer Samoan in the United States. McMullin seamlessly flows between exposing the ironies of Tiki kitsch-inspired cultural appropriation and intimate snapshots of Samoan people and place. In doing so, he disrupts popular notions of a beautiful Polynesia available for the taking, and carves out new avenues of meaning for Pacific Islanders of Oceania. Throughout the collection, McMullin illustrates various manifestations of geopolitical, cultural, linguistic, and sexual colonialism. His work illuminates the ongoing resistance to colonialism and the remarkable resilience of Pacific Islanders and queer-identified peoples. McMullin's Fa'a Fafine identity--the ability to walk between and embody both the masculine and feminine--creates a grounded and dynamic voice throughout the collection. It also fosters a creative dialogue between Fa'a Fafine people and trans-Indigenous movements. Through a uniquely Samoan practice of storytelling, McMullin contributes to the growing and vibrant body of queer Indigenous literature.
Punks, Monks and Politics by
Authenticity is much sought after; being described as inauthentic is an insult or an embarrassment. Being authentic suggests that a given behaviour or performance is reflective of a 'trueness' or 'genuineness' to one's identity. From a social science perspective there is sometimes scepticism expressed about the historical faithfulness of purported behaviours - such as when something is referred to as an 'invented' tradition. However, what can be overlooked in such criticisms is an array of sociological and existential dynamics that are at play when authenticity is striven for. Likewise able to be overlooked is where the location of that authenticity is ostensibly founded; sometimes the trueness of the behaviour is located in local traditions that reach back into time immemorial, sometimes in a universal human and shared sameness, and sometimes with regard to a global phenomenon. Punks, Monks and Politics explores the idea of authenticity as enacted in Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. The collective contributions reveal the sometimes contradictory ways in which the dynamics of authenticity - its pursuit, its deployment, its politics - play out in very different contexts. Whether authenticity inheres in the local or the global, amongst the majority or within a subculture, on the outside of or within people, or in the past or the present, authenticity is nevertheless valued.
Postcolonial Past and Present : Negotiating Literary and Cultural Geographies by
In Postcolonial Past & Present twelve outstanding scholars of literature, history and visual arts look to those spaces Epeli Hau’ofa has insisted are full not empty, asking what it might mean to Indigenise culture. A new cultural politics demands new forms of making and interpretation that rethink and reroute existing cultural categories and geographies. These ‘makers’ include Mukunda Das, Janet Frame, Xavier Herbert, Tomson Highway, Claude McKay, Marie Munkara, Elsje van Keppel, Albert Wendt, Jane Whiteley and Alexis Wright. Case studies from Canada to the Caribbean, India to the Pacific, and Africa, analyse the productive ways that artists and intellectuals have made sense of turbulent local and global forces. -- Abstract
Puro Arte by
Puro Arte explores the emergence of Filipino American theater and performance from the early 20th century to the present. It stresses the Filipino performing body's location as it conjoins colonial histories of the Philippines with U.S. race relations and discourses of globalization. Puro arte, translated from Spanish into English, simply means "pure art." In Filipino, puro arte however performs a much more ironic function, gesturing rather to the labor of over-acting, histrionics, playfulness, and purely over-the-top dramatics. In this book, puro arte functions as an episteme, a way of approaching the Filipino/a performing body at key moments in U.S.-Philippine imperial relations, from the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, early American plays about the Philippines, Filipino patrons in U.S. taxi dance halls to the phenomenon of Filipino/a actors in Miss Saigon. Using this varied archive, Puro Arte turns to performance as an object of study and as a way of understanding complex historical processes of racialization in relation to empire and colonialism.
K-Pop by
K-Pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Economic Innovation in South Korea seeks at once to describe and explain the emergence of export-oriented South Korean popular music and to make sense of larger South Korean economic and cultural transformations. John Lie provides not only a history of South Korean popular music--the premodern background, Japanese colonial influence, post-Liberation American impact, and recent globalization--but also a description of K-pop as a system of economic innovation and cultural production. In doing so, he delves into the broader background of South Korea in this wonderfully informed history and analysis of a pop culture phenomenon sweeping the globe.
