Journals: After(Life) Narratives of #MeToo, Digital Korean Studies, Playwright Betsuyaku Minoru + More

AP 62-2 cover

Asian Perspectives

Volume 62, Number 2 (2023)

What’s in a Hearth? Preliminary Findings from the Margal Hunter-Gatherer Habitation in the Eastern Mongolian Gobi Desert
Sarah Pleuger, Bastian Breitenfeld, Altanbayar Zoljargal, Albert Russell Nelson, William Honeychurch, and Chunag Amartuvshin

The Mid-Second Millennium A.D. Submerged Iron Production Village of Pontada in Lake Matano, South Sulawesi, Indonesia
Shinatria Adhityatama, Triwurjani, Dida Yurnaldi, Joko Wahyudiono, Ahmad Surya Ramadhan, Muslim Dimas Khoiru Dhony, Suryatman, Abdullah Abbas, Darfin, Alqiz Lukman, Aldhi Wahyu Pratama, and David Bulbeck

Iron Production Industry in Western Chongqing During the Late Ming Dynasty: A Perspective from Smelting Related Materials
Li Yuniu, Sun Zhigang, Qiu Tian, Bai Jiujiang, and Huang Wan

The Archaeology of Ancient Japanese Gardens
Richard Pearson

Find these articles, reviews, and more at Project MUSE.

ATJ 40-2 COVER

Asian Theatre Journal

Special Section: Betsuyaku Minoru

Volume 40, Number 2 (2023)

Editor Siyuan Liu discusses the special section in the introduction:

This issue starts with a special section on the Japanese playwright Betsuyaku Minoru (1937–2020), known in the west for his plays during the avant-garde angura (underground), or little theatre movement, of the 1960s and 1970s. Guest-edited by David Jortner, this special section updates our knowledge of his long career since then, with a translation of his play Yattekita Godō (Godot Came, 2007) by John K. Gillespie, together with two essays by Gillespie and Roger Pulvers.

Read more translations, reviews, reports, and articles at Project MUSE.

Front cover of Biography volume 45-4 (2023)

Biography

Special Edition: After(Life) Narratives of #MeToo

Guest Editors: Rebecca Wanzo and Carol A. Stabile

Volume 45, Number 4 (2022)

#MeToo: A Biography
Rebecca Wanzo and Carol A. Stabile

Micro-disclosures for Macro-erasures: #MeToo in the Academy
Roopika Risam

#MeToo Storytelling: Confession, Testimony, and Life Writing
Leigh Gilmore

“If it didn’t hurt so bad, I’d kill myself, but I’ll let Ed Buck do it for now”: #Justice4Gemmel and Black Queer Narratives in the Age and Afterlife of #MeToo
Terrance Wooten

The Afterlives of #MeToo: A Roundtable Discussion with Māhealani Ahia, Michelle Cho, Pallavi Guha, Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, Kahala Johnson, and Ever E. Osorio
Greta LaFleur, Dana Seitler, Māhealani Ahia, Michelle Cho, Pallavi Guha, Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, Kahala Johnson, and Ever E. Osorio

Read these articles and more at Project MUSE.

Rapa Nui Journal now available on eVols

Rapa Nui Journal‘s archive is now available on eVols, an open-access, digital institutional repository for the University of Hawai‘i community and researchers around the world.

The Rapa Nui Journal is the official, peer-reviewed journal of the Easter Island Foundation (EIF). The journal serves as a forum for interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities and social sciences on Easter Island and the Eastern Polynesian region.

The journal launched in 1984. Volumes 1 through 28 can be freely accessed via eVols and recent content can be viewed at Project MUSE. 

Learn more about Rapa Nui Journal here.

Journal cover
Rapa Nui Journal

The Zither: A Novella and New Short Stories from China (Mānoa, Vol. 33 Issue 1)

Featured in this Mānoa volume is The Woman Zou, the third in a series of novellas by the distinguished woman writer Zhang Yihe. Born in 1942 in Chongqing, Sichuan, Zhang Yihe was the daughter of Zhang Bojun, a high official in the Chinese Communist Party who was purged in 1957 and labeled a public enemy. By association, Zhang Yihe was convicted of counterrevolutionary activities and sentenced to twenty years in a remote prison camp. After serving ten years, she was released and allowed to return to Beijing in 1979. When she retired in 2001 from teaching at the Chinese National Opera Academy, she began writing her novellas based on the lives of her fellow women prisoners. Her nonfiction books were banned in China and she became an outspoken critic of China’s censorship laws. In 2004, she received the International PEN Award for Independent Chinese Writing. The award committee wrote that

Zhang Yihe’s writing is not only an indictment of the age of darkness, but it is also an affirmation of the indefatigable human dignity and a negation of all attempts to destroy this dignity… Zhang Yihe’s work illustrates the rarely seen courage among contemporary Chinese writers to defend freedom, dignity and historical memories.

