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490 books match the query 'Asian' and 15 start with w

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Watsuji on Nature

Japanese Philosophy in the Wake of Heidegger

David W. Johnson

Northwestern University Press, 2019

In the first study of its kind, David W. Johnson’s Watsuji on Nature reconstructs the astonishing philosophy of nature of Watsuji Tetsuro (1889–1960). Johnson situates Watsuji’s philosophy in relation to his reception of the thought of Heidegger and to his renewal of core ontological positions in classical Confucian and Buddhist philosophy. He shows that for Watsuji we have our being in the lived experience of nature, one in which nature and culture compose a tightly interwoven texture called fūdo(<風土). By fully unfolding Watsuji’s novel and radical claim that this is a setting that is neither fully external to human subjectivity nor merely a product of it, this book also sets out what still remains unthought in this concept, as well as in the relational structure that underwrites it. Johnson argues that what remains unarticulated is nothing less than the recovery of a reenchanted conception of nature and an elucidation of the wide-ranging implications of a relational conception of the self for questions about the disclosive character of experience, the distinction between fact and value, and the possibility of a place-based ecological ethics.

In an engagingly lucid and deft analysis, Watsuji on Nature radically expands our appreciation of twentieth-century Japanese philosophy and shows what it has to offer to a global philosophical conversation.

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We Mark Your Memory

writings from the descendants of indenture

Edited by David Dabydeen, Maria del Pilar Kaladeen, and Tina K. Ramnarine

University of London Press, 2018

Customers based in the United States and Canada, please order from here: https://bit.ly/2GAV2YR The abolition of slavery was the catalyst for the arrival of the first Indian indentured labourers into the sugar colonies of Mauritius (1834), Guyana (1838) and Trinidad (1845), followed some years later by the inception of the system in South Africa (1860) and Fiji (1879). By the time indenture was abolished in the British Empire (1917–20), over one million Indians had been contracted, the overwhelming majority of whom never returned to India. Today, an Indian indentured labour diaspora is to be found in Commonwealth countries including Belize, Kenya, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and the Seychelles. Indenture, whereby individuals entered, or were coerced, into an agreement to work in a colony in return for a fixed period of labour, was open to abuse from recruitment to plantation. Hidden within this little-known system of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Indian migration under the British Empire are hitherto neglected stories of workers who were both exploited and unfree. These include indentured histories from Madeira to the Caribbean, from West Africa to the Caribbean, and from China to the Caribbean, Mauritius and South Africa. To mark the centenary of the abolition of the system in the British Empire (2017–20) this volume brings together, for the first time, new writing from across the Commonwealth. It is a unique attempt to explore, through the medium of poetry and prose, the indentured heritage of the twenty-first century.

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Westminster West

Chard deNiord

Tupelo Press, 2025

This collection bears witness to ecstasy and grief through persona. By inhabiting the voices of Adam and Eve, Abelard and Heloise, etc., deNiord reveals the enduring alterity contained within the self.

Westminster West traverses the worlds of here and beyond. Chard deNiord divines “the everydayness of the mystery . . . in which being and making poetry are the same.” From posthumous correspondence between Abelard and Heloise to such poems as “Skywriting Over The Rockies,” “With A Bone In My Heart,” and “I Call Out To You,” this collection betrays a mortal charge, bearing witness to what Emily Dickinson called “each ecstatic moment/ to which we must an anguish pay” and which Aridjis in his defiance of death calls “dust in love.”

Ambitious and masterful, deNiord renders such ancient subject matter as love, betrayal, landscape, loss, grief, aging, and ecstasy new throughout Westminster West. He transforms the echo chamber of futility, silence, and failure by aspiring to cross over to “the other,” whatever it may be, a stone or cloud or lover or garment, or cancerous lung, with a “negative capability” that allows it, no matter its identity, to speak memorably in a way that transcends simple definition and ultimately any personal connection to it.

Westminster West is divided into three sections that complement each other in their archetypal themes which range historically, mythologically, and cathectically. The poems in the first section imagine correspondences and dialogues between couples, including Heloise and Abelard, Adam and Eve, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Odysseus and Calypso, a widower and his deceased wife in the time of Covid, and a lovesick husband in the air above the Rocky Mountains and his beloved on the ground. The second section also features love poems but focuses on more instructional and metaphysical themes that vary from metaphorical pedagogy on the topic of sex to “the harsh advice of loss” to the memory of a young couple’s transcendent, romantic walk by a river. Section three moves away from love poems to mortal and environmental themes, including elegies, pastorals, and a concluding confessional credo on the bittersweet reality of poetry’s irony and blessing.

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When the Yellow River Floods

Water, Technology, and Nation-Building in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature

Hui-Lin Hsu

Hong Kong University Press, 2024

A study of The Travels of Lao Can through an environmental lens.