Japanese Fashion Cultures by
From Rococo to Edwardian fashions, Japanese street style has reinvented many western dress styles, reinterpreting and altering their meanings and messages in a different cultural and historical context. This wide ranging and original study reveals the complex exchange of styles and what they represent in Japan and beyond, contesting common perceptions of gender in Japanese dress and the notion that non-western fashions simply imitate western styles.Through case studies focussing on fashion image consumption in style tribes such as Kamikaze Girls, Lolita, Edwardian, Ivy Style, Victorian, Romantic and Kawaii, this ground-breaking book investigates the complexities of dress and gender and demonstrates the flexible nature of contemporary fashion and style exchange in a global context. "Japanese Fashion Cultures" will appeal to students and scholars of fashion, cultural studies, gender studies, media studies and related fields.
Tears of Rangi : experiments across worlds by
Six centuries ago Polynesian explorers, who inhabited a cosmos in which islands sailed across the sea and stars across the sky, arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand where they rapidly adapted to new plants, animals, landscapes and climatic conditions. Four centuries later, European explorers arrived with maps and clocks, grids and fences, and they too adapted to a new island home. In this remote, beautiful archipelago, settlers from Polynesia and Europe (and elsewhere) have clashed and forged alliances, they have fiercely debated what is real and what is common sense, what is good and what is right. In this, her most ambitious book to date, Dame Anne Salmond looks at New Zealand as a site of cosmo-diversity, a place where multiple worlds engage and collide. Beginning with a fine-grained inquiry into the early period of encounters between Maori and Europeans in New Zealand (1769-1840), Salmond then investigates such clashes and exchanges in key areas of contemporary life; waterways, land, the sea and people. We live in a world of gridded maps, Outlook calendars and balance sheets; making it seem that this is the nature of reality itself. But in New Zealand, concepts of whakapapa and hau, complex networks and reciprocal exchange, may point to new ways of understanding interactions between peoples, and between people and the natural world. Like our ancestors, Anne Salmond suggests, we too may have a chance to experiment across worlds.
Orienting Hollywood : a century of film culture between Los Angeles and Bombay by
With American cinema facing intense technological and financial challenges both at home and abroad, and with Indian media looking to globalize, there have been numerous high-profile institutional connections between Hollywood and Bombay cinema in the past few years. Many accounts have proclaimed India's transformation in a relatively short period from a Hollywood outpost to a frontier of opportunity. Orienting Hollywood moves beyond the conventional popular wisdom that Hollywood and Bombay cinema have only recently become intertwined because of economic priorities, instead uncovering a longer history of exchange. Through archival research, interviews, industry sources, policy documents, and cultural criticism, Nitin Govil not only documents encounters between Hollywood and India but also shows how connections were imagined over a century of screen exchange. Employing a comparative framework, Govil details the history of influence, traces the nature of interoperability, and textures the contact between Hollywood and Bombay cinema by exploring both the reality and imagination of encounter.
The Rahui : legal pluralism in Polynesian traditional management of resources and territories by
This collection deals with an ancient institution in Eastern Polynesia called the rahui, a form of restricting access to resources and/or territories. While tapu had been extensively discussed in the scientific literature on Oceanian anthropology, the rahui is quite absent from secondary modern literature. This situation is all the more problematic because individual actors, societies, and states in the Pacific are readapting such concepts to their current needs, such as environment regulation or cultural legitimacy. This book assembles a comprehensive collection of current works on the rahui from a legal pluralism perspective. This study as a whole underlines the new assertion of identity that has flowed from the cultural dimension of the rahui. Today, rahui have become a means for indigenous communities to be fully recognised on a political level. Some indigenous communities choose to restore the rahui in order to preserve political control of their territory or, in some cases, to get it back. For the state, better control of the rahui represents a way of asserting its legitimacy and its sovereignty, in the face of this reassertion by indigenous communities.
