The creation of a new school system in the Philippines in 1898 and educational reforms in occupied Japan, both with stated goals of democratization, speaks to a singular vision of America as savior, following its politics of violence with benevolent recuperation.
Category Archive: New book announcement
The diva is a nearly universal phenomenon. Wherever poetry, music and mime have been practised with virtuosity, great women performers always take centre stage. Traditional Asian divas are however less well known and understood among English language readers than the great divas of Mozart and Puccini. Whether from Shiraz at the court of the Injuids, from Delhi during the twilight of the Moghuls, or from Yangzhou under the last Ming emperors, these Asian divas constitute the first identifiably modern women.
A remarkable and true tale of loyalty, vengeance, and ritual suicide… In the spring of 1701, the regional lord Asano Naganori wounded his supervising official, Kira Yoshinaka, during an important ceremony in the ruling shogunate’s Edo Castle and was at once condemned to death. Within two years, in the dead of winter, a band of forty-seven of Asano’s retainers avenged him by breaking into Yoshinaka’s mansion and killing him. Subsequently, all the men were sentenced to death but allowed to perform it honorably by seppuku.
At the dawn of the Ming Dynasty, the emperor will do anything to ensure the future of his empire. Building the Forbidden City in fulfillment of his father’s dreams is only the beginning. But few people share the emperor’s vision.
Whereas most scholarship on Japanese Americans looks at historical case studies or the 1.5 generation assimilating, this pioneering anthology, Japanese American Millennials: Rethinking Generation, Community, and Diversity, captures the experiences, perspectives, and aspirations of Asian Americans born between 1980 and 2000. The editors and contributors present multiple perspectives on who Japanese Americans are, how they think about notions of community and culture, and how they engage and negotiate multiple social identities.
An American Bum in China: Featuring the bumblingly brilliant escapades of expatriate Matthew Evans is the remarkable but true story of an Iowan misfit. At the age of twenty-one, cancer survivor Evans flees his Mississippi River hometown of Muscatine and heads to China in pursuit of love. He ends up destitute, deported, working as a professor at a prestigious university, homeless, imprisoned, and an accidental participant in the 2014 Hong Kong protests.
The last book in a trilogy of explorations on space and time from a preeminent scholar, The Boundless Sea is Gary Y Okihiro’s most innovative yet. Whereas Okihiro’s previous books, Island World and Pineapple Culture, sought to deconstruct islands and continents, tropical and temperate zones, this book interrogates the assumed divides between space and time, memoir and history, and the historian and the writing of history.