Nepal has undergone immense social change since 1951 and the end of the Rana dynasty. It has been transformed from a feudal autocratic monarchy to a federal republican democracy. Its politics, society and economy have been irrevocably changed by coups, civil war and political movements. So vast and far reaching are these changes that Jeevan R Sharma dubs them Nepal’s “great transformation”. Political Economy of Social Change and Development in Nepal is an attempt to provide a concise overview of these changes, and the effects they have had on Nepal’s politics, society and economy. At just 208 pages, this is a good one-volume primer for those seeking to understand Nepal’s great transformation as well as it’s idiosyncrasies, faults and discontents.
Society
In 2016, the city of Mumbai was blanketed in toxic smog. The source? Fires at the nearby dumping ground of Deonar: the country’s oldest. The Deonar fire became an embarrassment for Mumbai, coming right before an international expo meant to announce the city to international investors and business.
The ubiquity of Portuguese surnames in Hong Kong, including as they do quite a few people who don’t look particularly European, can come as something of a surprise. Some of these, as Catherine S Chan points out in her new book Macanese Diaspora in British Hong Kong: A Century of Transimperial Drifting, date literally from Hong Kong’s earliest days as the Macanese were some of the city’s first immigrants.
Historian RG Collingwood once wrote that “We study history in order to see more clearly into the situation in which we are called upon to act.” Few people see US-China relations with greater clarity than Cheng Li, who worked as a physician during the Cultural Revolution before earning his PhD in Political Science at Princeton. In his new book Middle Class Shanghai, Li uses the history and culture of the city and its denizens to illustrate how China’s internal dynamism and diversity should inform US policy.
The pontianak, a terrifying female vampire ghost, is a powerful figure in Malay cultures, as loved and feared in Southeast Asia as Dracula is in the West. In animist tradition, she is a woman who has died in childbirth, and her vengeful return upsets gender norms and social hierarchies. The pontianak first appeared on screen in late colonial Singapore in a series of popular films that combine indigenous animism and transnational production with the cultural and political force of the horror genre.
As the trash mountains tumble down all over the world—Delhi, Colombo, Addis Ababa, and Shenzhen—or float off the coast near New York, the trash mountains in Mumbai seem to be stable. But the world is watching these Mumbai mountains as a time bomb—NASA’s images of the fires burning at these landfills being among the latest bits to get international attention. Former journalist and founder of a microfinance venture, Saumya Roy writes about these trash mountains, the human habitation around them, their history, and the bureaucracy that is supposed to take care of them in her ethnographic account Mountain Tales: Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belongings.
Making Kin: Ecofeminist Essays from Singapore contemplates and re-centres Singapore women in the overlapping discourses of family, home, ecology and nation. For the first time, this collection of ecofeminist essays focuses on the crafts, minds, bodies and subjectivities of a diverse group of women making kin with the human and non-human world as they navigate their lives.
To call the hundred years that straddle the 19th- and 20th-centuries as a radical period of change for China is an understatement, moving from the Imperial period, through the Republican era, and ending in the rise of the PRC. Dr Elizabeth LaCouture’s Dwelling in the World: Family, House, and Home in Tianjin, China, 1860–1960 explores this history by looking at Tianjin: a city divided into nine foreign concessions, and perhaps, at the time, the world’s most cosmopolitan—and colonized—cities. With a focus on family and the home, Dr Lacouture explores the interplay between these massive political changes and the lives of ordinary people.
The Art of Useless Fashion: Media, and Consumer Culture in Contemporary China, Calvin Hui (Columbia University Press, September 2021)
Since embarking on economic reforms in 1978, the People’s Republic of China has also undergone a sweeping cultural reorganization, from proletarian culture under Mao to middle-class consumer culture today. Under these circumstances, how has a Chinese middle class come into being, and how has consumerism become the dominant ideology of an avowedly socialist country?
“Dwelling in the World: Family, House, and Home in Tianjin, China, 1860-1960” by Elizabeth LaCouture
Tianjin has always seemed to play second fiddle to the more prominent Beijing. By the same token, during the late-Qing and Republican periods, Shanghai has been held up as China’s most cosmopolitan city, attracting people from around the world. Elizabeth LaCouture, in her new book, Dwelling in the World: Family, House, and Home in Tianjin, China, 1860-1960, shows that Tianjin became more prosperous than Beijing after the Nationalist government left the north for Nanjing and that it was more of an international city than Shanghai.
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