Techno-Orientalism by
What will the future look like? To judge from many speculative fiction films and books, from Blade Runner to Cloud Atlas, the future will be full of cities that resemble Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, and it will be populated mainly by cold, unfeeling citizens who act like robots. Techno-Orientalism investigates the phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hyper-technological terms in literary, cinematic, and new media representations, while critically examining the stereotype of Asians as both technologically advanced and intellectually primitive, in dire need of Western consciousness-raising. The collection's fourteen original essays trace the discourse of techno-orientalism across a wide array of media, from radio serials to cyberpunk novels, from Sax Rohmer's Dr. Fu Manchu to Firefly. Applying a variety of theoretical, historical, and interpretive approaches, the contributors consider techno-orientalism a truly global phenomenon. In part, they tackle the key question of how these stereotypes serve to both express and assuage Western anxieties about Asia's growing cultural influence and economic dominance. Yet the book also examines artists who have appropriated techno-orientalist tropes in order to critique racist and imperialist attitudes. Techno-Orientalism is the first collection to define and critically analyze a phenomenon that pervades both science fiction and real-world news coverage of Asia. With essays on subjects ranging from wartime rhetoric of race and technology to science fiction by contemporary Asian American writers to the cultural implications of Korean gamers, this volume offers innovative perspectives and broadens conventional discussions in Asian American Cultural studies.
Japanese Avant-Garde and Experimental Film by
The book shows the connections between Japanese historical avant-garde movements and new Japanese experimental films. The author provides insight into the development of Japanese avant-garde visual culture and experimental aesthetics, also featuring the expanded cinema after 2000. The author focuses on the detailed presentation of the chosen aspects, artists and films of the Japanese avant-garde from its origins to the post-2000 period. The analysis is built around themes, objectives and aesthetics introduced by such artists as Shūji Terayama, Takahiko Iimura, Masao Adachi, Takashi Itō, Toshio Matsumoto, Mako Idemitsu, Japanese feminist filmmakers, video artists and the new wave of experimenting independent directors: Takashi Makino, Rei Hayama, Shinkan Tamaki and Kazuhiro Goshima.
New mana : transformations of a classic concept in Pacific languages and cultures / New mana : transformations of a classic concept in Pacific languages and cultures by
"'Mana', a term denoting spiritual power, is found in many Pacific Islands languages. In recent decades, the term has been taken up in New Age movements and online fantasy gaming. In this book, 16 contributors examine mana through ethnographic, linguistic, and historical lenses to understand its transformations in past and present. The authors consider a range of contexts including Indigenous sovereignty movements, Christian missions and Bible translations, the commodification of cultural heritage, and the dynamics of diaspora. Their investigations move across diverse island groups--Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Hawai'i, and French Polynesia--and into Australia, North America and even cyberspace. A key insight that the volume develops is that mana can be analysed most productively by paying close attention to its ethical and aesthetic dimensions. Since the late nineteenth century, mana has been an object of intense scholarly interest. Writers in many fields including anthropology, linguistics, history, religion, philosophy, and missiology have long debated how the term should best be understood. The authors in this volume review mana's complex intellectual history but also describe the remarkable transformations going on in the present day as scholars, activists, church leaders, artists, and entrepreneurs take up mana in new ways"--Provided by publisher
Early Tahitian Poetics by
From 1963 to 2011 Pacific Linguistics, located at the Australian National University, published over six hundred books concerned with the languages of the Pacific, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Southeast, South and East Asia. The Mouton Pacific Linguistics series represents a continuation of this publishing venture under the same Editorial Board. The Pacific Linguistics series presents linguistic descriptions, dictionaries, and other materials concerned with languages of this region. The authors and editors of Pacific Linguistics publications are drawn from a wide range of institutions around the world, and its publications are refereed by international scholars with relevant expertise. Pacific Linguistics has built a reputation as the most authoritative publisher of works on the languages of the Pacific and neighbouring areas, read by scholars with an interest in the region as well as by linguists with interests in language typology, sociolinguistics, language contact and the reconstruction of linguistic change and culture history. Pacific Linguistics is proud to act as a vehicle for the dissemination of knowledge about the languages of the Pacific and the Pacific Rim, many of which are little known, and to bring them to the attention of scholars around the world, as well as providing local communities with published language material, at a time when many minority languages are under threat.