The other outstanding writers in this volume are Yi Zhou, whose writing awards include the first prize for novellas and short stories in the Yellow River Literature competition, the Dunhuang Literary Award, and the Lu Xun literary prize, and Zhu Wenying, who is considered one of the leading representatives of post-70s women writers and has received the Annual People’s Literature Prize, among other awards.

The Zither was translated and guest edited by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping. 

More News from Mānoa

Manoa MA 32-2 Acting My Age Cover Thomas Farber

“An Office in the Ocean”: An interview with author Thomas Farber at The Hawai‘i Review of Books

Podcast: Michael Ellsberg interviews author Thomas Farber

The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project: Leland Cheuk interviews author Thomas Farber

A letter from author Thomas Farber to Mānoa journal

Two Mānoa pieces are included in the new Pushcart anthology, including Xiao Xiao’s “Crime against Grief: Myth of an Age” (translated by Ming Di and Frank Stewart) and Tang Donhong’s essay, “Chairman Mao is Dead!” (translated by Anne Henochowicz). Both are included in the Mānoa volume, Tyranny Lessons.

The Zither: A Novella and New Short Stories from China
MĀNOA Vol. 33 Issue 1 (2021)

Read on Project MUSE:

The Zither

Subscribe to MĀNOA

Like The Zither? MĀNOA publishes two compelling issues annually of international literature. Subscribe here

New Journal Special Issues: We Are Maunakea, Contemporary Japanese Theatre + Digital Methods, Empire Histories

cover image

Asian Theatre Journal

Volume 38, Number 1, (2021)

From the Editor Siyuan Liu:

This issue starts with Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei’s appreciation of Leonard Pronko (1927–2019), noted kabuki scholar and teacher who passed away late 2019. Building on her profile of Pronko for Asian Theatre Journal’s “founders of the fields” series (28: 2, 2011), Sorgenfrei offers a touching personal profile of her former professor as an extraordinary human being.
As evidence to the flourishing field of Japanese theatre studies pioneered by Pronko and his peers, this issue continues with a special section on contemporary Japanese theatre with a combination of articles, reports, a translation, and a performance review essay.

cover image

biography

Volume 43, Number 3 (2020)


We Are Maunakea: Aloha ʻĀina Narratives of Protest, Protection, and Place
Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada and Noʻu Revilla

From the guest editors’ introduction:

In the summer of 2019, kiaʻi (protectors) gathered at Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu to defend Maunakea, a sacred mountain, against desecration by the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). Thousands gathered at Ala Hulu Kupuna, or Mauna Kea Access Road. Daily protocols were led by cultural practitioners and long-time protectors of Maunakea, intergenerational Native Hawaiian leadership was developed and empowered on Hawaiian terms, a community kitchen was organized, Puʻuhuluhulu University was established as an actual Hawaiian place of learning, and a collective commitment to ʻāina and kapu aloha rooted all who arrived and all who continue to stay in this movement.
The 2019 stand was also an unprecedented opportunity to witness the battle of narratives, as mainstream media and highly paid public relations firms were outmaneuvered by Kanaka- and ally-authored life writing. This special issue features first-hand accounts, academic reflections, creative works, photography, and interviews with kiaʻi from the 2019 front lines and members of the media team.

