In a 1965 letter to Newsweek, French writer and academic Bernard Fall (1926–67) staked a claim as the ‘Number One Realist’ on the Vietnam War. This is the first book to study the thought of this overlooked figure, one of the most important experts on counterinsurgency warfare in Indochina. Nathaniel L Moir’s intellectual history analyses…
Beyond English: World Literature and India radically alters the debates on world literature that hinge on the model of circulation and global capital by deeply engaging with the idea of the world and world-making in South Asia. Tiwari argues that Indic words for world (vishva, jagat, sansar) offer a nuanced understanding of world literature that…
The pontianak, a terrifying female vampire ghost, is a powerful figure in Malay cultures, as loved and feared in Southeast Asia as Dracula is in the West. In animist tradition, she is a woman who has died in childbirth, and her vengeful return upsets gender norms and social hierarchies. The pontianak first appeared on screen…
An all-in-one craft guide and anthology that examines stories by leading writers from Japan, China, India, Singapore and beyond as well as those from Asian diasporas in Europe and America. While still taking stock of the traditional elements of story such as character, viewpoint and setting, Xu and Hemley let these compelling stories speak for…
Since Thailand’s political crisis began with royalist mobilization against prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra in 2005, observers have been treated to easy clichés about reactionary Thai elites. The chapters in this book invite readers to refrain from quick judgement and engage with the conservative norms of sections of the middle class, military, intellectuals and state ideologues.
Mo Yan’s fiction has captivated a global audience for years, and his speeches are just as riveting. They provide rare insights into the complex thought processes of one of the most influential writers in the world. Mo Yan’s passion for this work comes across clearly in his lectures and speeches, reinforcing the strong emotions his…
Making Kin: Ecofeminist Essays from Singapore contemplates and re-centres Singapore women in the overlapping discourses of family, home, ecology and nation. For the first time, this collection of ecofeminist essays focuses on the crafts, minds, bodies and subjectivities of a diverse group of women making kin with the human and non-human world as they navigate…
Just as the denial of tenure for Nikole Hannah-Jones with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Wang Ping at Macalester have made headlines for academic racism targeting Black professors and professors of color, Truong Tran’s book of the other is a timely commentary on the inequities built into the white establishment within academia…
Photographer Arseniy Kotov has a thing for “modernist” Soviet architecture and has made a career of documenting it via (this being now a decidedly post-Soviet world) Instagram, entries to which were gathered into a book Soviet Cities which has been followed by Soviet Seasons, a collection of photos divided into four quarters, nominally by time…
This book is much more than the memoir of the scholar who has been hailed as the most important living Chinese historian of our times—it is also an invaluable record of a history of our times, witnessing the cultural, political, and social transformations of what Professor Yü Ying-shih notes as the period of the most…
This book provides a local journalist’s perspective on a four-decade long regional contribution to global news production. Fixers are local journalists hired to help global media outlets in developing news stories on wars. The book shows how the fixers’ risky news pursuits made possible for global media to access distant regions and dangerous caves on…
This book analyses how authoritarian rulers of Southeast Asian countries maintain their durability in office, and, in this context, explains why some movements of civil society organizations succeed while others fail to achieve their demands.
Should we regulate artificial intelligence? Can we? From self-driving cars and high-speed trading to algorithmic decision-making, the way we live, work, and play is increasingly dependent on AI systems that operate with diminishing human intervention. These fast, autonomous, and opaque machines offer great benefits—and pose significant risks.
Where do those relegated to the margins find belonging? In her luminous debut Unbelonging, Gayatri Sethi deftly interweaves verse, memoir, and a bold call to action as she recounts her experience searching for home in the diaspora.
A history of the Manila Pact and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) from its establishment in 1954 until its dissolution in 1977, which has received meagre attention due to its perceived failure.