The Social Life of Kimono by
The kimono is an iconic garment with a history as rich and colourful as the textiles from which it is crafted. Deeply associated with Japanese culture both past and present, it has often been thought of as a highly gendered, rigidly traditional and unchanging national costume. This book challenges that perception, revealing the nuanced meanings and messages behind the kimono from the point of view of its wearers and producers, many of whom - both men and women - see the garment as a vehicle for self-expression. Taking a material culture approach, The Social Life of Kimono is the first study to combine the history of the kimono as a fashionable garment with an in-depth exploration of its multifaceted role today on both the street and the catwalk. Through case studies covering historical advertising campaigns, fashion magazines, interviews with contemporary kimono designers, large scale and small craft producers, and consumers who choose to wear them, The Social Life of Kimono gives a unique insight into making and meaning of this complex garment.
The History of Chinese Animation I by
China has been one of the first countries to develop its own aesthetic for dynamic images and to create animation films with distinctive characteristics. In recent years, however, and subject to the influence of Western and Japanese animation, the Chinese animation industry has experienced several new stages of development, prompting the question as to where animation in China is heading in the future. This book describes the history, present and future of China's animation industry. The author divides the business's 95-year history into six periods and analyses each of these from an historical, aesthetic, and artistic perspective. In addition, the book focuses on representative works; themes; directions; artistic styles; techniques; industrial development; government support policies; business models; the nurturing of education and talent; broadcasting systems and animation. Scholars and students who are interested in the history of Chinese animation will benefit from this book and it will appeal additionally to readers interested in Chinese film studies.
Music and words : producing popular songs in modern Japan, 1887-1952 by
This book analyzes composer Nakayama Shimpei's popular songs in the context of Japan's developing record industry and popular music market between 1887 and 1952.
Traveling texts and the work of Afro-Japanese cultural production : two haiku and a microphone by 
America's Japan and Japan's Performing Arts by
America's Japan and Japan's Performing Arts studies the images and myths that have shaped the reception of Japan-related theater, music, and dance in the United States since the 1950s. Soon after World War II, visits by Japanese performing artists to the United States emerged as a significant category of American cultural-exchange initiatives aimed at helping establish and build friendly ties with Japan. Barbara E. Thornbury explores how "Japan" and "Japanese culture" have been constructed, reconstructed, and transformed in response to the hundreds of productions that have taken place over the past sixty years in New York, the main entry point and defining cultural nexus in the United States for the global touring market in the performing arts. The author's transdisciplinary approach makes the book appealing to those in the performing arts studies, Japanese studies, and cultural studies.
Hearts of pine : songs in the lives of three Korean survivors of the Japanese "comfort women" by
In the wake of the wartime experience of sexual slavery for the Japanese military during the Asia-Pacific War (1930-45), Korean survivors lived under great pressure not to speak about what had happened to them. These sexual slaves were known as 'comfort women, ' and this book brings us into the lives of three of them.
Divine Work, Japanese Colonial Cinema and Its Legacy by
For many East Asian nations, cinema and Japanese Imperialism arrived within a few years of each other. Exploring topics such as landscape, gender, modernity and military recruitment, this study details how the respective national cinemas of Japan's territories struggled under, but also engaged with, the Japanese Imperial structures. Japan was ostensibly committed to an ethos of pan-Asianism and this study explores how this sense of the transnational was conveyed cinematically across the occupied lands. Taylor-Jones traces how cinema in the region post-1945 needs to be understood not only in terms of past colonial relationships, but also in relation to how the post-colonial has engaged with shifting political alliances, the opportunities for technological advancement and knowledge, the promise of larger consumer markets, and specific historical conditions of each decade.
