The Mesopotamian high priestess Enheduana lived over 4,000 years ago, but her words ring down to the present: “I am Enheduana.”
Author: Elizabeth Lawrence
In both English and Chinese, the term warlord, or junfa, immediately conjures the image of a rapacious strongman, violent and reactionary. The territorial aggrandizement of these military men nipped Chinese democracy in the bud, contributing to the fragmentation and instability of the Republican period (1912-1949). But the warlords who vied for power after the final dynasty’s collapse were also husbands, fathers, and friends. By centering the women in their lives, Kate Merkel-Hess’s Women and Their Warlords: Domesticating Militarism in Modern China, revisits the history and memory of a dynamic era and highlights the political valences of intimate relationships.
Anne Anlin Cheng grew up in Taiwan and moved to Savannah, Georgia with her parents and brother as a school-aged girl. Having learned English as her second language, she majored in English literature in college (“to my parents’ horror”), earned a PhD, published books on race and gender, and worked her way up the ladder of the professoriate at Princeton University. Then one day, she lost herself.
For much of his life, Jay Prosser was uncertain of where he belonged. He was “Jewish and not, British and Asian, Iraqi, English, Welsh, Chinese”. With a military father, his family moved often. At a boarding school, he was dubbed a “half-caste”. At synagogue, he felt like an imposter. Prosser’s memoir, Loving Strangers, tells the story of how he forged a sense of belonging, and a deep appreciation of his multicultural heritage and Jewish faith, through the excavation of a camphorwood chest.
There are over sixty million “left-behind children” in China at present. These children have been “left behind” by parents who moved for work, or sometimes school. Most left-behind children grow up in rural villages, while their parents sojourn in China’s megalopolises. The phenomenon has touched the lives of Chinese families across generations, but especially since the market reforms of the Deng Xiaoping era. One left-behind child of the 1990s was Yuan Yang, the author of Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China’s New Social Order. While her parents pursued higher education, Yuan Yang spent her earliest years living in rural Sichuan Province with her maternal grandparents. Then, at the age of four, she reunited with her father and mother in England, where she would later naturalize as a British citizen.
The title of Women across Asian Art cannot do justice to the edited volume’s rich and varied content. Ranging over 3,000 years, the book is not only about women, but also gender. It is not limited to “art”, but takes on a more wide-ranging body of material culture and its associated disciplines, including archaeology and architecture. Geographically, it spans East and South Asia and beyond, albeit skewing sinocentric.
“You are what you eat,” or so goes a well-worn adage. But what if “you” are an 18th-century Brit and “what you eat” is exotic fare from the Orient? The implications are explored by Yin Yuan in Alimentary Orientalism: Britain’s Literary Imagination and the Edible East.