Adapted for the Screen: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film
by Hsiu-Chuang Deppman
June 2010
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Contemporary Chinese films are popular with audiences worldwide, but a key reason for their success has gone unnoticed: many of the films are adapted from brilliant literary works. This book is the first to put these landmark films in the context of their literary origins and explore how the best Chinese directors adapt fictional narratives and styles for film.
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The Chrysantheme Papers: The Pink Notebook of Madame Chrysantheme and other Documents of French Japonisme
by Christopher Reed
June 2010
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Pierre Loti's novel Madame Chrysanthème (1888) enjoyed great popularity during the author's lifetime, served as a source of Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly, and remains in print to this day as a classic in Western literature. Loti’s story, cast in the form of his fictionalized diary, describes the affair between a French naval officer and Chrysanthème, a temporary "bride” purchased in Nagasaki. More broadly, Loti's novel helped define the terms in which Occidentals perceived Japan as delicate, feminine, and, to use one of Loti's favorite words, “preposterous"—in short, ripe for exploitation.
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Attracting the Heart: Social Relations and the Aesthetics of Emotion in Sri Lankan Monastic Culture
by Jeffrey Samuels
June 2010
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An idealized view of the lifestyle of a Buddhist monk might be described according to the doctrinal demand for emotional detachment and, ultimately, the cessation of all desire. Yet monks are also enjoined to practice compassion, a powerful emotion and equally lofty ideal, and live with every other human feeling—love, hate, jealousy, ambition—as they relate to other monks and the lay community. In this important ethnography of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Jeffrey Samuels takes and unprecedented look at how emotion determines and influences the commitments that laypeople and monastics make to each other and to the Buddhist religion in general. By focusing on “multimoment” histories, Samuels highlights specific junctures in which ideas about recruitment, vocation, patronage, and institution-building are dynamically negotiated and refined. Positing a nexus between aesthetics and affect, he illustrates not only how aesthetic responses trigger certain emotions, but also how personal and shared emotions, at the local level, shape notions of beauty.
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Twelve Days at Nuku Hiva: Russian Encounters and Mutiny in the South Pacific
by Elena Govor
June 2010
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In August 1803 two Russian ships, the Nadezhda and the Neva, set off on a round-the-world voyage to carry out scientific exploration and collect artifacts for Alexander I’s ethnographic museum in St. Petersburg. Russia’s strategic concerns in the north Pacific, however, led the Russian government to include as part of the expedition an embassy to Japan, headed by statesman Nikolai Rezanov, who was given authority over the ships’ commanders without their knowledge. Between them the ships carried an ethnically and socially disparate group of men: Russian educated elite, German naturalists, Siberian merchants, Baltic naval officers, even Japanese passengers. Upon reaching Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas archipelago on May 7, 1804, and for the next twelve days, the naval officers revolted against Rezanov’s command while complex crosscultural encounters between Russians and islanders occurred. Elena Govor recounts the voyage, reconstructing and exploring in depth the tumultuous events of the Russians’ stay in Nuku Hiva; the course of the mutiny, its resolution and aftermath; and the extent and nature of the contact between Nuku Hivans and Russians.
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Re-Centering Asia: Histories, Encounters, Identities
ed. by Henry Johnson; Jacob Edmond; Jacqueline
Leckie
July 2010
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This volume explores a key new approach to Asian studies with a particular focus on globalization, diaspora, modernism, and modernity. Essentially, it is concerned with two concepts: re-centering Asia by way of asserting its centrality (such as when Asian locations become centers and microcosms for transnational and global phenomena) and re-centering Asia by rethinking it in time and place, i.e., not as a unified whole but as a zone of encounter, exchange, and contestation.
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South Korea's Foreign Policy Dilemmas: Defining State Security and the Goal of National Unification
by Sung-Hack Kang
July 2010
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Koreans historically consider their country as a victim of foreign powers—a shrimp among whales. In fact, Korea’s international status has to a great extent been determined by the historical rivalries between great powers. This collection of essays produced over time by one of Korea’s leading political scientists, probes many of the fundamental post–Korean War issues South Korea has wrestled with in the context of its foreign policy positions—not least the question of how it actually defines it foreign policy, its relationship with the United States, and ever-present security issues.
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Ultranationalism in German-Japanese Relations, 1930-45: From Wenneker to Sasakawa
by John W. M. Chapman
July 2010
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This important new study focusing on the ultranationalist regimes in Germany and Japan during the 1930s and 1940s examines in biographical format the roles played by individuals significantly involved in the drive for global hegemony. Employing a considerable range of new source materials and eyewitness testimony on the German side, it highlights the roles of the Nazi Party “enforcer” and Gestapo representative in East Asia, Josef Albert Meisinger; the officer commanding German naval forces in the Pacific region, Admiral Paul Werner Wenneker; agent Richard Sorge, whose relations with the Japanese Navy in the 1930s were observed and recalled by Engineer-Commander George C. Ross, the UK assistant naval attache in Japan. The reactions of the German aero-engineer to both Meisinger and Wenneker in the 1940s, Willi Foerster (a client of the Soviet radio operator, Max Clausen) are also documented.