Staging Chinese Revolution by
Staging Chinese Revolution surveys fifty years of theatrical propaganda performances in China, revealing a dynamic, commercial capacity in works often dismissed as artifacts of censorship.
Mu Shiying by
Shanghai's "Literary Comet" When the avant-garde writer Mu Shiying was assassinated in 1940, China lost one of its greatest modernist writers while Shanghai lost its most detailed chronicler of the city's Jazz-Age nightlife. Mu's highly original stream-of-consciousness approach to short story writing deserves to be re-examined and re-read. As Andrew Field argues, Mu advanced modern Chinese writing beyond the vernacular expression of May Fourth giants Lu Xun and Lao She to reveal even more starkly the alienation of a city trapped between the forces of civilization and barbarism in the 1930s. Mu Shiying China's Lost Modernist includes translations of six short stories, four of which have not appeared before in English. Each story focuses on Mu's key obsessions the pleasurable yet anxiety-ridden social and sexual relationships in the modern city, and the decadent maelstrom of consumption and leisure epitomized by the dance hall and nightclub. In his introduction, Field situates Mu's work within the transnational and hedonistic environment of inter-war Shanghai, the city's entertainment economy, as well as his place within the wider arena of Jazz-Age literature from Berlin, Paris, Tokyo and New York.
Kimono design : an introduction to textiles and patterns by
Kimono Design: An Introduction to Textiles and Patterns uses hundreds of photographs and a wealth of information on colors, fabrics and embellishments to paint a portrait of Japanese culture, art and thought. Lavish classical patterns, sweeping scenes, and the many motifs that have been woven, dyed, painted or embroidered into these textiles reveal a reflectiveness, a sense of humor, and an appreciation of exquisite beauty that is uniquely Japanese. Organized according to motifs traditionally associated with each season of the year, Kimono Design interprets the kimono's special language as expressed in depictions of: - Flowers and grasses - Birds and other animals - Symbols of power, luck and prestige - Land-and-seascapes - scenes from literature, history and daily life - scenes of travel and the Japanese concept of other lands - and many others Extensive notes on all the motifs demonstrate how the kimono reflects changing times and a sense of the timeless. Information on jewelry, hairpins and other accessories is scattered throughout to give a fuller sense of the Japanese art of dress. This is a volume that Japanophiles, historians, artists and designers will all cherish.
Understanding David Henry Hwang by
David Henry Hwang is best known as the author of M. Butterfly, which won a 1988 Tony Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and he has written the Obie Award-winners Golden Child and FOB, as well as Family Devotions, Sound and Beauty, Rich Relations, and a revised version of Flower Drum Song. His Yellow Face won a 2008 Obie Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Understanding David Henry Hwang is a critical study of Hwang's playwriting process as well as the role of identity in each one of Hwang's major theatrical works. A first-generation Asian American, Hwang intrinsically understands the complications surrounding the competing attractiveness of an American identity with its freedoms in contrast to the importance of a cultural and ethnic identity connected to another country's culture. William C. Boles examines Hwang's plays by exploring the perplexing struggles surrounding Asian and Asian American stereotypes, values, and identity. Boles argues that Hwang deliberately uses stereotypes in order to subvert them, while at other times he embraces the dual complexity of ethnicity when it is tied to national identity and ethnic history. In addition to the individual questions of identity as they pertain to ethnicity, Boles discusses how Hwang's plays explore identity issues of gender, religion, profession, and sexuality. The volume concludes with a treatment of Chinglish, both in the context of rising Chinese economic prominence and in the context of Hwang's previous work. Hwang has written ten short plays including The Dance and the Railroad, five screenplays, and many librettos for musical theater. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, Hwang was appointed by President Bill Clinton to the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.
Chinese Poems by
First published in 1946. Here in one volume is a collection of Arthur Waley's translations of Chinese poetry. The book includes some poems from The Book of Songs and 170 Chinese Poems, More Translations and The Temple. Some old translations have been revised and new notes and explanatory material added.
