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490 books match the query 'Asian' and 9 start with h

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Habib Tanvir and His Legacy in Theatre

Edited by Anjum Katyal and Javed Malick

Seagull Books, 2024

Essays exploring the lasting impact of Habib Tanvir's pioneering theatre which blended tradition with modernity in the post-Independence Indian theatre scene.

This collection of essays delves into the profound legacy of Habib Tanvir (1923–2009), a luminary in the post-Independence Indian theater scene. Tanvir's decades-long contributions as a director, poet, playwright, and actor are explored by a diverse group of scholars, practitioners, and peers. The book examines his pivotal role in founding the Naya Theatre in 1959, a pioneering group blending rural traditions with contemporary theatre, challenging conventional norms.

Against the backdrop of contemporary societal and political shifts, the essays reflect on Tanvir's fearless resistance against the right wing in his later years, particularly his challenges to religious dogma and caste discrimination in works like Ponga Pandit. The collection also emphasizes the enduring impact of Tanvir's seminal work, Charandas Chor, highlighting its adaptability across varied cultural landscapes.

With international contributors, the book expands beyond national borders, showcasing Tanvir's impact on global theatre and cross-cultural collaborations. The essays in this volume assert Tanvir's continued relevance, positioning his ideals as a guiding force for India amid evolving cultural and political landscapes.

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Hailing the State

Indian Democracy between Elections

Lisa Mitchell

Duke University Press, 2023

In Hailing the State, Lisa Mitchell explores the methods of collective assembly that people in India use to hold elected officials and government administrators accountable, demand inclusion in decision making, and stage informal referendums. Mitchell traces the colonial and postcolonial lineages of collective forms of assembly, in which—rather than rejecting state authority—participants mobilize with expectations that officials will uphold the law and fulfill electoral promises. She shows how assembly, which ranges from sit-ins, hunger strikes, and demands for meetings with officials to massive general strikes and road and rail blockades, is fundamental to the functioning of democracy in India. These techniques are particularly useful for historically marginalized groups and others whose voices may not be easily heard. Moving beyond an exclusive focus on electoral processes, Mitchell argues that to understand democracy—both in India and beyond—we must also pay attention to what occurs between elections, thereby revising understanding of what is possible for democratic action around the world.

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Having Once Paused

Poems of Zen Master Ikkyu (1394-1481)

Ikkyu Sojun

University of Michigan Press, 2015

The influence of Zen Master Ikkyū (1394-1481) permeates the full field of medieval Japanese aesthetics. Though best known as a poet, he was central to the shaping and reshaping of practices in calligraphy, Noh theater, tea ceremony, and rock gardening, all of which now define Japan’s sense of its cultural tradition. Ikkyū is unique in Zen for letting his love of all appearance occupy him until it destroys any possibility for safety or seclusion. In his poetry, he turns the eye of enlightenment to all phenomena: politics, pine trees, hard meditation practice, sex, wine. A lifelong outsider to religious establishments, Ikkyū nonetheless accepted Imperial command to rebuild his home temple, Daitoku-ji, destroyed in the civil wars. He died before that project was complete.

The poems in this collection express the unborn bliss of Ikkyū’s realization and equally his devastation at the horrors of this world. They are peopled with ancient Chinese poets, cantankerous Japanese Zen Masters, contemporary warlords, and his lover Mori, a blind musician who lived with Ikkyū the last eleven years of his life. All of this is his Buddhism. His awakening outshines the small idols of reason, emotion, self, desire, doctrine, even of Buddhism itself.

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Hollywood Diplomacy

Film Regulation, Foreign Relations, and East Asian Representations

Hye Seung Chung

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Hollywood Diplomacy contends that, rather than simply reflect the West’s cultural fantasies of an imagined “Orient,” images of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean ethnicities have long been contested sites where the commercial interests of Hollywood studios and the political mandates of U.S. foreign policy collide, compete against one another, and often become compromised in the process. While tracing both Hollywood’s internal foreign relations protocols—from the “Open Door” policy of the silent era to the “National Feelings” provision of the Production Code—and external regulatory interventions by the Chinese government, the U.S. State Department, the Office of War Information, and the Department of Defense, Hye Seung Chung reevaluates such American classics as Shanghai Express and The Great Dictator and applies historical insights to the controversies surrounding contemporary productions including Die Another Day and The Interview. This richly detailed book redefines the concept of “creative freedom” in the context of commerce: shifting focus away from the artistic entitlement to offend foreign audiences toward the opportunity to build new, better relationships with partners around the world through diplomatic representations of race, ethnicity, and nationality.

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Holy Prayers in a Horse's Ear

A Japanese American Memoir

Kathleen Tamagawa, Edited by Greg Robinson and Elena Tajima Creef

Rutgers University Press, 2008

Originally published in 1932, Kathleen Tamagawa’s pioneering Asian American memoir is a sensitive and thoughtful look at the personal and social complexities of growing up racially mixed during the early twentieth century. Born in 1893 to an Irish American mother and a Japanese father and raised in Chicago and Japan, Tamagawa reflects on the difficulty she experienced fitting into either parent’s native culture.

She describes how, in America, her every personal quirk and quality was seen as quintessentially Japanese and how she was met unpredictably with admiration or fear—perceived as a “Japanese doll” or “the yellow menace.” When her family later moved to Japan, she was viewed there as a “Yankee,” and remained an outsider in that country as well. As an adult she came back to the United States as an American diplomat’s wife, but had trouble feeling at home in any place.

This edition, which also includes Tamagawa’s recently rediscovered short story, “A Fit in Japan,” and a critical introduction, will challenge readers to reconsider how complex ethnic identities are negotiated and how feelings of alienation limit human identification in any society.

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