In the third century BCE, Ashoka ruled an empire encompassing much of modern-day India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh. During his reign, Buddhism proliferated across the South Asian subcontinent, and future generations of Asians came to see him as the ideal Buddhist king. Disentangling the threads of Ashoka’s life from the knot of legend that surrounds it, Nayanjot Lahiri presents a vivid biography of this extraordinary Indian emperor and deepens our understanding of a legacy that extends beyond the bounds of Ashoka’s lifetime and dominion.
At the center of Lahiri’s account is the complex personality of the Maurya dynasty’s third emperor—a strikingly contemplative monarch, at once ambitious and humane, who introduced a unique style of benevolent governance. Ashoka’s edicts, carved into rock faces and stone pillars, reveal an eloquent ruler who, unusually for the time, wished to communicate directly with his people. The voice he projected was personal, speaking candidly about the watershed events in his life and expressing his regrets as well as his wishes to his subjects.
Ashoka’s humanity is conveyed most powerfully in his tale of the Battle of Kalinga. Against all conventions of statecraft, he depicts his victory as a tragedy rather than a triumph—a shattering experience that led him to embrace the Buddha’s teachings. Ashoka in Ancient India breathes new life into a towering figure of the ancient world, one who, in the words of Jawaharlal Nehru, “was greater than any king or emperor.”
A concise new history of a century of struggles to define Asian identity and express alternatives to European forms of universalism.
The balance of global power changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century, above all with the economic and political rise of Asia. Asia after Europe is a bold new interpretation of the period, focusing on the conflicting and overlapping ways in which Asians have conceived their bonds and their roles in the world. Tracking the circulation of ideas and people across colonial and national borders, Sugata Bose explores developments in Asian thought, art, and politics that defied Euro-American models and defined Asianness as a locus of solidarity for all humanity.
Impressive in scale, yet driven by the stories of fascinating and influential individuals, Asia after Europe examines early intimations of Asian solidarity and universalism preceding Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905; the revolutionary collaborations of the First World War and its aftermath, when Asian universalism took shape alongside Wilsonian internationalism and Bolshevism; the impact of the Great Depression and Second World War on the idea of Asia; and the persistence of forms of Asian universalism in the postwar period, despite the consolidation of postcolonial nation-states on a European model.
Diverse Asian universalisms were forged and fractured through phases of poverty and prosperity, among elites and common people, throughout the span of the twentieth century. Noting the endurance of nationalist rivalries, often tied to religious exclusion and violence, Bose concludes with reflections on the continuing potential of political thought beyond European definitions of reason, nation, and identity.
War, defeat, and the collapse of empire in 1945 touched every aspect of postwar Japanese society, profoundly shaping how the Japanese would reconstruct national identity and reengage with the peoples of Asia. While “America” offered a vision of re-genesis after cataclysmic ruin, “Asia” exposed the traumata of perpetration and the torment of ethnic responsibility. Obscured in the shadows of a resurgent postwar Japan lurked a postimperial specter whose haunting presence both complicated and confounded the spiritual rehabilitation of the nation.
Asia and Postwar Japan examines Japanese deimperialization from 1945 until the early twenty-first century. It focuses on the thought and activism of progressive activists and intellectuals as they struggled to overcome rigid preconceptions about “Asia,” as they grappled with the implications of postimperial responsibility, and as they forged new regional solidarities and Asian imaginaries. Simon Avenell reveals the critical importance of Asia in postwar Japanese thought, activism, and politics—Asia as a symbolic geography, Asia as a space for grassroots engagement, and ultimately, Asia as an aporia of identity and the source of a new politics of hope.
Chen is one of the most important intellectuals working in East Asia today; his writing has been influential in Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and mainland China for the past fifteen years. As a founding member of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society and its journal, he has helped to initiate change in the dynamics and intellectual orientation of the region, building a network that has facilitated inter-Asian connections. Asia as Method encapsulates Chen’s vision and activities within the increasingly “inter-referencing” East Asian intellectual community and charts necessary new directions for cultural studies.
A pioneering study of historical developments that have shaped Asia concludes with this volume tracing the impact of ideas and cultures of people on the move across the continent, whether willingly or not.
In the final volume of Asia Inside Out, a stellar interdisciplinary team of scholars considers the migration of people—and the ideas, practices, and things they brought with them—to show the ways in which itinerant groups have transformed their culture and surroundings. Going beyond time and place, which animated the first two books, this third one looks at human beings on the move.
