New Non-Fiction Books

New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “Forsaken Causes: Liberal Democracy and Anticommunism in Cold War Laos” by Ryan Wolfson-Ford
15 June 202418 June 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…
Read More New Book Announcement: “Forsaken Causes: Liberal Democracy and Anticommunism in Cold War Laos” by Ryan Wolfson-Ford
New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “Discovering India Anew: Out of Africa to Its Early History” by Alan Machado (Prabhu)
13 June 202413 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…
Read More New Book Announcement: “Discovering India Anew: Out of Africa to Its Early History” by Alan Machado (Prabhu)
New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “Ginkgo Village: Trauma and Transformation in Rural China” by Tamara Jacka
10 June 202410 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.
Read More New Book Announcement: “Ginkgo Village: Trauma and Transformation in Rural China” by Tamara Jacka
New Non-Fiction Books
New book announcement: “Translating Kerala: The Cultural Turn in Translation Studies” by Meena T Pillai
26 May 202426 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…
Read More New book announcement: “Translating Kerala: The Cultural Turn in Translation Studies” by Meena T Pillai
New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “India and Japan: A Natural Partnership in the Indo-Pacific”, edited by Harsh V Pant and Madhuchanda Ghosh
19 May 202419 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…
Read More New Book Announcement: “India and Japan: A Natural Partnership in the Indo-Pacific”, edited by Harsh V Pant and Madhuchanda Ghosh
New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “The Army of the Manchu Empire: The Conquest Army and the Imperial Army of Qing China, 1600-1727” by Michael Fredholm von Essen
28 April 202428 April 2024
New research on an army that details the military system of Qing China, which fought a variety of enemies ranging from Ming Chinese, Mongols, and Tibetans to Russians and Western Colonial armies.
Read More New Book Announcement: “The Army of the Manchu Empire: The Conquest Army and the Imperial Army of Qing China, 1600-1727” by Michael Fredholm von Essen
New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “Religion and Empire in Portuguese India: Conversion, Resistance, and the Making of Goa” by Angela Barreto Xavier
18 April 2024
How did the colonization of Goa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries take place? How was it related to projects for the conversion of Goan colonial subjects to Catholicism? And how did these contribute to the making of Goan identity?
Read More New Book Announcement: “Religion and Empire in Portuguese India: Conversion, Resistance, and the Making of Goa” by Angela Barreto Xavier
New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “Punjabi Centuries: Tracing Histories of Punjab”, edited by Anshu Malhotra
11 April 2024
The historical and territorial space of Punjab has been politically and spatially unstable and changing, What Punjab means to different people also varies over time and context. Equally, what one holds dear about Punjab, the sense of “Punjabiyat/Punjabiness”, is both emotionally and culturally complex.
Read More New Book Announcement: “Punjabi Centuries: Tracing Histories of Punjab”, edited by Anshu Malhotra
New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “Joy, Despair, Illusion, Dreams: Twenty Plays from the Nō Tradition”, translated by Royall Tyler
8 April 2024
Nō drama, which integrates speech, song, dance, music, mask, and costume into a distinctive art form, is among Japan’s most revered cultural traditions. It gained popularity in the fourteenth century, when the actor and playwright Zeami (1363–1443) drew the favor of the shogun with his theatrical innovations. Nō’s intricacies and highly stylized conventions continue to…
Read More New Book Announcement: “Joy, Despair, Illusion, Dreams: Twenty Plays from the Nō Tradition”, translated by Royall Tyler
New Non-Fiction Books
“Asie centrale 300-850: Des routes et des royaumes” by Étienne de la Vaissière
7 April 202428 April 2024
Our journey toward having a true understanding of world history passes through Central Asia, the lands in-between the great civilizations of India, China and Iran. William H McNeil’s classic Rise of the West (1963) vividly illustrated the role of Central Asia as a gearbox whose spinning connected these civilizations and propelled history forward. One had…
Read More “Asie centrale 300-850: Des routes et des royaumes” by Étienne de la Vaissière
New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “Japanese Fighting Heroes: Warriors, Samurai and Ronins” by Jamie Ryder
1 April 2024
These Japanese folk heroes led fascinating lives that provide insight into our own through the principles and practices they lived by. They struggled with universal ideals of honor, duty, courage and kindness, helping them transcend their culture.
Read More New Book Announcement: “Japanese Fighting Heroes: Warriors, Samurai and Ronins” by Jamie Ryder
New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “The Dawn of the Warrior Age: War Tales from Medieval Japan”, translated by Royall Tyler
29 March 202429 March 2024
The war between the Heike and Genji clans in the 13th and 13th centuries is among the most compelling and significant moments in Japan’s history, immortalized in The Tale of the Heike. Beyond the events recorded in this canonical text, the conflicts of the surrounding years are crucial to medieval Japanese culture and history. In…
Read More New Book Announcement: “The Dawn of the Warrior Age: War Tales from Medieval Japan”, translated by Royall Tyler
New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “Impossible Speech The Politics of Representation in Contemporary Korean Literature and Film” by Christopher P Hanscom
18 March 2024
In what ways can or should art engage with its social context? Authors, readers, and critics have been preoccupied with this question since the dawn of modern literature in Korea. Advocates of social engagement have typically focused on realist texts, seeing such works as best suited to represent injustices and inequalities by describing them as…
Read More New Book Announcement: “Impossible Speech The Politics of Representation in Contemporary Korean Literature and Film” by Christopher P Hanscom
New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “Teaching the Young: The Early Childhood Development Profession in India”
29 February 2024
Care and education of young children is crucial for a nation’s development and the early years teacher is the most important person in a child’s life after her parents. While early education has been in the hands of informally qualified educators in India for the past several decades, the National Education Policy 2020 has emphasized…
Read More New Book Announcement: “Teaching the Young: The Early Childhood Development Profession in India”
New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “Singaporean Creatures: Histories of Humans and Other Animals in the Garden City”, edited by Timothy P Barnard
18 February 2024
Modern Singapore is the city in a garden, a biophilic and highly managed urban space that is home to a variety of animals, from mosquitoes to humans to polar bears. How has this coexistence worked as we enter the Anthropocene? How have human-animal relationships shaped Singapore society—socially, economically, politically and environmentally—over the last half century?
Read More New Book Announcement: “Singaporean Creatures: Histories of Humans and Other Animals in the Garden City”, edited by Timothy P Barnard

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