Journal of World History

Volume 32, Number 2 (2021)

Special Issue: Digital Methods, Empire Histories

Introduction from Guest Editor Antoinette Burton reads:

The technological evangelism of much of anglophone digital humanities discourse should sit uneasily with empire historians, who know what languages of discovery and “new frontiers” have meant in the context of world history, especially where data collection is concerned. To be sure, digitization has made myriad colonial archives, official and unofficial, available via open access platforms. This means that vast stores of knowledge are now at our fingertips—a proximity and immediacy that has reshaped the lived experience of archival research for many scholars, in this case bringing the imperial world not just closer to home but into the hands of anyone who has access to a cellphone. And the revolution in digital tools in the last twenty-five years has given rise to equally vast possibilities for gathering and visualizing evidence as well as for scaling and interpreting data: for worlding, mostly by aggregation and consolidation, what we aim to know about the kinds of colonial pasts that are available and capturable via text and image. Yet, this information empire is not exactly new. Digitization most often reassembles archival collections proper, sometimes remixing them with print and visual culture and typically organizing them through mechanisms and selection processes that are more or less visible depending on the commitment to transparency of the conglomerator. In some cases, those conglomerators are private individuals or government entities; in others, corporate sponsors; in still others, community-based activists. Inevitably perhaps, today’s digital imperial “data” are actually, more accurately, digitally transformed imperial sources. And for colonial subjects, as for the enslaved, data has more often than not meant terror at the scene of the crime.

Journal of World History Special Issue: Health, Globally – Free!

Next week, the World History Association hosts its annual meeting virtually, from July 5 to 9, on the theme “Health, Globally.” The Journal of World History offers an accompanying special collection, free on the Project MUSE platform through summer. Attendees can also receive 30% off select world history titles.

The “Health, Globally” special issue draws together some of the journal’s most frequently cited and downloaded material alongside some less well-known contributions. Together, these articles present a multivalent approach to the study of global health. Some are driven by new scientific breakthroughs that allow previously held assumptions to be challenged and even rewritten. Some consider the history of health to be a debate about culture or the method of communicating knowledge. Some take a global approach to consider issues that touched every corner of the world, and others begin with specific local circumstances and consider how these episodes inform greater debates in world history. 

This special issue provides accessible resources for scholars and teachers worldwide, pulled together by editor Matthew P. Romaniello, who discusses the issue below.  

Matthew P. Romaniello, editor of the Journal of World History
Matthew P. Romaniello, editor of the Journal of World History

University of Hawai‘i Press: Tell us how this special issue came together.

Matthew P. Romaniello: The World History Association’s President, Laura Mitchell, let me know that the annual conference was going to be organized around the theme of “Health, Globally,” and it just seemed like a perfect fit for a special collection. Pandemics have been a recurring threat throughout history, making this theme not only reflective of the ongoing pandemic but also one with deep roots in the journal’s past.

UHP: Why is this issue important now?

MPR: I’m just going to quote from the WHA’s original call for papers for the conference this summer because it’s so apt: “The urgency of global public health crises, economic hardship, famine and food insecurity, political instability, ongoing violence, and environmental disasters demand immediate attention and invite measured analysis over long time horizons—a move along temporal scales at which world historian excel.”

UHP: How do you hope people will use this issue?

MPR: We are extremely fortunate that the University of Hawai‘i Press has once again worked with Project MUSE to make the special collection available open access until the end of September. My hope is that these articles will be brought into world history classes this fall to have students critically engage with the impact of health crises throughout history. We all know students are grappling with how their lives have changed in the past year, and these case studies can speak meaningfully to the way past societies have responded to, and recovered from, pandemics.

UHP: In addition to this year’s World History Association meeting, what resources would you point your colleagues to?

MPR: There’s a tremendous wealth of resources available to study responses to past pandemics, both other scholarly works and an enormous body of primary sources. Harvard University made available some of its resources through “Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics,” which is a curated collection for the classroom. Many scholars are probably familiar with the open access collection available through PubMed, but the National Library of Medicine (NLM) has rich digital resources available on its website. Between the NLM and the Wellcome Library in London, there’s just an enormous variety of primary sources available. I also recommend browsing the resources identified at the American Association for the History of Medicine, particularly the Syllabus for “A History of Anti-Black Racism in Medicine,” which lays out a plan for integrating two of the defining issues of the past year—structural racism and health—in one class.

UHP: Finally, a year in, how has the pandemic affected your own research and teaching?

MPR: It’s been a long year. I’ve learned a lot about how to approach virtual and online teaching, but I’m mostly relieved to be back in the classroom this fall. And I’ve enjoyed the time I’ve had to focus on both editing and writing, but I’m optimistic about a return to the archive next year. There’s no doubt we have incredible access to online materials compared to only a few years ago, but there’s nothing quite like being in the archive and making an unexpected discovery!