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Japanese-Mongolian Relations, 1873-1945: Faith, Race and Strategy
by James Boyd
July 2010
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This book offers the first in-depth examination of Japanese-Mongolian relations from the late nineteenth century through to the middle of the twentieth century and in the process repositions Mongolia in Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese relations.
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Individualism in Early China: Human Agency and the Self in Thought and Politics
by Erica Brindley
July 2010
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Conventional wisdom has it that the concept of individualism was absent in early China. In this uncommon study of the self and human agency in ancient China, Erica Fox Brindley provides an important corrective to this view and persuasively argues that an idea of individualism can be applied to the study of early Chinese thought and politics with intriguing results. She introduces the development of ideological and religious beliefs that link universal, cosmic authority to the individual in ways that may be referred to as individualistic and illustrates how these evolved alongside and potentially helped contribute to larger sociopolitical changes of the time, such as the centralization of political authority and the growth in the social mobility of the educated elite class.
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Embodying Belonging: Racializing Okinawan Diaspora in Bolivia and Japan
by Taku Suzuki
July 2010
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Embodying Belonging is the first full-length study of a Okinawan diasporic community in South America and Japan. Under extraordinary conditions throughout the twentieth century (Imperial Japanese rule, the brutal Battle of Okinawa at the end of World War II, U.S. military occupation), Okinawans left their homeland and created various diasporic communities around the world. Colonia Okinawa, a farming settlement in the tropical plains of eastern Bolivia, is one such community that was established in the 1950s under the guidance of the U.S. military administration. Although they have flourished as farm owners in Bolivia, thanks to generous support from the Japanese government since Okinawa’s reversion to Japan in 1972, hundreds of Bolivian-born ethnic Okinawans have left the Colonia in the last two decades and moved to Japanese cities, such as Yokohama, to become manual laborers in construction and manufacturing industries.
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Haoles in Hawaii
by Judy
Rohrer
August 2010
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Haoles in Hawai‘i strives to make sense of haole (Hawaiian for “white person”) and “the politics of haole” in current debates about race in Hawai‘i. Recognizing it as a form of American whiteness specific to Hawai‘i, the author (who grew up in Kaua‘i and O‘ahu) argues that haole was forged and reforged over two centuries of colonization and needs to be understood in that context. Haole reminds us that race is about more than skin color as it identifies a certain amalgamation of attitude and behavior that is at odds with Hawaiian and local values and social norms. By situating haole historically and politically, the author asks readers to think about ongoing processes of colonization and possibilities for reformulating the meaning of haole.
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In Search of Korean Traditional Opera: Discourses of Changguk
by Andrew Killick
August 2010
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This is the first book on Korean opera in a language other than Korean. Its subject is ch’angguk, a form of musical theater that has developed over the last hundred years from the older narrative singing tradition of p’ansori. Andrew Killick examines the history and current practice of ch’angguk as an ongoing attempt to invent a traditional Korean opera form to compare with those of neighboring China and Japan. In this, the work addresses a growing interest within the fields of ethnomusicology and Asian studies in the adaptation of traditional arts to conditions in the modern world. Ch’angguk presents an intriguing case in that, unlike the “invented traditions” described in Hobsbawm and Ranger's influential book that were firmly established within a few years of their invention, ch’angguk remains in a marginal position relative to recognized traditional art forms such as South Korea’s “Important Intangible Cultural Properties” after more than a century. Performers, writers, directors, and historians have looked for ways to make the genre more traditional, including looking outside Korea for comparisons with traditional theater forms in other countries and for recognition of ch’angguk as a national art form by international audiences.
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Japan in Decline: Fact or Fiction?
ed. by Purnendra Jain
September 2010
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To what extent is Japan in decline? In recent years, popular writings, media commentaries, and analysts often take the view that the rise of Japan is long since over and that the world’s second largest economy is not just treading water but that its society and economy is failing, with potential catastrophic outcomes. But is this really the case? Could it be that once again Japan is being misread and misinterpreted? Are there not both obvious and less obvious signs of renewal and recovery? And how might the new DPJ-led government reform Japan?
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Ainsko-Russkii Slovar (Ainu-Russian Dictionary)
by M. M. Dobrotvorskii
September 2010
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This dictionary of the Ainu language is highly eclectic: It contains not only words from Sakhalin dialects collected personally by Dobrotvorskii, but also entries from other sources, such as the Japanese-Ainu dictionary Moshiogusa (1793).
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The Silk Road: Key Papers. Part 1: The Pre-Islamic Period
by Valerie Hansen
September 2010
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This is the first of two 2-volume collections by top scholars in their fields on the history of the Silk Road. This collection’s main focus is the first millennium CE, when the Silk Road trade was at its height.
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