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264 books match the query 'Asian Studies' and 12 start with d

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Dancing for Their Lives

The Pursuit of Meaningful Aging in Urban China

Claudia Huang

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Dancing for Their Lives explores the vibrant world of retired Chinese women known as "dancing grannies” who seek fulfillment and companionship amidst societal upheaval. These women, part of China’s “lost generation,” gather in parks and public squares to reclaim their lives through dance in the wake of Chinese economic and cultural transformations. The book challenges prevailing narratives of aging societies, portraying old age as a site of social innovation rather than decline. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Chengdu, China, Dancing for Their Lives reveals how retirees learn to navigate shifting social norms and values while actively creating new models for growing older. The book’s insights resonate beyond Chinese society, offering lessons on resilience and the pursuit of meaning in any aging population. Dancing for Their Lives underscores the human capacity to craft purposeful lives amid uncertainty, transcending geographical boundaries to illuminate the universal quest for fulfillment in later years.

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Decolonial Becoming

Immobility, Indigeneity, and Disability in Transpacific Korea

Jeong Eun Annabel We

Duke University Press, 2027

Decolonial Becoming reimagines decolonization by centering questions of Indigeneity, disability, and the settler diaspora in modern Korea from the 1930s to the present. Jeong Eun Annabel We traces the ways that South Korean military and economic practices in the Pacific have functioned as a subempire of US settler colonialism and how South Korea’s nationalist ideology of monoethnicity as Indigeneity under US and Japanese occupations has come at the expense of myriad Indigenous and disabled peoples. Arguing that Korea must grapple with its place in this transpacific colonial order, We challenges the binary of mobility as freedom and immobility as unfreedom through what she calls “decolonial becoming,” a polyrhythmic theory of dialectics in which immobility is a condition of occupation as well as a critical site of relationality. She places Asian, diasporic, and transpacific theories and literatures of decolonization in conversation with Caribbean and Latin American decolonial thought and Native and Indigenous studies to show how immobility can offer a means of unlearning settler colonial logics.

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Dhol

Drummers, Identities, and Modern Punjab

Gibb Schreffler

University of Illinois Press, 2021

An icon of global Punjabi culture, the dhol drum inspires an unbridled love for the instrument far beyond its application to regional vernacular music. Yet the identities of dhol players within their local communities and the broadly conceived Punjabi nation remain obscure.

Gibb Schreffler draws on two decades of research to investigate dhol's place among the cultural formations within Punjabi communities. Analyzing the identities of musicians, Schreffler illuminates concepts of musical performance, looks at how these concepts help create or articulate Punjabi social structure, and explores identity construction at the intersections of ethnicity, class, and nationality in Punjab and the diaspora. As he shows, understanding the identities of dhol players is an ethical necessity that acknowledges their place in Punjabi cultural history and helps to repair their representation.

An engaging and rich ethnography, Dhol reveals a beloved instrumental form and the musical and social practices of its overlooked performers.

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Diasporic Intimacies

Queer Filipinos and Canadian Imaginaries

Edited by Robert Diaz, Marissa Largo, and Fritz Pino

Northwestern University Press, 2018

Diasporic Intimacies: Queer Filipinos and Canadian Imaginaries is the first edited volume of its kind, featuring the works of leading scholars, artists, and activists who reflect on the contributions of queer Filipinos to Canadian culture and society.

Addressing a wide range of issues beyond the academy, the authors present a rich and under-studied archive of personal reflections, in-depth interviews, creative works, and scholarly essays. Their trandsdisciplinary approach highlights the need for queer, transgressive, and utopian practices that render visible histories of migration, empire building, settler colonialism, and globalization.

Timely, urgent, and fascinating, Diasporic Intimacies offers an accessible entry point for readers who seek to pursue critically engaged community work, arts education, curatorial practice, and socially inflected research on sexuality, gender, and race in this ever-changing world.

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Disaster Nationalism

Tsunami and Civil War in Sri Lanka

Vivian Y. Choi

Duke University Press, 2025

In Disaster Nationalism, Vivian Y. Choi examines how the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami fostered new forms of governance and militarization during Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war that led to enduring forms of precarity and insecurity. Tracing the development of disaster management projects following the tsunami, Choi demonstrates how these projects rest on a logic that treats natural disasters and terrorism as inevitable risks in need of management. The tsunami’s destruction foreclosed the possibility of political resolution to the war, as the state leveraged these projects to justify its militarized aggression in the war against the Tamil Tigers and a new construction of the Sri Lankan nation. Choi reveals how, paradoxically, state-sponsored disaster management projects—from new buffer and border zones to early warning systems—created more insecurity. Choi amplifies the experiences of those affected by the tsunami, particularly Tamil and Muslim communities. In so doing, Choi shows how life perseveres against perpetual uncertainty and danger—caused by natural disasters and state-sanctioned violence alike.

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Disorienting Politics

Chimerican Media and Transpacific Entanglements

Fan Yang

University of Michigan Press, 2024

Disorienting Politics mines 21st-century media artifacts—including films like The Martian and TV/streaming media shows such as Firefly and House of Cards—to make visible the economic, cultural, political, and ecological entanglements of China and the United States. Describing these transpacific entanglements as “Chimerica”—coined by economic historians to reference the symbiosis of China and America—Yang examines how Chimerican media, originating in the US but traversing national boundaries in their production, circulation, and consumption, co-create the figure of rising China and extend a political imagination beyond the conventional ground of the nation.