Human movement from place to place across time reinforces older connections while forging new ones. Erik Harms turns to Vietnam to show that the notion of a homeland as a marked geographic space can remain important even if that space is not fixed in people’s lived experience. Angela Leung traces how much of East Asia was brought into a single medical sphere by traveling practitioners. Seema Alavi shows that the British preoccupation with the 1857 Indian Revolt allowed traders to turn the Omani capital into a thriving arms emporium. James Pickett exposes the darker side of mobility in a netherworld of refugees, political prisoners, and hostages circulating from the southern Russian Empire to the Indian subcontinent. Other authors trace the impact of movement on religious art, ethnic foods, and sports spectacles.
By stepping outside familiar categories and standard narratives, this remarkable series challenges us to rethink our conception of Asia in complex and nuanced ways.
The first of three volumes surveying the historical, spatial, and human dimensions of inter-Asian connections, Asia Inside Out: Changing Times brings into focus the diverse networks and dynamic developments that have linked peoples from Japan to Yemen over the past five centuries.
Each author examines an unnoticed moment—a single year or decade—that redefined Asia in some important way. Heidi Walcher explores the founding of the Safavid dynasty in the crucial battle of 1501, while Peter C. Perdue investigates New World silver’s role in Sino–Portuguese and Sino–Mongolian relations after 1557. Victor Lieberman synthesizes imperial changes in Russia, Burma, Japan, and North India in the seventeenth century, Charles Wheeler focuses on Zen Buddhism in Vietnam to 1683, and Kerry Ward looks at trade in Pondicherry, India, in 1745. Nancy Um traces coffee exports from Yemen in 1636 and 1726, and Robert Hellyer follows tea exports from Japan to global markets in 1874. Anand Yang analyzes the diary of an Indian soldier who fought in China in 1900, and Eric Tagliacozzo portrays the fragility of Dutch colonialism in 1910. Andrew Willford delineates the erosion of cosmopolitan Bangalore in the mid-twentieth century, and Naomi Hosoda relates the problems faced by Filipino workers in Dubai in the twenty-first.
Moving beyond traditional demarcations such as West, East, South, and Southeast Asia, this interdisciplinary study underscores the fluidity and contingency of trans-Asian social, cultural, economic, and political interactions. It also provides an analytically nuanced and empirically rich understanding of the legacies of Asian globalization.
Asia Inside Out reveals the dynamic forces that have historically linked regions of the world’s largest continent, stretching from Japan and Korea to the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Middle East. Connected Places, the second installment in this pioneering three-volume survey, highlights the transregional flows of goods, ideas, and people across natural and political boundaries—sea routes, delta ecologies, and mountain passes, ports and oasis towns, imperial capitals and postmodern cities. It challenges the conventional idea that defines geopolitical regions as land-based, state-centered, and possessing linear histories.
Exploring themes of maritime connections, mobile landscapes, and spatial movements, the authors examine significant sites of linkage and disjuncture from the early modern period to the present. Readers discover how eighteenth-century pirates shaped the interregional networks of Vietnam’s Tonkin Gulf, how Kashmiri merchants provided intelligence of remote Himalayan territories to competing empires, and how for centuries a vibrant trade in horses and elephants fueled the Indian Ocean economy. Other topics investigated include cultural formations in the Pearl River delta, global trade in Chittagong’s transformation, gendered homemaking among mobile Samurai families, border zones in Qing China and contemporary Burma, colonial spaces linking India and Mesopotamia, transnational marriages in Oman’s immigrant populations, new cultural spaces in Korean pop, and the unexpected adoption of the Latin script by ethnically Chinese Muslims in Central Asia.
Connected Places shows the constant fluctuations over many centuries in the making of Asian territories and illustrates the confluence of factors in the historical construction of place and space.
Asian America is the first comprehensive look at post-1960s Asian American communities in the United States and Canada. From Chinese Americans in Chicagoland to Vietnamese Americans in Orange County, this multi-disciplinary collection spans a wide comparative and panoramic scope. Contributors from an array of academic fields focus on global views of Asian American communities as well as on territorial and cultural boundaries.
Presenting groundbreaking perspectives, Asian America revises worn assumptions and examines current challenges Asian American communities face in the twenty-first century.
The Asian American Avant-Garde is the first book-length study that conceptualizes a long-neglected canon of early Asian American literature and art. Audrey Wu Clark traces a genealogy of counter-universalism in short fiction, poetry, novels, and art produced by writers and artists of Asian descent who were responding to their contemporary period of Asian exclusion in the United States, between the years 1882 and 1945.
