Slavery underpins so much of the pre-modern Islamicate world, with its slave-sultans, eunuchs, elite dancing girls as well as household servants, and yet we don’t know much about this social institution and what we know is probably wrong. Perhaps because contemporary historians considered slavery so natural, we can glean little insight from their texts about…
In a 2019 interview with Words Without Borders alongside her translator Natascha Bruce, Hong Kong writer Dorothy Tse said, “I believe experimenting with language brings insight to any type of writing.” Later in the interview, Bruce remarks, “There is usually a playful element to Dorothy’s work, coexisting with—or perhaps contributing to—a deeply sinister one.”
The “Chicken’s Neck”, or Siliguri Corridor, was created in the aftermath of Partition. Just 22 kilometres wide at its narrowest point and roughly 60 kilometres long, it connects India’s northeast to the rest of the country. Bordering Bangladesh and Bhutan and with China in close proximity, security theorists have long worried that this strategically vital…
Written 40-50 years ago during the South Korean dictatorship from the 1970s-80s, now newly-translated into English and framed by reflective essays, Kim Hyesoon’s poetry collection The Hell of That Star is a violent and grotesque testament to a censored time. Having worked as an editor during the regime, Kim is familiar with the censorship apparatus…
World War II birthed the anti-colonial Indian National Army (INA), a force composed of former imperial troops and civilian recruits that fought with Japan against the British and helped to accelerate India’s independence from Great Britain. Like most aspects of World War II, these developments were messy, complicated, and filled with tragedy. Gautam Hazarika, a…
A mere 120 pages long, Kwan Ann Tan’s choose-your-own-adventure novella, The Waiter, offers more than just adventure. Set in a near-future London that is infested with spontaneously opening and closing sinkholes—or “maws”—the book invites readers to step into the shoes of an unnamed Waiter, whose job it is to complete time-consuming, unproductive tasks on behalf…
Historians are usually loath to ask “what if?”, but in The War That Made the Middle East: World War I and the End of the Ottoman Empire, Georgetown’s Mustafa Aksakal gets close.
Biographies, at least in English, about Japanese who played key roles in the Second World War are relatively rare. Chiang Kai-shek, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin—each the subject of dozens of biographies—have all attracted a great deal of attention. General Tojo Hideki, Japan’s leader for…
Dan Wang’s Breakneck opens with an assertion that will immediately ring true with many observers of both China and the United States: despite their ongoing sparring, “no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese”.
Yumiko Kurahashi (1935-2005) is celebrated as a pivotal female writer in Japan’s growing post-war break with literary tradition. Informed by European writers and philosophers of the 1950s and 1960s, “third wave” writers in post-war Japan—Kobo Abe, Kenzaburo Oe, Minako Oba, Meiko Kanai and dozens of others labeled experimentalists, avant-garde, and absurdists—were interested in the metaphysical,…
Saleem Haddad was born in Kuwait in 1983, of an Iraqi-German mother and a Palestinian-Lebanese father, whose own mother, a Christian, was displaced to Beirut at the formation of Israel. He was raised between various countries, including Jordan, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Before he published his first novel he worked as an aid worker…
A book that attempts to tell the story of one of the world’s largest and most complex islands across vast spans of time—from deep geological history to the urgent pressures of the present—Olivier Hein’s Borneo: The History of an Enigma announces its ambition from the first pages. Such scale is risky: many books with grand…
The name Jodhpur itself conjures for many the full colour of the Raj at its height: polo grounds and palaces, and impeccably-tailored riding trousers—jodhpurs—a word exported into the English language. In Peter Vacher’s richly-illustrated and deeply-researched book, that familiar imagery is joined by something less-widely appreciated but no less consequential: aviation. The result is a…
A child was abandoned on the train tracks of Cheongnyangni Station, Seoul. Nothing was known of her before that moment—no certificates, no paperwork. She would grow up to be called Munju by her foster father, then Esther by the nuns at the orphanages, and finally given the name Nana by her French adoptive parents. Those…
Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850 is the accompanying volume to an eponymous exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art which places painters, local and foreign, working in India and China in the context of the commercial and colonial operations of the East India Company.