Slapping the table in amazement : a Ming Dynasty story collection by
"Slapping the table in amazement is the unabridged English translation of the famous story collection Pai an jingqi by Ling Mengchu (1580-1644), originally published in 1628. The forty lively stories gathered here present a broad picture of traditional Chinese society and include characters from all social levels. We learn of their joys and sorrows, their views about life and death, and their visions of the underworld and the supernatural. Ling was a connoisseur of popular literature and a seminal figure in the development of Chinese literature in the vernacular, which paved the way for the late-imperial Chinese novel. Slapping the table in amazement includes translations of verse and prologue stories as well as marginal and interlinear comments"-- Provided by the publisher.
Revisiting Women's Cinema by
In Revisiting Women's Cinema, Lingzhen Wang ponders the roots of contemporary feminist stagnation and the limits of both commercial mainstream and elite minor cultures by turning to socialist women filmmakers in modern China. She foregrounds their sociopolitical engagements, critical interventions, and popular artistic experiments, offering a new conception of socialist and postsocialist feminisms, mainstream culture, and women's cinema. Wang highlights the films of Wang Ping and Dong Kena in the 1950s and 1960s and Zhang Nuanxin and Huang Shuqin in the 1980s and 1990s to unveil how they have been profoundly misread through extant research paradigms entrenched in Western Cold War ideology, post-second-wave cultural feminism, and post-Mao intellectual discourses. Challenging received interpretations, she elucidates how socialist feminism and culture were conceptualized and practiced in relation to China's search not only for national independence and economic development but also for social emancipation, proletarian culture, and socialist internationalism. Wang calls for a critical reevaluation of historical materialism, socialist feminism, and popular culture to forge an integrated emancipatory vision for future transnational feminist and cultural practices.
An Annotated Bibliography for Taiwan Film Studies by
Compiled by two skilled librarians and a Taiwanese film and culture specialist, this volume is the first multilingual and most comprehensive bibliography of Taiwanese film scholarship. It catalogues the published and unpublished monographs, theses, manuscripts, and conference proceedings of Taiwanese film scholars from the 1950s to 2013.
China's Encounter with Global Hollywood by
In recent years, the film industry in the People's Republic of China has found itself among the top three most prolific in the world. When the Chinese government introduced a new revenue-sharing system in 1994, the nation's total movie output skyrocketed with gross box-office receipts totaling billions of yuan. This newfound success, however, has been built on an alternately competitive and collaborative relationship between the ascendant global power of China and the popular culture juggernaut of America. In China's Encounter with Global Hollywood, Wendy Su examines the intertwining relationships among the Chinese state, global Hollywood, and the Chinese film industry while analyzing the causes and consequences of the rapid growth of the nation's domestic film production. She demonstrates how the Chinese state has consolidated power by negotiating foreign interest in the lucrative Chinese market while advancing its cultural industries. Su also reveals how mainland Chinese and Hong Kong filmmakers have navigated the often-incompatible requirements of marketization and state censorship. This timely analysis demonstrates how China has cannily used global capital to modernize its own film industry and now stands poised to step clear of Hollywood's shadow. The country's debates--on- and offscreen--over cultural change, market-based economic reforms, and artistic freedom illuminate China's ongoing efforts to build a modern national identity.
Chinese Lesbian Cinema by
The emergence of lesbian film in the first decade of the twenty-first century symbolizes a breakthrough through the creation of new cinema that opens up a space that was not previously available or accessible in China. These motion pictures present a new breed of characters--namely, lesbians--as well as a new sexual subject on the screen for the first time in the history of Chinese cinema. Blending historicist and comparative approaches, this book begins with a critical genealogy of Chinese homosexual traditions in the first two chapters. This strategy allows the author to examine a number of films individually through contextualizing their historical and cultural articulations and interpretations through the remainder of the book.
