The 1920s and 1930s were a period of cosmopolitan globalization—and no one, perhaps, exemplified it more than Victor Sassoon, business tycoon, trader and industrialist. He’s the subject of Rosemary Wakeman’s latest book The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918–1941 which traces Victor’s journey through these three cities—and explores how the world economy changes as he travels. After all, it’s a period where the world trading system is beginning to unravel, as British dominance in manufacturing is starting to be challenged by cheaper rivals in Germany and Japan, with arguments for economic policies that seem very familiar to us today.
Some years back as a graduate student enrolled in a mandatory DEI training for college teaching, I distinctly recall raising a question about dealing with the unabashed misogyny, depictions of sexual violence and child abuse bursting out of the primary sources so often used in the history classroom. Encountering More Swindles from the Late Ming: Sex, Scams, and Sorcery, triggered the memory, especially when faced with an array of humorous yet disturbing stories about everyday social relations in 17th-century China.
China’s history under the Communist Party has been demarcated, like geological ages, into neat, self-contained phases. There is the Great Leap Forward (1958-62); the Cultural Revolution (1966-76); and Reform and Opening (December 1978-1989). The bits outside these branded groups of years, including the first nine years of CCP rule, can feel a little fuzzy, while the links between phases are often overlooked.
Ukrainian-born nurse Kateryna Ivanonva Desnytska became a Thai princess at the turn of the 20th century as wife of the Siamese prince Chakrabongse Bhuvanath. This story, with echoes of that of King Chulalongkorn and his English tutor Anna Leonowens (immortalized in The King and I) , has obvious potential for artistic adaptation: it was made into a ballet in 2003. A few years earlier, it provided the basis for a historical novel by V Vinicchayakul, the pen name of Vinita Diteeyont, a prolific Thai novelist. In her version, A Passage to Siam: A Story of Forbidden Love, only recently translated into English by Lucy Srisupshapreeda, Kateryna becomes the young Englishwoman Catherine Burnett.
The Dead Sea—and its environs of Jericho and the Jordan River—is perhaps second only to Jerusalem as a place where history, archaeology, religion, politics and international relations meet and mix. It is, as Nir Arielli points out in his new book, quite a bit older, and today is as much a place of environmental as political dispute.
Originally written in Russian by Ukrainian novelist Igor Zavilinsky, A Dream of Annapurna spans Nepal, Italy and the US. The book has an equally broad time frame, ranging from the 1950s to 2015.
Kwai-Cheung Lo’s Ethnic Minority Cinema in China’s Nation-State Building investigates the convoluted relations between cinematic productions about non-Han ethnic minorities and China’s nation-state building project from the early Republican era of the 1920s to the current authoritarian regime in the 21st century.
Portuguese India was tiny—a handful of trading posts and enclaves, centered on the colony of Goa. The Estado da Índia faced the Mughal Empire and the Deccan Sultanates, large Muslim and Persian-based societies that ruled the subcontinent. How did Portuguese India survive? Well, by spying.
Fifteen years into his marriage, Noor Mohammad Ganju has never seen his wife naked. He lusts after her but sex, when she occasionally obliges him, is reduced by veils—literal and symbolic—to tedious and unimaginative coupling in the dark.
In a dystopia-lite future, singles in Korea opt for pseudo-marriages under the mysterious Wedding & Life (W&L for short), an exclusive and expensive matchmaking company that hosts the VIP branch of “New Marriages” (NM). In an NM, W&L clients could pay for a new spouse—either a field wife or field husband (FW or FH)—for a stipulated period. With an influx of abbreviations for each department and a list of company-exclusive terminology, the world of Kim Ryeo-ryeong’s novel The Trunk—recently released as a drama series on Netflix—is corporate and clinical, where emotion is pushed to the edges of the page.
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