Believing in the promise of an inclusive America, these avant-gardists critiqued racism as well as institutionalized art. Clark examines racial outsiders including Isamu Noguchi, Dong Kingman and Yun Gee to show how they engaged with modernist ideas, particularly cubism. She draws comparisons between writers such as Sui Sin Far and Carlos Bulosan with modernist luminaries like Stein, Eliot, Pound, and Proust.
Acknowledging the anachronism of the term “Asian American” with respect to these avant-gardists, Clark attempts to reconstruct it. The Asian American Avant-Garde explores the ways in which these artists and writers responded to their racialization and the Orientalism that took place in modernist writing.
Warren Cohen reviews the role of the United States in East Asia over the past century, making a convincing case for American influence in Asia as generally positive. He illustrates specific ways in which American culture has affected Asians, from forms of government to entertainment, and offers valuable insights into the nature of cultural exchange. Americanization was most successful when Asians freely adopted cultural elements, while efforts to impose values generally failed, notably in the Philippines. And in a fascinating and eye-opening assessment of the "Asianization" of America, Cohen observes that Asian influences in food, film, music, medicine, and religion are now woven deeply--and permanently--into the American fabric. Indeed, Asians are changing American identity itself: by mid-century, approximately one in ten Americans will boast Asian ancestry.
In this lively look at the cultural bonds that continue to shape the relationship between East Asians and Americans, Cohen invites us to ponder the past and envision the future as the "American century" gives way to one with a decidedly more Asian focus.
Social media provides ethno-racial immigrant groups—especially those who cannot vote due to factors such as lack of citizenship and limited English proficiency—the ability to mobilize and connect around collective issues. Online spaces and discussion forums have encouraged many Asian Americans to participate in public policy debates and take action on social justice issues. This form of digital group activism serves as an adaptive political empowerment strategy for the fastest-growing and largest foreign-born population in America. Asian American Connective Action in the Age of Social Media illuminates how associating online can facilitate and amplify traditional forms of political action.
James Lai provides diverse case studies on contentious topics ranging from affirmative action debates to textbook controversies to emphasize the complexities, limitations, and challenges of connective action that is relevant to all racial groups. Using a detailed multi-methods approach that includes national survey data and Twitter hashtag analysis, he shows how traditional immigrants, older participants, and younger generations create online consensus and mobilize offline to foment political change. In doing so, Lai provides a nuanced glimpse into the multiple ways connective action takes shape within the Asian American community.
Active for more than two decades, the Asian American movement began a middle-class reform effort to achieve racial equality, social justice, and political empowerment. In this first history and in-depth analysis of the Movement, William Wei traces to the late 1960s, the genesis of an Asian American identity, culture, and activism.
Wei analyzes the Asian American women's movement, the alternative press, Asian American involvement in electoral politics. Interviews with many key participants in the Movement and photographs of Asian American demonstrations and events enliven this portrayal of the Movement's development, breadth, and conflicts.
Asian American plays provide an opportunity to think about how racial issues are engaged through theatrical performance physical contact, bodily labor, and fleshly desire as well as through the more standard elements of plot, setting, characterization, staging, music, and action.
Asian American Plays for a New Generation showcases seven exciting new plays that dramatize timely themes that are familiar to Asian Americans. The works variously address immigration, racism, stereotyping, identity, generational tensions, assimilation, and upward mobility as well as post-9/11 paranoia, racial isolation, and adoptee experiences.
Each of these works engages directly and actively with Asian American themes through performance to provide an important starting point for building relationships, raising political awareness, and creating active communities that can foster a sense of connection or even rally individuals to collective action.
Jean Yu-wen Shen Wu and Thomas C. Chen have selected essays for the significance of their contribution to the field and their clarity, brevity, and accessibility to readers with little to no prior knowledge of Asian American studies. Featuring both reprints of seminal articles and groundbreaking texts, as well as bold new scholarship, Asian American Studies Now addresses the new circumstances, new communities, and new concerns that are reconstituting Asian America.
Contributors
Vincanne Adams
Nancy N. Chen
Stefan Ecks
Kathleen Erwin
Phuoc V. Le
Jennifer Liu
Aihwa Ong
Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner
Kaushik Sunder Rajan
Wen-Ching Sung
Charis Thompson
Ara Wilson
C. Patterson Giersch provides a groundbreaking challenge to the China-centered narrative of the Qing conquest through comparative frontier history and a pioneering use of indigenous sources. He focuses on the Tai domains of China's Yunnan frontier, part of the politically fluid borderlands, where local, indigenous leaders were crucial actors in an arena of imperial rivalry.