India on the Western screen : imaging a country in film, TV, and digital media by
"An insightful analysis and impact assessment of the ways in which India is portrayed on different screens in the West. This book examines the nuances of multiple images--cinema, TV, computer, and smartphones--that feed into the making of a new Indian narrative and showcase an India that is very different from the unilinear notion that used to exist a few decades ago. It elaborates on the critical role of the impressions formed in redefining how the Indian diaspora is imagined and received in the West, which in turn impacts everyday experiences of Indians living there. Building on his earlier book India through the Western Lens: Creating National Images in Film (SAGE 1999), which focused primarily on films, Mitra expands his latest study to new media. Effectively, the book highlights the West's perception of India based on what is being projected through visual media."--Provided by publisher.
Musical Journeys in Sumatra by
Despite being the sixth largest island in the world and home to an estimated 44 million Indonesians, Sumatra's musical arts and cultures have not been the subject of a book-length study until now. Documenting and explaining the ethnographic, cultural, and historical contexts of Sumatra's performing arts, Musical Journeys in Sumatra also traces the changes in their style, content, and reception from the early 1970s onward. Having dedicated thirty years of scholarship to exploring the rich and varied music of Sumatran provinces, Margaret Kartomi provides a fascinating ethnographic record of vanishing musical genres, traditions, and practices that have become deeply compromised by the pressures of urbanization, rural poverty, and government policy in. This unique collection showcases the complex diversity of Indonesian music and includes field observations from five different provinces: Aceh, North Sumatra, Riau, West Sumatra, and South Sumatra. Featuring unique photographs and original drawings from Kartomi's field observations of instruments and performances, Musical Journeys in Sumatra provides a comprehensive musical introduction to this neglected, very large island, with its hundreds of ethno-linguistic-musical groups.
South Asia's Hotspots : the Impact of Temperature and Precipitation Changes on Living Standards by
South Asia is particularly vulnerable to climate change. Most previous studies have focused on the projected impacts of sea-level rise or extreme weather - droughts, floods, heatwaves and storm surges. This study adds to that knowledge by identifying the impacts of long-term changes in the climate - rising temperatures and changes in precipitation patterns - on living standards. It does so by first building an understanding of the relationship between current climate conditions and living standards across South Asia. The study also identifies the set of climate models that are best suited for projecting long-term changes in climate across South Asia. This novel understanding of living standards and climate change is then combined to project impacts of long-term changes in climate on living standards in South Asia. The study finds that higher temperatures will reduce living standards for most of South Asia, with the severity impacts depending on future global greenhouse gas emissions. The study projects "hotspots", which are locations where long-term changes in climate will have negative impacts on living standards. Many hotspots are in locations that hitherto have not been identified as particularly vulnerable to climate change. Moreover, hotspots have distinguishing features that vary from country to country. This detailed assessment provides a mosaic of information that enriches our understanding of how climate change will impact people and which populations are most vulnerable. The report also provides guidance on the kinds of actions are most likely to reduce impacts of climate change in each country. The study is a major contribution to our understanding of how increasing temperatures and changing precipitation patterns interact with social and economic structures at a fine granular level across South Asia.
Aspiring to Home by
Aspiring to Home explores South Asian immigrants as they create new ethnic identities through popular cultural works that bind together narratives of multicultural and postcolonial citizenship.
Performing Shakespeare in India : exploring Indianness, literatures and cultures by
"An adaptation of Shakespeare's plays as a basis of critical exploration of identity formation in India. Even while a conscious dismantling of colonization was happening since the 19th century, the Indian literati, intellectuals, scholars and dramaturges were engaged in deconstructing the ultimate icon of colonial presence--Shakespeare. This book delves into what constitutes Indianness in the postcolonial context by looking into the text and sub-text of the Bard of Avon's plays adapted in visual culture, translation, stage performance and cinema. The book is an important intervention in the ongoing explorations in social and cultural history, as it explores how Shakespeare has impacted the emergence of regional identities around questions of language and linguistic empowerment in various ways. It reveals an extraordinary negotiation of colonial and postcolonial identity issues--be it in language, in social and cultural practices or in art forms"--Provided by publisher.
