Museums are not having the best press at the moment. In addition to long-running disputes over the Elgin/Parthenon Marbles and Benin Bronzes, there have a been a recent spate of “returns” of items deemed to have been looted or stolen, ranging from a 2700-year-old gold and carnelian necklace in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts from…
Now merely one of the fifty-five officially recognized ethnic minority groups in the People’s Republic of China, for almost a millennium the Uyghurs were among Central Asia’s most dominant political, economic and cultural forces.
In both English and Chinese, the term warlord, or junfa, immediately conjures the image of a rapacious strongman, violent and reactionary. The territorial aggrandizement of these military men nipped Chinese democracy in the bud, contributing to the fragmentation and instability of the Republican period (1912-1949). But the warlords who vied for power after the final…
Anne Anlin Cheng grew up in Taiwan and moved to Savannah, Georgia with her parents and brother as a school-aged girl. Having learned English as her second language, she majored in English literature in college (“to my parents’ horror”), earned a PhD, published books on race and gender, and worked her way up the ladder…
Those who have come of age since the 1973 oil embargo should have no great difficulty accepting the outsized importance of the Persian Gulf and the surrounding region. From oil and gas to, more recently, airlines, finance, media and football teams, the countries of the Gulf have influence that far exceeds traditional measurements of power…
For much of his life, Jay Prosser was uncertain of where he belonged. He was “Jewish and not, British and Asian, Iraqi, English, Welsh, Chinese”. With a military father, his family moved often. At a boarding school, he was dubbed a “half-caste”. At synagogue, he felt like an imposter. Prosser’s memoir, Loving Strangers, tells the…
When thinking about the most important World War II generals on the Allied side, the name Hastings Ismay does not come immediately to mind. But it should. Throughout the war, he was Winston Churchill’s right arm, serving as his chief staff officer in the Defense Ministry, Deputy Secretary of the War Cabinet, and as a…
In Indonesia, the colonial past has a conspicuously low profile in public consciousness and political debate, but the national revolution—”Revolusi” in Bahasa Indonesia—that threw off colonial rule once and for all nonetheless remains the single most defining moment in the country’s history. Countless murals, quirky dioramas, annual Independence Day celebrations, place names, monuments, official and…
Centered on the eastern half of Java and coming to control most of what would later become Indonesia, as well as Singapore, Malaysia and parts of Thailand during the 14th and 15th centuries, Majapahit may be the most significant empire that most people have never heard of. There are physical remains, but not as well-preserved…
Gerda Philipsborn, Jewish and a part of the 1920s Berlin arts scene, developed a close friendship with a trio of Muslim Indian students. A decade later, she would move to India to join her friends at Jamia Millia Islamia, a university in Aligarh that was established in 1920 to boycott the colonial government’s educational institutions….
The influence of China on Japanese arts, culture and thought has been enormous. Yet, it varied widely across time. Periods of intense exposure and assimilation, as when the archipelago adopted Buddhism in the 6th century along with the logographic script that made its transmission possible, were often followed by decades, if not centuries, of distancing…
Pity the poor archaeologists who lie on their bellies in sand or mud and painstakingly dust off bits of fossilized wood or bone, ceramics or metal scraps. It is, however, from their patient work that scientific truth progresses. Our understanding of the natural history of the horse has galloped ahead in the 21st century. As…
The late British historian Paul Johnson devoted an entire chapter of his 1983 classic Modern Times to what he called the “Bandung Generation”—the leaders of former European colonies in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia who in April 1955 gathered in Bandung, Indonesia to form a non-aligned movement in the midst of the Cold War…
Traude Gavin’s Borneo Ikat Textiles, Style Variations, Ethnicity, and Ancestry is a beautiful book replete with magnificent color plates documenting the author’s fieldwork. Gavin’s research included tracking down examples of a now defunct textile tradition, the warp ikat weaving once practiced by Ibanic-speaking ethnic groups in West Kalimantan.
Peter Hessler, arguably the most famous contemporary American writer on China after his first book River Town which detailed his years teaching in a small city along the Yangtze River in the late 90s, returned to the region more than two decades later to see how his students had done while teaching at a university,…