When the Yellow River Floods explores the relationship between environmental degradation, hydraulic engineering, and nation-building in the context of Liu E’s The Travels of Lao Can. This book provides a unique perspective on modern Chinese literary history that goes beyond conventional narratives that focus solely on political and cultural factors. The main areas covered include the role of water management in literary nation-building and the connections between the novel’s various themes, such as river engineering, medical and political discourses, national sentiment, and landscape description.

By offering a comprehensive analysis of The Travels of Lao Can, this book broadens the understanding of nation-building in early twentieth-century China, highlighting the impact of environmental crises and hydraulics on the formation of national literature and consciousness. When the Yellow River Floods provides a new perspective on the environmental roots of modern Chinese literature, making it an essential read for those seeking to understand the complex interplay between literature, the environment, and national identity in China. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Chinese literature, history, and environmental studies.

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When “I” Was Born

Women’s Autobiography in Modern China

Jing M. Wang

University of Wisconsin Press, 2008

In the period between the 1920s and 1940s, a genre emerged in Chinese literature that would reveal crucial contradictions in Chinese culture that still exist today. At a time of intense political conflict, Chinese women began to write autobiography, a genre that focused on personal identity and self-exploration rather than the national, collective identity that the country was championing.

When “I” Was Born: Women’s Autobiography in Modern China reclaims the voices of these particular writers, voices that have been misinterpreted and overlooked for decades. Tracing women writers as they move from autobiographical fiction, often self-revelatory and personal, to explicit autobiographies that focused on women’s roles in public life, Jing M. Wang reveals the factors that propelled this literary movement, the roles that liberal translators and their renditions of Western life stories played, and the way in which these women writers redefined writing and gender in the stories they told. But Wang reveals another story as well: the evolving history and identity of women in modern Chinese society. When “I” Was Born adds to a growing body of important work in Chinese history and culture, women’s studies, and autobiography in a global context.

Writers discussed include Xie Bingying, Zhang Ailing, Yu Yinzi, Fei Pu, Lu Meiyen, Feng Heyi, Ye Qian, Bai Wei, Shi Wen, Fan Xiulin, Su Xuelin, and Lu Yin.

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Where FDI Goes in Decentralized Authoritarian Countries

The Politics of Taiwanese Site Selection for Investment in Mainland China

Kelan Lu

University of Michigan Press, 2023

Among all the decentralized authoritarian countries, China is distinctive not only because of its emergence as one of the largest foreign direct investment (FDI) recipient countries with one of the highest levels of fiscal decentralization, but also because of the combination of its fiscal decentralization and the cadre promotion system as incentive institutions for attracting FDI inflows. China is an important case to empirically investigate the impact of fiscal autonomy on adversarial investment because it has become the largest investment destination of its long-term adversary, Taiwan, with Taiwanese FDI being among the largest FDI in mainland China. Given the special role played by local Chinese governments in attracting and hosting Taiwanese FDI, it is important to study the differences between where Taiwanese FDI and other FDI goes.

Given the uniqueness of the China case and that of Taiwanese investment in mainland China, this book explores the following questions. What determines where FDI goes in authoritarian countries like China? Fiscal decentralization has been argued to be a driving force of skyrocketing FDI inflows in China due to its impact on local governments’ incentives. However, is the impact of fiscal autonomy on FDI monolithic with the dynamically changing levels of FDI inflows at the lower administrative levels in China, especially with its special cadre management system? Does the impact of fiscal decentralization on FDI strengthen or weaken or stay the same when attracting FDI inflows from adversarial states? And what are the implications of such adversarial investment—especially as it diffuses from coastal cities to the interior regions, or from key cities to peripheral regions—of decentralized authoritarian countries targeted by this investment?

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Whose India?

The Independence Struggle in British and Indian Fiction and History

Teresa Hubel

Duke University Press, 1996

For centuries, India has captured our imagination. Far more than a mere geographical presence, India is also an imaginative construct shaped by competing cultures, emotions, and ideologies. In Whose India? Teresa Hubel examines literary and historical texts by the British and Indian writers who gave meaning to the construct “India” during the final decades of the Empire. Feminist and postcolonial in its approach, this work describes the contest between British imperialists and Indian nationalists at that historical moment when India sought to achieve its independence; that is, when the definition, acquisition, and ownership of India was most vehemently at stake.
Hubel collapses the boundary between literature and history by emphasizing the selected nature of the “facts” that comprise historical texts, and by demonstrating the historicity of fiction. In analyzing the orthodox construction of the British/Indian encounter, Hubel calls into question assumptions about the end of nationalism implicit in mainstream histories and fiction, which generally describe a battleground on which only ruling-class Indians and British meet. Marginalized texts by women, untouchables, and overt imperialists alike are, therefore, examined alongside the well-known work of figures such as Rudyard Kipling, Jawaharlal Nehru, E. M. Forster, and Mahatma Gandhi.
In Whose India? discursive ownership and resistance to ownership are mutually constructing categories. As a result, the account of Indian nationalism and British imperialism that emerges is much more complicated, multivocal, and even more contradictory than previous studies have imagined. Of interest to students and scholars engaged in literary, historical, colonial/postcolonial, subaltern, and Indian studies, Whose India? will also attract readers concerned with gender issues and the canonization of texts.