Homemaking by
Is it possible to think of a counter-hegemonic, progressive nostalgia that celebrates and helps sustain the marginalised? What might such a nostalgia look like, and what political importance might it have? Homemaking: Radical Nostalgia and the Construction of a South Asian Diaspora examines diasporic life in south Asian communities in Europe, North America and Australia, to map the ways in which members of these communities use nostalgia to construct distinctive identities. Using a series of examples from literature, cinema, visual art, music, computer games, mainstream media, physical and virtual spaces and many other cultural objects, this book argues that it is possible, and necessary, to read this nostalgia as helping to create a powerful notion of home that can help to transcend international relations of empire and capital, and create instead a pan-national space of belonging. This homemaking represents the persistent search for somewhere to belong on one's own terms. Constructed through word, image and music, preserved through dreams and imagination, the home provides sustenance in the continuing struggle to change the present and the future for the better.
Beyond the Nation by
Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series Beyond the Nation charts an expansive history of Filipino literature in the U.S., forged within the dual contexts of imperialism and migration, from the early twentieth century into the twenty-first. Martin Joseph Ponce theorizes and enacts a queer diasporic reading practice that attends to the complex crossings of race and nation with gender and sexuality. Tracing the conditions of possibility of Anglophone Filipino literature to U.S. colonialism in the Philippines in the early twentieth century, the book examines how a host of writers from across the century both imagine and address the Philippines and the United States, inventing a variety of artistic lineages and social formations in the process. Beyond the Nation considers a broad array of issues, from early Philippine nationalism, queer modernism, and transnational radicalism, to music-influenced and cross-cultural poetics, gay male engagements with martial law and popular culture, second-generational dynamics, and the relation between reading and revolution. Ponce elucidates not only the internal differences that mark this literary tradition but also the wealth of expressive practices that exceed the terms of colonial complicity, defiant nationalism, or conciliatory assimilation. Moving beyond the nation as both the primary analytical framework and locus of belonging, Ponce proposes that diasporic Filipino literature has much to teach us about alternative ways of imagining erotic relationships and political communities.
Sbek Thom by
A book studying the history and significance of shadow puppet theater in Cambodia. Khmer and English texts, as well as 153 full-page photographs, describe the Khmer Reamker, an ancient story whose episodes and characters have figured in Cambodian...
Palms of Southern Asia by
Southern Asia is a vast and ecologically diverse region that extends from the deserts of Afghanistan to the rainforests of Thailand, and is home to a marvelously rich palm flora. Palms of Southern Asia is the only complete field guide to the 43 genera and 352 species of palms and rattans that occur in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Laos, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. This attractive guide's handsome illustrations and succinct, authoritative, and jargon-free text make identification easy. Each species account includes the correct scientific and common names, and fully describes morphology, habitat, and uses. Featuring a distribution map for most species and 256 full-color photographs, this is also the only field guide to cover the extremely diverse palm flora of Vietnam, and the first to offer a taxonomic overview of the rattan species of Southern Asia. Palms of Southern Asia is a book of major importance for botanists and an invaluable aid for naturalists and conservationists, and it's the perfect field guide for ecotourists traveling in the region. Covers all 352 naturally occurring palms in Southern Asia Features full-color photographs of 256 species, many never before illustrated Includes a distribution map for most species Provides the first taxonomic overview of the rattans of Southern Asia
Noon at five o'clock : the short stories of Arthur Yap by
This volume marks the recovery and first combined publication of the stories of Arthur Yap (1943-2006). One of Singapore's most important artists, he was an award-winning poet and an accomplished painter. A hitherto neglected facet of Yap's opus, his eight short stories are deceptive in their simplicity, housing within their sparse prose a complex engagement with Singapore society from which he wrote. With his signature minimalistic style, Yap simultaneously perplexes readers with stories of seemingly plotless ambiguity, yet draws them in with familiar characters playing out situations that still resonate in twenty-first century Singapore today. Angus Whitehead's introduction highlights literary nuances in the stories and frames the stories within the wider backdrop of social change of Singapore at the time of Yap's writing. The meticulous critical apparatus make this book of interest to not only the general reader but also students of Singapore and Southeast Asian literature in English.
