Birds in Open CagesUma Padmasola (Magic Mongrel, October 2024)
Birds in Open Cages, Uma Padmasola (Magic Mongrel, October 2024)

Witches make the world go round, and Gerda’s quest leads her to the most powerful one of all. When her village is hit with an unnatural snowspell, Gerda leaves in search of a missing boy. Every step of her journey culminates in a single choice: to save a boy, or save the world. But supernatural creatures want to make her their pawn. Will magic empower her, or will she lose to forces greater than herself?

Sinophone Studies Across Disciplines: A Reader, Howard Chiang, Shu-mei Shih (eds) (Columbia University Press, September 2024)
Sinophone Studies Across Disciplines: A Reader, Howard Chiang, Shu-mei Shih (eds) (Columbia University Press, September 2024)

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, ethnic studies, queer studies, and area studies.

When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League, Susan Blumberg-Kason (University of Illinois Press, September 2024)
When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League, Susan Blumberg-Kason (University of Illinois Press, September 2024)

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 Wong’s intimate account of her own life story through the CASL’s larger history, Blumberg-Kason follows the group from its origins to its emergence as a robust social network that connects Chinatown residents to everything from daycare to immigration services to culinary education.

Cutting the Mass Line: Water, Politics, and Climate in Southwest China, Andrea E Pia (John Hopkins University Press, July 2024)
Cutting the Mass Line: Water, Politics, and Climate in Southwest China, Andrea E Pia (John Hopkins University Press, July 2024)

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 drought, infrastructural disrepair, and environmental breakdown.

The Unruly Dead: Spirits, Memory, and State Formation in Timor-Leste, Lia Kent (University of Wisconsin Press, August 2024)
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)
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)
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.

Lost Letters and Feminist History: The Political Friendship of Mohandas K Gandhi and Sarala Devi Chaudhurani, Geraldine Forbes (Orient BlackSwan, June 2024)
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)
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.