Negotiating Borders and Borderlands: The Indian Experience, Gorky Chakraborty (ed), Supurna Banerjee (ed) (Orient BlackSwan, February 2023)
Negotiating Borders and Borderlands: The Indian Experience, Gorky Chakraborty (ed), Supurna Banerjee (ed) (Orient BlackSwan, February 2023)

Borders have always been seen as physical lines of separation, which mark the “other” and group geographical spaces into territories and nation-States. However, can borders and borderlands also simultaneously exist as gateways for trade and commerce while being rigid institutions that disallow the movement of people from one part to another? Are some borders seen while others are only felt?

Sinophone Utopias: Exploring Futures Beyond the China Dream, Andrea Riemenschnitter, Jessica Imbach, Justyna Jaguscik (Cambria Press, Martch 2023)
Sinophone Utopias: Exploring Futures Beyond the China Dream, Andrea Riemenschnitter, Jessica Imbach, Justyna Jaguscik (Cambria Press, Martch 2023)

Focusing on counter-narratives that challenge or undermine the grand nationalist Chinese theme, this book studies the ways Sinophone artists, writers, and other cultural agents reimagine a future (world) society that can be more tolerant of cultural, ecological, ethnic, gender and ideological diversity.

Gandhi’s Travels in Tamil Nadu, A Ramasamy, PC Ramakrishna (trans) (Orient BlackSwan, March 2023)
Gandhi’s Travels in Tamil Nadu, A Ramasamy, PC Ramakrishna (trans) (Orient BlackSwan, March 2023)

Gandhi’s Travels in Tamil Nadu highlights the deep and abiding connection and friendship Gandhi had with Tamil Nadu and its people, from the time that he, as a young lawyer, led the struggle of Indian contractual labourers, many of them Tamilians, against the colonial government in South Africa, to when he returned to India to lead the Congress and the freedom movement. It covers the period from his very first visit to (what was then) Madras State/Province in 1896, to his last visit to the state in 1946, a year before Independence.

Where the Madness Lies: Citizen Accounts of Identity and Nationalism, Kishalay Bhattacharjee (Orient BlackSwan, March 2023)
Where the Madness Lies: Citizen Accounts of Identity and Nationalism, Kishalay Bhattacharjee (Orient BlackSwan, March 2023)

The idea of citizenship today conveys a static dullness, a clerical certification, and a fixed sense of identity. By re-examining the relationship between citizenship and nationality, Where the Madness Lies redefines the multiple sources of identity that ordinary people contend with. Citizenship becomes a critical theatre where diverse identities crisscross to create new forms of meaning and interaction.

The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy, Lin Zhang (Columbia University Press, March 2023)
The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy, Lin Zhang (Columbia University Press, March 2023)

From start-up founders in the Chinese equivalent of Silicon Valley to rural villages experiencing an e-commerce boom to middle-class women reselling luxury goods, the rise of internet-based entrepreneurship has affected every part of China. Problematizing worldwide euphoria about digital entrepreneurship while complicating the dichotomy of “China threat vs. China model”, The Labor of Reinvention attends to the everyday labor of digital-centered entrepreneurial reinvention vis-à-vis China’s national remaking amid global technological transformations and changing geopolitical currents.

Growing Up Asian in Black and White America, Julia Lee (Henry Holt and Co, April 2023)
Growing Up Asian in Black and White America, Julia Lee (Henry Holt and Co, April 2023)

When Julia Lee was fifteen, her hometown went up in smoke during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. The daughter of Korean immigrant store owners in a predominantly Black neighborhood, Julia was taught to be grateful for the privilege afforded to her. However, the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of Rodney King, following the murder of Latasha Harlins by a Korean shopkeeper, forced Julia to question her racial identity and complicity. She was neither Black nor white. So who was she?

Absence: On the Culture and Philosophy of the Far East, Byung-Chul Han, Daniel Steuer (trans) (Polity, March 2023)
Absence: On the Culture and Philosophy of the Far East, Byung-Chul Han, Daniel Steuer (trans) (Polity, March 2023)

Western thinking has long been dominated by essence, by a preoccupation with that which dwells in itself and delimits itself from the other. By contrast, Far Eastern thought is centered not on essence but on absence. The difference between essence and absence is the difference between being and path, between dwelling and wandering.