Can we write women’s authorial roles into the history of industrial cinema in South Asia? How can we understand women’s creative authority and access to the film business infrastructure in this postcolonial region? Esha Niyogi De draws on rare archival and oral sources to explore these questions from a uniquely comparative perspective, delving into examples…
Experimental Times is an in-depth ethnography of the transformation of Bengaluru/Bangalore from a site of “backend” IT work to an aspirational global city of enterprise and innovation. The book journeys alongside the migrant workers, technologists, and entrepreneurs who shape and survive the dreams of a “Startup India” knitted through office work, at networking meetings and…
Misery Beneath the Miracle in East Asia challenges prevailing views of the East Asian economic miracle. Existing scholarship has overlooked the severity, persistence, and harmful consequences of the social-welfare crises affecting the region. Arvid J Lukauskas and Yumiko Shimabukuro fill this gap and put a major asterisk on East Asia’s economic record.
Nishant Upadhyay unravels Indian diasporic complicity in its ongoing colonial relationship with Indigenous peoples, lands, and nations in Canada. Upadhyay examines the interwoven and simultaneous areas of dominant Indian caste complicity in processes of settler colonialism, antiblackness, capitalism, brahminical supremacy, Hindu nationalism, and heteropatriarchy.
Fan Jinshi, a distinguished archaeologist, has devoted her life to safeguarding and researching the Mogao Caves, an esteemed UNESCO Heritage site nestled in Dunhuang, Gansu Province, China, and considered one of the world’s greatest archaeological discoveries. Her significant contributions to the field of Dunhuang studies and her advocacy for the protection and promotion of the…
Sinophone studies—the study of Sinitic-language cultures and communities around the world—has become increasingly interdisciplinary over the past decade. Today, it spans not only literary studies and cinema studies but also history, anthropology, musicology, linguistics, art history, and dance. More and more, it is in conversation with fields such as postcolonial studies, settler-colonial studies, migration studies,…
Born in Hong Kong, Bernie Wong moved to the United States in the early 1960s to attend college. A decade later, she cofounded the Chinese American Service League (CASL) to help meet the needs of the city’s isolated Chinese immigrants. Susan Blumberg-Kason draws on extensive interviews to profile the community and social justice organization. Weaving…
China is experiencing climate whiplash—extreme fluctuations between drought and flooding—that threatens the health and autonomy of millions of people. Set against mounting anxiety over the future of global water supplies, Cutting the Mass Line explores the enduring political, technical, and ethical project of making water available to human communities and ecosystems in a time of…
“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…
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…
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…
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.
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.
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…
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…