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Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China

David Der-wei Wang

Brandeis University Press, 2020

Contemporary discussions of China tend to focus on politics and economics, giving Chinese culture little if any attention. Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China offers a corrective, revealing the crucial role that fiction plays in helping contemporary Chinese citizens understand themselves and their nation. Where history fails to address the consequences of man-made and natural atrocities, David Der-Wei Wang argues, fiction arises to bear witness to the immemorial and unforeseeable.

Beginning by examining President Xi Jinping’s call in 2013 to “tell the good China story,” Wang illuminates how contemporary Chinese cultural politics have taken a “fictional turn,” which can trace its genealogy to early modern times. He does so by addressing a series of discourses by critics within China, including Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, and Shen Congwen, as well as critics from the West such as Arendt, Benjamin, and Deleuze. Wang highlights the variety and vitality of fictional works from China as well as the larger Sinophone world, ranging from science fiction to political allegory, erotic escapade to utopia and dystopia. The result is an insightful account of contemporary China, one that affords countless new insights and avenues for understanding.

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Word of Mouth

Asian American Artists Sharing Recipes

Laura Kina

University of Arkansas Press, 2025

Conceived during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown and the accompanying rise in anti-Asian bigotry, Word of Mouth: Asian American Artists Sharing Recipes is an artists’ cookbook featuring stories and artwork from twenty-three Asian American and Asian diaspora artists from across the United States, with contributions that range from Los Angeles–based performance artist Kristina Wong’s “Recipe for Political Action” to New Orleans–based painter Francis Wong’s family recipe for stir-fried Szechuan alligator.

Word of Mouth was first published as an online exhibition through the Virtual Asian American Art Museum. This print version features a new introduction by art historian Michelle Yee, expanded essays, and brand-new recipes. Each contribution is accompanied by an original illustration and enriched by the artist’s reflections on how their cuisine has been impacted by histories of war, migration, relocation, labor, or mixing.

A pandemic project turned illustrated cookbook, this unique collection disrupts genre expectations to celebrate how artists use food to nurture and sustain their diverse communities and artistic practices as well as to build connection during times of isolation, grief, and loss.

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World Making with Malay-Indonesian Manuscripts

Circulation, Contestation and Connection

Edited by Maznah Mohamad and Sher Banu Khan

National University of Singapore Press, 2026

An innovative account of Malay-Indonesian manuscripts as dynamic agents of knowledge and cultural reinvention in the region.

What new framings emerge when we revisit the vibrant world of Malay-Indonesian manuscripts, looking beyond the boundaries imposed by colonial and nationalist scholarship? This volume revitalizes manuscript studies by using texts in entirely fresh ways, situating them as dynamic instruments of knowledge and cultural transformation. Through contextual readings, it uncovers multiple historical and cultural narratives within and between manuscripts, challenging established understandings of power, identity, and authorship. Chapters explore themes ranging from the origins of kingdoms and intellectual traditions to the reinvention of contemporary lives through politicized readings of older texts.

By foregrounding the diversity and versatility of Malay-Indonesian textual traditions, this book recenters manuscripts as vital agents in shaping Southeast Asian histories, decenters fixed notions of a singular “Malay” worldview, and reveals the fluidity of cultural memory across time and place.

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Writing Beijing

History and Knowledge of the Capital

Naixi Feng

University of Michigan Press, 2027

Writing Beijing offers a comprehensive study of the textual representations of the city from the late Ming dynasty through the Republican era, interrogating how urban narratives were actively constructed, adapted, and repurposed across periods of political transformation. Scholars, officials, and travelers reshaped the capital’s identity by rewriting older texts, borrowing new surveys, and even inserting critiques into guidebooks.. This study reveals how the crises brought by intense social transformation, including dynastic collapse and foreign invasion, forced writers to reinvent Beijing on paper. Some turned the city into a monument to lost glory; others documented everyday life to resist imperialism. These narratives served to critique contemporary sociopolitical conditions, assert cultural legitimacy during times of crisis, and ultimately shape Beijing’s enduring cultural image as China’s symbolic capital.