Patterns of acculturation were multi-directional. Both Qing and Tai created a hybrid frontier government that was tested as Burma and Siam extended influence into the region. As Qing and Chinese migrants gained greater political and economic control in borderland communities, indigenes adopted select Chinese ways. Chinese language was useful for trade, and relations with imperial officials were eased by wearing the queue and donning imperial robes. But indigenous culture and livelihoods persisted, and Tai aristocrats adopted rituals and symbols of the Burmese and Siamese courts.
Qing conquest and Chinese migration did not lead to simple patterns of incorporation and assimilation. Chinese economic and cultural influences were profound, but did not entirely undermine indigenous practices. These legacies, which would shape and complicate twentieth-century Chinese state building, hold an important key to understanding modern China.
Since 1970, a growing number of Asian Indians have called Michigan home. Representative of the “new immigration,” Asian Indians come from a democratic country, are well-educated, and come from middle- and upper-class families. Unlike older immigrant groups, Asian Indians do not form urban ethnic enclaves or found their own communities to meet the challenges of living in a new society. As Arthur W. Helweg shows, Asian Indians contribute to the richness and diversity of Michigan’s culture through active participation in local institutions, while maintaining a strong ethnic identity rooted in India.
More than a decade ago, before globalization became a buzzword, Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth established themselves as leading analysts of how that process has shaped the legal profession. Drawing upon the insights of Pierre Bourdieu, Asian Legal Revivals explores the increasing importance of the positions of the law and lawyers in South and Southeast Asia.
Dezalay and Garth argue that the current situation in many Asian countries can only be fully understood by looking to their differing colonial experiences—and in considering how those experiences have laid the foundation for those societies’ legal profession today. Deftly tracing the transformation of the relationship between law and state into different colonial settings, the authors show how nationalist legal elites in countries such as India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and South Korea came to wield political power as agents in the move toward national independence. Including fieldwork from over 350 interviews, Asian Legal Revivals illuminates the more recent past and present of these legally changing nations and explains the profession’s recent revival of influence, as spurred on by American geopolitical and legal interests.
In a major new book, Lucian W. Pye reconceptualizes Asian political development as a product of cultural attitudes about power and authority. He contrasts the great traditions of Confucian East Asia with the Southeast Asian cultures and the South Asian traditions of Hinduism and Islam, and explores the national differences within these larger civilizations.
Breaking with modern political theory, Pye believes that power differs profoundly from one culture to another. In Asia the masses of the people are group-oriented and respectful of authority, while their leaders are more concerned with dignity and upholding collective pride than with problem-solving. As culture decides the course of political development, Pye shows how Asian societies, confronted with the task of setting up modern nation-states, respond by fashioning paternalistic forms of power that satisfy their deep psychological craving for security. This new paternalism may appear essentially authoritarian to Western eyes, but Pye maintains that it is a valid response to the people’s needs and will ensure community solidarity and strong group loyalties. He predicts that we are certain to see emerging from Asia’s accelerating transformation some new version of modern society that may avoid many of the forms of tension common to Western civilization but may also produce a whole new set of problems.
This book revitalizes Asian political studies on a plane that comprehends the large differences between Asia and the West and at the same time is sensitive to the subtle variations among the many Asian cultures. Its comparative perspective will provide indispensable insights to anyone who wishes to think more deeply about the modern Asian states.
In this work Neils Steensgaard combines an analytical economic approach with detailed historic scholarship to provide an imaginitive and important analysis of a central incident in modern world history. The event is the breaking of the Portuguese monopoly on Asian trade in the seventeenth century by English and Dutch mercantile interests. This change the author demonstrates, was not simply the triumph of the new powers over the old. Rather, the Dutch--English victory heralded a structural change in international trade: the triumph of entrepreneurial capitalism over the older economic mode of the "peddler-merchant."
Professor Steensgaard's study is divided into two major parts. The first examines the economic and political structure of the seventeenth century institutions in the Near East, Portugal, England, and the Netherlands. The author demonstrates that the rise to preeminence of the English and Dutch East India Companies over the Portuguese "State of India" was the result of the superior economic and bureaucratic organization of the former. The eclipse of Portuguese power in general, the author argues, is best understood as an institutional failure–an inability to adapt to changing patterns and demands of economic life.
The second part of Professor Steensgaard's study provides a detailed historical account of an important event in the fall of the Portuguese trading empire–the loss of the city of Hormuz in 1622. Hormuz, located at a strategic point at the entrance of the Persian Gulf, was a central port city on the Asian trade route. It fell to an English and Persian force. The author demonstrates why this event exemplifies the Portuguese institutional weaknesses that are discussed in the first part of the book.