Examining how Chimerican media are shaped by and perpetuate uneven power relations, Disorienting Politics argues that the pervasive tendency among wide-ranging cultural producers to depict the Chinese state as a racialized Other in American media life diminishes the possibility of engaging transpacific entanglements as a basis for envisioning new political horizons. Such othering of China not only results in overt racism against people of Asian descent, Yang argues, but also impacts the wellbeing of people of color more generally. This interdisciplinary book demonstrates the ways in which race is embedded in geopolitics even when the subject of discussion is not the people, but the (Chinese) state. Bridging media and cultural studies, Asian and Asian American studies, geography, and globalization studies, Disorienting Politics calls for a relational politics that acknowledges the multifarious interconnectivity between people, places, media, and environment.

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Divine Meets Digital

Tech Workers and Religion in the U.S. and China

Di Di

Rutgers University Press, 2026

What role does religion play in the tech industry? Based on nearly one hundred interviews, Divine Meets Digital uncovers the ways tech workers engage with religion and make sense of their work through religious and spiritual worldviews. While most identify as nonreligious, they are far from antireligious. Instead, they navigate competing religious and nonreligious views, often distinguishing between what they see as the controversial elements of religion—such as belief in the supernatural in China and its politicized and dogmatic aspects in the United States—and its more noncontroversial aspects. In doing so, they justify their religious engagement by embracing religion's noncontroversial elements while distancing themselves from its controversial features. This book offers a powerful new lens for understanding one of the most influential industries of our time, inviting readers to better understand the people who live and work at the intersection between science, religion, and technology.

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Divorce Portals

The Postdivorce in Asian Contexts

Shalini Grover

Rutgers University Press, 2027

Across Asia and its global diasporas, marriage remains a dominant and public institution, and divorce generates widespread comment and concern. Breaking new ground, Divorce Portals reveals divorce to be generative of transformations in individual intimate lives and wider societies. Through compelling, sensitive ethnographic accounts inviting readers into the lives of people undergoing separation and divorce, chapters capture the antecedent-lives of uncoupling – the imaginary, anticipatory, and cautionary – and the afterlives of divorce, in the immediate aftermath and across life courses and generations. Chapters explore the vivid and bold new selves that divorcees are fashioning for themselves and highlight the intersecting inequalities that shape postdivorce predicaments, sometimes belying the hoped-for freedoms of divorce and remarriage. Together, chapters chart nascent and haltering accommodations of the single, repartnered, and queer. Across cases drawn from diverse geographic contexts, this book unlocks new, expansive, and accessible ways to think about divorce and its aftermath.

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Domesticating Brown

Movements of Racial Imagination

Christopher B. Patterson

Duke University Press, 2026

Domesticating Brown interrogates the slippery senses that brownness as a racial form has manifested over time, charting its transitions across historical colonial contexts and into the transpacific dynamics of contemporary empire. Christopher B. Patterson rethinks universalist definitions of race to consider the constant movements in racial contexts, meanings, and practices that “brownness” reveals: as a site for the ungovernable brown mass, as peoples marked for domestication through strategies of colonial containment, and as the complex shades that reveal troubling genealogies and shameful intimacies. Tracing the emergences and transformations of brownness in various contexts of transpacific encounter—from the Mongol Empire to Filipino plantation migration in Hawaiʻi, from the imperial management of Hong Kong to contemporary brown authorship—Domesticating Brown explores how colonial subjects and other marginalized peoples have strategized ways of resisting and reversing dominating notions of brownness through art, story, and embodied difference.

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Drawing the Sea Near

Satoumi and Coral Reef Conservation in Okinawa

C. Anne Claus

University of Minnesota Press, 2020

How Japanese coastal residents and transnational conservationists collaborated to foster relationships between humans and sea life

Drawing the Sea Near opens a new window to our understanding of transnational conservation by investigating projects in Okinawa shaped by a “conservation-near” approach—which draws on the senses, the body, and memory to collapse the distance between people and their surroundings and to foster collaboration and equity between coastal residents and transnational conservation organizations. This approach contrasts with the traditional Western “conservation-far” model premised on the separation of humans from the environment.

Based on twenty months of participant observation and interviews, this richly detailed, engagingly written ethnography focuses on Okinawa’s coral reefs to explore an unusually inclusive, experiential, and socially just approach to conservation. In doing so, C. Anne Claus challenges orthodox assumptions about nature, wilderness, and the future of environmentalism within transnational organizations. She provides a compelling look at how transnational conservation organizations—in this case a field office of the World Wide Fund for Nature in Okinawa—negotiate institutional expectations for conservation with localized approaches to caring for ocean life.

In pursuing how particular projects off the coast of Japan unfolded, Drawing the Sea Near illuminates the real challenges and possibilities of work within the multifaceted transnational structures of global conservation organizations. Uniquely, it focuses on the conservationists themselves: why and how has their approach to project work changed, and how have they themselves been transformed in the process?

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