The Unruly Dead: Spirits, Memory, and State Formation in Timor-Leste, Lia Kent (University of Wisconsin Press, August 2024)
“What might it mean to take the dead seriously as political actors?” asks Lia Kent. In Timor-Leste, a new nation-state that experienced centuries of European colonialism before a violent occupation by Indonesia from 1975 to 1999, the dead are active participants in social and political life who continue to operate within familial structures of obligation and commitment.
Laos: Why We Cannot Forget; Memoirs of Shared Histories, Jose V Fuentecilla (July 2024)
In the 1960s, bands of adventurous Filipinos found themselves spending years in communal, austere lifestyles while doing foreign aid work. They were healthcare workers, engineers, teachers, agriculturists, nutritionists. The existing model for international assistance during that period was Northern white rich to Southern black or brown. The Filipinos were going to do something else not tried before in Laos. It was an Asian-to-Asian effort that exemplified an interesting example of development aid unique in Lao history and perhaps in Philippine history.
Romantic Nationalism in India: Cultivation of Culture and the Global Circulation of Ideas, Bob van der Linden (Brill, May 2024)
Through the concept of “Romantic nationalism”, this interdisciplinary global historical study investigates cultural initiatives in (British) India that aimed at establishing the nation as a moral community and which preceded or accompanied state-oriented political nationalism. Drawing on a vast array of sources, it discusses important Romantic nationalist traits, such as the relationship between language and identity, historicism, artistic revivalism and hero worship.
Subaltern Studies: A Short Introduction, Gargi Talapatra, Krishna Sen (ed) (Orient BlackSwan, June 2024)
This volume is a comprehensive and critical introduction to Subaltern Studies. It offers a detailed discussion of all major perspectives of the Subaltern Studies Collective and a panoramic view of the twelve volumes published by the Collective.
Lost Letters and Feminist History: The Political Friendship of Mohandas K Gandhi and Sarala Devi Chaudhurani, Geraldine Forbes (Orient BlackSwan, June 2024)
In the 1920s, amidst the upheaval of the Indian national movement, Mohandas K. Gandhi and the prominent Indian nationalist and feminist, Sarala Devi Chaudhurani, communicated with each other for over a year via letters that were both politically charged and personally insightful.
Forsaken Causes: Liberal Democracy and Anticommunism in Cold War Laos, Ryan Wolfson-Ford (University of Wisconsin Press, July 2024)
In the wake of anticolonial struggles and amid the two world wars, twentieth-century Southeast Asia churned with new political, cultural, and intellectual realities. Liberal democracies flourished briefly, only to be discarded for dictatorships and other authoritarian regimes as the disorder and inefficiencies inherent to democracy appeared unequal to postcolonial and Cold War challenges. Uniquely within the region, Laos maintained a stable democracy until 1975, surviving wars, coups, and revolutions. But Lao history during this period has often been flattened, subsumed within the tug-of-war between the global superpowers and their puppets.
Discovering India Anew: Out of Africa to Its Early History, Alan Machado (Prabhu) (Orient BlackSwan, June 2024)
Where does one begin to tell a story that spans many thousands of years, a story whose origins are obscured by stubborn mists that will not lift and enduring myths that will not shift under the weight of ages of telling Discovering India Anew reconstructs the history of Indian peoples, taking off from where the history of Indians really begins: Africa. Exploring their earliest journey out of Africa through the colonization of South Asia by different genetic groups to the end of South Asia’s first urban civilisation, Harappa, and the arrival of the Indo-Aryans, the author asks a fundamental question: Who are we Indians?
Ginkgo Village: Trauma and Transformation in Rural China, Tamara Jacka (ANU Press, June 2024)
Ginkgo Village provides an original and powerfully intimate bottom-up perspective on China’s recent tumultuous history. Drawing on ethnographic and life-history research, the book takes readers deep into a village in a mountainous region of central-eastern China known as Eyuwan.
Translating Kerala: The Cultural Turn in Translation Studies, Meena T Pillai (Orient BlackSwan, May 2024)
Translating Kerala is an interdisciplinary study that is situated at the interstices of translation studies and cultural studies. It looks at translation as a social and cultural act that transcribes, articulates and interprets structures of power unfolding within asymmetrical fields of cultural politics. The book tries to go beyond traditional approaches that consider translation as a literary and linguistic endeavor, attempting to look at it as a process that transcribes and articulates the region of Kerala, while teasing out the paradoxes, ambiguities and politics that mediate such translational acts.
India and Japan: A Natural Partnership in the Indo-Pacific, Harsh V Pant, Madhuchanda Ghosh (eds) (Orient BlackSwan, May 2024)
The Indo-Pacific has emerged as a new theater of strategic and economic competition in the twenty-first century. With the rise of China and the decline of US influence in Asia, India–Japan relations and foreign policies have also been undergoing a significant transformation. This volume critically assesses India–Japan relations with a particular focus on the growing power shift in the Indo-Pacific region. It brings together a diverse group of scholars and analysts from both countries who examine aspects of bilateral relations, partnerships at the regional level, obstacles in the way of fully cementing these ties, and the concrete policies that both countries can undertake for a comprehensive development of India–Japan relations.
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