Since the horrific Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the debate on human rights in China has raged on with increasing volume and shifting context, but little real progress. In this provocative book, one of our most learned scholars of China moves beyond the political shouting match, informing and contextualizing this debate from a Confucian and a historical perspective.
"Asian Values" is a concept advanced by some authoritarian regimes to differentiate an Asian model of development, supposedly based on Confucianism, from a Western model identified with individualism, liberal democracy, and human rights. Highlighting the philosophical development of Confucianism as well as the Chinese historical experience with community organization, constitutionalism, education, and women's rights, Wm. Theodore de Bary argues that while the Confucian sense of personhood differs in some respects from Western libertarian concepts of the individual, it is not incompatible with human rights, but could, rather, enhance them.
De Bary also demonstrates that Confucian communitarianism has historically resisted state domination, and that human rights in China could be furthered by a genuine Confucian communitarianism that incorporates elements of Western civil society. With clarity and elegance, Asian Values and Human Rights broadens our perspective on the Chinese human rights debate.
Does media representation advance racial justice?
While the past decade has witnessed a push for increased diversity in visual media, Asians on Demand grapples with the pressing question of whether representation is enough to advance racial justice. Surveying a contemporary, cutting-edge archive of video works from the Asian diaspora in North America, Europe, and East Asia, this book uncovers the ways that diasporic artists challenge the narrow—and damaging—conceptions of Asian identity pervading mainstream media.
Through an engagement with grassroots activist documentaries, experimental video diaries by undocumented and migrant workers, and works by high-profile media artists such as Hito Steyerl and Ming Wong, Feng-Mei Heberer showcases contemporary video productions that trouble the mainstream culture industry’s insistence on portraying ethnic Asians as congenial to dominant neoliberal values. Undermining the demands placed on Asian subjects to exemplify institutional diversity and individual exceptionalism, this book provides a critical and nuanced set of alternatives to the easily digestible forms generated by online streaming culture and multicultural lip service more broadly.
Employing feminist, racial, and queer critiques of the contemporary media landscape, Asians on Demand highlights how the dynamics of Asian representation play out differently in Germany, the United States, Taiwan, and Spain. Rather than accepting the notion that inclusion requires an uncomplicated set of appearances, the works explored in this volume spotlight a staunch resistance to formulating racial identity as an instantly accessible consumer product.
Contributors. Joseph P. Balaz, Chris Bongie, William A. Callahan, Thomas Carmichael, Leo Ching, Chiu Yen Liang (Fred), Chungmoo Choi, Christopher L. Connery, Arif Dirlik, John Fielder, Miriam Fuchs, Epeli Hau`ofa, Lawson Fusao Inada, M. Consuelo León W., Katharyne Mitchell, Masao Miyoshi, Steve Olive, Theophil Saret Reuney, Peter Schwenger, Subramani, Terese Svoboda, Jeffrey Tobin, Haunani-Kay Trask, John Whittier Treat, Tsushima Yuko, Albert Wendt, Rob Wilson
Contributors. Jonathan Beller, Joan Kee, Kyung Hyun Kim, Helen Hok-sze Leung, Bliss Cau Lim, Gina Marchetti, Susan Napier, Esther C. M. Yau
This new textbook gathers an international roster of top security studies scholars to provide an overview of Asia-Pacific’s international relations and pressing contemporary security issues. It is a suitable introduction for undergraduate and masters students' use in international relations and security studies courses. Merging a strong theoretical component with rich contemporary and historical empirical examples, Asia-Pacific Security examines the region's key players and challenges as well as a spectrum of proposed solutions for improving regional stability. Major topics include in-depth looks at the United States' relationship with China; Security concerns presented by small and microstates, the region's largest group of nations; threats posed by terrorism and insurgency; the region's accelerating arms race and the potential for an Asian war; the possible roles of multilateralism, security communities, and human security as part of solutions to regional problems.
This interdisciplinary collection examines the shaping of local sexual cultures in the Asian Pacific region in order to move beyond definitions and understandings of sexuality that rely on Western assumptions. The diverse studies in AsiaPacifiQueer demonstrate convincingly that in the realm of sexualities, globalization results in creative and cultural admixture rather than a unilateral imposition of the western values and forms of sexual culture. These essays range across the Pacific Rim and encompass a variety of forms of social, cultural, and personal expression, examining sexuality through music, cinema, the media, shifts in popular rhetoric, comics and magazines, and historical studies. By investigating complex processes of localization, interregional borrowing, and hybridization, the contributors underscore the mutual transformation of gender and sexuality in both Asian Pacific and Western cultures.