Naixi Feng bridges literary studies, urban history, and critical historiography by examining a wide range of genres—including literary miscellanies, local gazetteers, Qing imperial compilations, Republican textbooks, social reports, and travel guides—to demonstrate how writing about Beijing was never merely descriptive but always a site of cultural and political contestation.

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Writing Ground Zero

Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb

John Whittier Treat

University of Chicago Press, 1994

From Einstein and Truman to Sartre and Derrida, many have declared the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be decisive events in human history. None, however, have more acutely understood or perceptively critiqued the consequences of nuclear war than Japanese writers. In this first complete study of the nuclear theme in Japanese intellectual and artistic life, John Whittier Treat shows how much we have to learn from Japanese writers and artists about the substance and meaning of the nuclear age.

Treat recounts the controversial history of Japanese public discourse around Hiroshima and Nagasaki—a discourse alternatively celebrated and censored—from August 6, 1945, to the present day. He includes works from the earliest survivor writers, including Hara Tamiki and Ota Yoko, to such important Japanese intellectuals today as Oe Kenzaburo and Oda Makoto. Treat argues that the insights of Japanese writers into the lessons of modern atrocity share much in common with those of Holocaust writers in Europe and the practitioners of recent poststructuralist nuclear criticism in America. In chapters that take up writers as diverse as Hiroshima poets, Tokyo critics, and Nagasaki women novelists, he explores the implications of these works for critical, literary, and cultural theory.

Treat summarizes the Japanese contribution to such ongoing international debates as the crisis of modern ethics, the relationship of experience to memory, and the possibility of writing history. This Japanese perspective, Treat shows, both confirms and amends many of the assertions made in the West on the shift that the death camps and nuclear weapons have jointly signaled for the modern world and for the future.

Writing Ground Zero will be read not only by students of Japan, but by all readers concerned with the fate of culture after the fact of nuclear war in our time.

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Writing Pirates

Vernacular Fiction and Oceans in Late Ming China

Yuanfei Wang

University of Michigan Press, 2021

In Writing Pirates, Yuanfei Wang connects Chinese literary production to emerging discourses of pirates and the sea. In the late Ming dynasty, so-called “Japanese pirates” raided southeast coastal China. Hideyoshi invaded Korea. Europeans sailed for overseas territories, and Chinese maritime merchants and emigrants founded diaspora communities in Southeast Asia. Travel writings, histories, and fiction of the period jointly narrate pirates and China’s Orient in maritime Asia. Wang shows that the late Ming discourses of pirates and the sea were fluid, ambivalent, and dialogical; they simultaneously entailed imperialistic and personal narratives of the “other”: foreigners, renegades, migrants, and marginalized authors. At the center of the discourses, early modern concepts of empire, race, and authenticity were intensively negotiated. Connecting late Ming literature to the global maritime world, Writing Pirates expands current discussions of Chinese diaspora and debates on Sinophone language and identity.

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Writing Taiwan

A New Literary History

David Der-wei Wang and Carlos Rojas, eds.

Duke University Press, 2007

Writing Taiwan is the first volume in English to examine the entire span of modern Taiwan literature, from the first decades of the twentieth century to the present. In this collection, leading literary scholars based in Taiwan and the United States consider prominent Taiwanese authors and works in genres including poetry, travel writing, and realist, modernist, and postmodern fiction. The diversity of Taiwan literature is signaled by the range of authors treated, including Yang Chichang, who studied Japanese literature in Tokyo in the early 1930s and wrote all of his own poetry and fiction in Japanese; Li Yongping, an ethnic Chinese born in Malaysia and educated in Taiwan and the United States; and Liu Daren, who was born in mainland China and effectively exiled from Taiwan in the 1970s on account of his political activism.

Because the island of Taiwan spent the first half of the century as a colony of Japan and the second half in an umbilical relationship to China, its literature challenges basic assumptions about what constitutes a “national literature.” Several contributors directly address the methodological and epistemological issues involved in writing about “Taiwan literature.” Other contributors investigate the cultural and political grounds from which specific genres and literary movements emerged. Still others explore themes of history and memory in Taiwan literature and tropes of space and geography, looking at representations of boundaries as well as the boundary-crossing global flows of commodities and capital. Like Taiwan’s history, modern Taiwan literature is rife with conflicting legacies and impulses. Writing Taiwan reveals a sense of its richness and diversity to English-language readers.

Contributors. Yomi Braester, Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Fangming Chen, Lingchei Letty Chen, Chaoyang Liao, Ping-hui Liao, Joyce C. H. Liu, Kim-chu Ng, Carlos Rojas, Xiaobing Tang, Ban Wang, David Der-wei Wang, Gang Gary Xu, Michelle Yeh, Fenghuang Ying

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