Contributors are Ronald Baytan, J. Neil C. Garcia, Kam Yip Lo Lucetta, Song Hwee Lim, J. Darren Mackintosh, Claire Maree, Jin-Hyung Park, Teri Silvio, Megan Sinnott, Yik Koon Teh, Carmen Ka Man Tong, James Welker, Heather Worth, and Audrey Yue.
Foreword by Tracie D. Hall
Community engagement isn’t simply an important component of a successful library—it’s the foundation upon which every service, offering, and initiative rests. Working collaboratively with community members—be they library customers, residents, faculty, students or partner organizations— ensures that the library works, period. This important resource from ALA’s Public Programs Office (PPO) provides targeted guidance on how libraries can effectively engage with the public to address a range of issues for the betterment of their community, whether it is a city, neighborhood, campus, or something else. Featuring contributions by leaders active in library-led community engagement, it’s designed to be equally useful as a teaching text for LIS students and a go-to handbook for current programming, adult services, and outreach library staff. Balancing practical tools with case studies and stories from field, this collection explores such key topics as
The great Arab singer Asmahan was the toast of Cairo song and cinema in the late 1930s and early 1940s, as World War II approached. She remained a figure of glamour and intrigue throughout her life and lives on today in legend as one of the shaping forces in the development of Egyptian popular culture. In this biography, author Sherifa Zuhur does a thorough study of the music and film of Asmahan and her historical setting.
A Druze princess actually named Amal al-Atrash, Asmahan came from an important clan in the mountains of Syria but broke free from her traditional family background, left her husband, and became a public performer, a role frowned upon for women of the time.
This unique biography of the controversial Asmahan focuses on her public as well as her private life. She was a much sought-after guest in the homes of Egypt's rich and famous, but she was also rumored to be an agent for the Allied forces during World War II.
Through the story of Asmahan, the reader glimpses not only aspects of the cultural and political history of Egypt and Syria between the two world wars, but also the change in attitude in the Arab world toward women as public performers on stage. Life in wartime Cairo comes alive in this illustrated account of one of the great singers of the Arab world, a woman who played an important role in history.
The Nigerian and West African practice of aso ebi fashion invokes notions of wealth and group dynamics in social gatherings. Okechukwu Nwafor’s volume Aso ebi investigates the practice in the cosmopolitan urban setting of Lagos, and argues that the visual and consumerist hype typical of the late capitalist system feeds this unique fashion practice. The book suggests that dress, fashion, aso ebi, and photography engender a new visual culture that largely reflects the economics of mundane living. Nwafor examines the practice’s societal dilemma, whereby the solidarity of aso ebi is dismissed by many as an ephemeral transaction. A circuitous transaction among photographers, fashion magazine producers, textile merchants, tailors, and individual fashionistas reinvents aso ebi as a product of cosmopolitan urban modernity. The results are a fetishization of various forms of commodity culture, personality cults through mass followership, the negotiation of symbolic power through mass-produced images, exchange value in human relationships through gifts, and a form of exclusion achieved through digital photo editing. Aso ebi has become an essential part of Lagos cosmopolitanism: as a rising form of a unique visual culture it is central to the unprecedented spread of a unique West African fashion style that revels in excessive textile overflow. This extreme dress style is what an individual requires to transcend the lack imposed by the chaos of the postcolonial city.
Aspects of Article Introductions has bee reissued to make it more easily available than it has ever been, particularly for the use of university libraries and for younger and newer practitioners and researchers in the rapidly expanding and increasingly global field of EAP.
The original Aspects of Article Introductions appeared in fall 1981 as a ring-bound 90-page monograph. The “publisher” was the Language Studies Unit at the University of Aston in Birmingham. Although essentially an “underground” work, it has remained a relevant part of the short intellectual history of English for Academic Purposes, particularly as genre-based or genre-driven approaches to EAP research and pedagogical practice have become more popular. Its longevity is also a testament to the genre analysis work of John Swales, but in addition, the research article has become the most influential genre in most areas of scholarship, and introductions are at least supposed to be read first and to be designed in such a way as to attract as large readership as possible.
“If I were asked to list the most influential texts in applied linguistics over the last 30 years, John Swales' Aspects of Article Introductions would be in the top three or four. This was a seminal work which not only presented a novel way of analysing texts and a commentary on academic discourse, but one which helped to establish a foundation for the massive interest we see today in describing the structure and features of academic articles. This is not just a text which offers us a glimpse of an intellectual history, but it remains full of fascinating insights and observations about texts and the workings of academic discourse. While the ideas may have evolved and the genre it describes moved on, both the style of writing and the methodology it describes are as fresh and as revealing as anything written on the topic since.” ---Ken Hyland, Hong Kong University
Aspects of English Sentence Stress is written within the conceptual framework of generative-transformational grammar. However, it is atheoretical in the sense that the proposals made cannot be formulated in this theory and are a challenge to many other theories. The author's concern is not with the phonetic nature of stress; rather, using a working definition of stress as subjective impression of prominence, she attempts to formulate general principles that will predict the relative prominence of different words in particular utterances—what might be called the syntax of stress. She supports her arguments with a large amount of original data and provides the basis for new ways of thinking about this area of linguistic research.
Schmerling begins with a detailed review and critique of Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle's approach to sentence stress; she shows that their cyclic analysis cannot be considered valid, even for quite simple phrases and sentences. Next, she reviews discussions of sentence stress by Joan Bresnan, George Lakoff, and Dwight Bolinger, agreeing with Bolinger's contention that there is no intimate connection between sentence stress and syntactic structure but showing that his counterproposal to the standard approach is inadequate as well. She also examines the concept of "normal stress" and demonstrates that no linguistically significant distinction can be drawn between "normal" and "special" stress contours.
In generating her own proposals concerning sentence stress, Schmerling takes the view that certain items which are stressable are taken for granted by the speaker and are eliminated from consideration by the principles governing relative prominence of words in a sentence. Then she examines the pragmatic and phonological principles pertaining to items that are not eliminated from consideration. Finally, the author contends that the standard views, which she shows to be untenable, are a result of the assumption that linguistic entities should be studied apart from questions concerning their use, in that it was adoption of this methodological assumption that forced linguists to deny the essentially pragmatic nature of sentence stress.
Accessible to anyone who is familiar with the basic concepts of generative-transformational grammar, Aspects of English Sentence Stress presents provocative ideas in the field.
Aspects of History and Epic in Ancient Iran focuses on the content of one of the most important inscriptions of the Ancient Near East: the Bisotun inscription of the Achaemenid king Darius I (6th century BCE), which in essence reports on a suspicious fratricide and subsequent coup d’état. Moreover, the study shows how the inscription’s narrative would decisively influence the Iranian epic, epigraphic, and historiographical traditions well into the Sasanian and early Islamic periods.
Intriguingly, our assessment of the impact of the Bisotun narrative on later literary traditions—in particular, the inscription of the Sasanian king Narseh at Paikuli (3rd–4th centuries CE)—necessarily relies on the reception of the oral rendition of the Bisotun story captured by Greek historians. As Rahim Shayegan argues, this oral tradition had an immeasurable impact upon the historiographical writings and epic compositions of later Iranian empires. It would have otherwise remained unknown to modern scholars, had it not been partially preserved and recorded by Hellanicus of Lesbos, Herodotus, Ctesias, and other Greek authors. The elucidation of Bisotun’s thematic composition therefore not only allows us to solve an ancient murder but also to reevaluate pre-Thucydidean Greek historiography as one of the most important repositories of Iranian epic themes.
On a Monday in August 2004, three Muslim girls sat with each other on the floor of a mosque surrounded by boxes of books. Two wore traditional Muslim dress, their companion was dressed Western style, but their intention was the same. They were involved in a project to distribute almost 2 million dollars worth of books, DVDs, and videos to over 300 British public libraries. Their aim was not to convert or proselytize but to educate the public about their faith and try to offset the negative image of Islam that has developed since 9/11. Perhaps of more significance was the fact that the books used for the project were not the 'insider' literature produced by the mosques, but works of Western academics that approached their subject in a neutral and informative manner.
Ron Geaves offers a thematic and experiential exploration of the Muslim religion and world that shows it is not some homogenous entity but the dynamic faith you would expect to find in a religion over fourteen centuries old, consisting of over a billion people stretching from the USA to China.
Readers of the book require no previous knowledge of the subject. Chapters are dedicated to individual topics and range from a look at Western media representation of Islam, through controversial issues such as martyrdom, shari'a law, jihad, and the place of women. It examines the ideas of community, Sufism, fundamentalism and other sects within the faith, and also explains the source of many of the interpretations of the Prophet Mohammed, and the importance of the Muslim concept of unity.
By examining the divisions that exist within contemporary Islam, Geaves makes a special contribution to the ongoing examination of today's Muslim communities. By offering a way to better understand this tradition, Geaves helps to counteract the oversimplifications that seem to dominate popular discourse about Muslims and instead shows them as participants in a religious tradition that is still unfolding, struggling to recognize and respect its diversities while seeking to maintain a unity that all parts of it acknowledge as central.
Islamic literature is rich, varied, and abundant, as befits the literature of a civilization which once controlled an empire as great as that of the Romans. In Aspects of Islamic Civilization, A. J. Arberry has chosen and translated passages from the most highly regarded works of Islamic literature in order to illustrate the development of Islamic civilization from its origins in the sixth century to the present.
This anthology is made up of selections from Arabic and Persian writers who have given world renown to Islamic literature—such as Hafiz, Sa'di, Jalal al-Din Rumi, Omar Khayyam, Ibn al-Farid, Avicenna, Ibn Hazm—and from such works as the Koran, the Masnavi, and the Moorish Anthology. It is an invaluable collection of sources for anyone interested in the Moslem world and a fascinating volume to browse in.
The essays are loosely connected through their bearing on one or more of three themes: the role of orality in the transmission of chant circa 700-1400; varying degrees of stability or instability in the transmission of chant; and the role of the formula in the construction of chant. Throughout, Karp uses 202 musical examples.
The first essay evaluates forms of evidence that may shed light on the nature of orality that led to the surviving notational records of Gregorian chant and assembles evidence that supports the conclusion that fidelity of transmission represented an important goal of the Franks. The second essay treats formulas that cross the boundaries of individual liturgical genres and modes. The third essay defines the varying kinds of musical formulas in chant and proposes a chronological ordering of the genre of second-mode tracts.
The fourth essay treats the transmission of a stable melody and explores the ways in which one basic melody may be adapted to texts of widely differing structures and lengths. The fifth essay deals with a group of unstable melodies that furnished difficulties in modal classification. The sixth essay explores the problems faced by scribes seeking to represent in diastematic notation melodies employing tones not normally admitted into the medieval gamut. The seventh essay takes up the role of the formula in introits, a neumatic genre intended forchoral performance.
The two final essays look at second-mode tracts and at the interrelationship between Roman and Gregorian chant.
Aspects of Psychologism is a penetrating look into fundamental philosophical questions of consciousness, perception, and the experience we have of our mental lives. Psychologism, in Tim Crane's formulation, presents the mind as a single subject-matter to be investigated not only empirically and conceptually but also phenomenologically: through the systematic examination of consciousness and thought from the subject's point of view.
How should we think about the mind? Analytical philosophy tends to address this question by examining the language we use to talk about our minds, and thus translates our knowledge of mind and consciousness into knowledge of the concepts which this language embodies. Psychologism rejects this approach. The philosophy of mind, Crane believes, has become too narrow in its purely conceptual focus on the logical and linguistic formulas that structure thought. We cannot assume that the categories needed to understand the mind correspond absolutely with such semantic categories. A central claim of Crane's psychologism is that intentionality--the "aboutness" or "directedness" of the mind--is essential to all mental phenomena. In addition, Crane responds to proponents of materialist doctrines about consciousness and defends the claim that perception can represent the world in a non-conceptual, non-propositional way.
Philosophers must take more seriously the findings of psychology and phenomenology, Crane contends. An investigation of mental phenomena from this broader viewpoint opens up philosophy to a more realistic and plausible account of the mind's nature.
The Renaissance has long posed a problem to scholars. It has been generalized as an emergence of intellect and will in all fields of human endeavor, but because it is diversely manifested in varying attitudes and forms at various times in the Western world, this vast era of Western European history has resisted definitive boundaries.
To help clarify the problems inherent in the study of the Renaissance and its relationship to the preceding and subsequent historical periods, an international conference was held in Austin, Texas, in April, 1964, jointly sponsored by the South Central Renaissance Conference and The University of Texas. The ten papers here presented reveal how during the symposium leading scholars representing several academic disciplines shared their approaches and insights into the politics, economics, science, literature, art, music, philosophy, and religion of this complex era.
Coming to terms with a new period of uncertainty when it is still replete with possibilities
This quick and engaging study clearly lays out the United States’ current democratic crisis. Examining the early stages of the Nazi movement in Germany, William E. Connolly detects synergies with Donald Trump’s rhetorical style. Tapping into a sense of contemporary fragility, Aspirational Fascism pays particular attention to how conflicts between neoliberalism and the pluralizing left have placed the white working class in a bind. Ultimately, Connolly believes a multifaceted democracy constitutes the best antidote to aspirational fascism and rethinks what a politics of the left might look like today.
Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press