Join Matthew P. Romaniello for a roundtable discussion with special issue authors Gregory D. Smithers, Nükhet Varlik, and Stephanie Anne Boyle on July 8 at the World History Association meeting.

Celebrating Barry Lopez: Special Print Bundle Sale + Free Digital Special Issue

Barry Lopez passed away on Christmas Day 2020 at age seventy-five. He was celebrated and admired as a writer of fiction, nonfiction, essays, and memoir.

Barry was an ardent friend of MĀNOA. In addition to giving MĀNOA stories and essays, he co-edited two important international issues: Maps of Reconciliation: Literature and the Ethical Imagination in 2007, and its companion issue, Gates of Reconciliation, in 2008.

To celebrate Barry’s life and work, we offer 5 print titles for $30 (or $10 each) and also a selection of his work free via the Project MUSE platform.

Special Print Bundle Sale

The 5 MĀNOA titles (pictured, right) featuring Barry Lopez’s work as writer and editor are now available for $30 (or $10 per title) through the end of February 2021.

Buy the Special Print Bundle Now.

Free Digital Special Issue

Read Now: Remembering Barry Lopez (1945-2020): Stories and Essays in MĀNOA

To celebrate his work and in gratitude for his life, friendship, and support, we offer this selection of work by Barry Lopez that appeared in MĀNOA: A Pacific Journal of International Writing.

These articles will be free on Project MUSE through May 2021.

Introduction: Barry Lopez (1945-2020) (Open Access)

Editors’ Note
Originally published: Volume 19, Number 2, 2007

The Leadership Imperative: An Interview with Oren Lyons
Originally published: Volume 19, Number 2, 2007

¡Nunca Más!
Originally published: Volume 20, Number 1, 2008

Epilogue
Originally published: Volume 20, Number 1, 2008

The Letters of Heaven
Originally published: Volume 23, Number 2, 2011

In the Great Bend of the Souris River
Originally published: Volume 25, Issue 1, 2013

Print Bundle Sale

Titles included in bundle.

9780824832681
Cascadia: The Life and Breath of the World
Almost Heaven: On the Human and Divine
9780824833206
Wild Hearts: Literature

Buy Special Bundle Now

Acting My Age: Thomas Farber’s new book from MĀNOA

Thomas Farber, 2020. Photograph by Andrea Young
Thomas Farber, 2020. Photograph by Andrea Young

Elegant, exuberant, and idiosyncratic, Acting My Age is a memoir and meditation by one of America’s most playful and inventive writers.

Acting My Age is the newest volume from MĀNOA. In the words of Mary Mackey (The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams), “in Acting My Age, Thomas Farber gives us an unflinching, luminous, cleverly conceived meditation on his own mortality as well as on the extinction of the coral reefs, snow leopards, dolphins, and, ultimately the human species. Couching his observations in a series of short, interconnected, almost-epigrammatic essays that read like prose poems, Farber creates a narrative style reminiscent of Joyce and Melville: oceanic in depth and all-encompassing in range.”

Below, Thomas Farber shares how this book came together, water friendships, and how he’s faring a year into the COVID-19 pandemic. 


University of Hawai‘i Press: You describe Acting My Age as an “interim report.” When and where did Acting My Age begin?

Thomas Farber: I’d finished Here and Gone in early 2015. The concluding chapter of its third person nonfiction has “the writer” confronting open heart surgery in seven days. Acting My Age picks up, in the first person, where that left off.

UHP: You sign your author’s note that opens Acting My Age from both Berkeley and Honolulu. Tell us about your relationship to these places.

TF: Born and raised in Boston, I first came to Berkeley in 1964 at age twenty. I’ve been based there most of the time since, albeit with long absences, and have taught at the University of California, Berkeley since the mid-1990s.

I first came to Hawai‘i in 1971, have had long stays every year since, often for half the year. Surfing and Pacific Island post-colonial writing have been two of my persistent interests. I’ve been visiting writer at the University of Hawai‘i, Manoa; visiting fellow at the East-West Center; and have traveled extensively in the South Pacific.

Gill net pyramid,   Keauhou Bay, Hawai‘i, 2009. Photograph by Wayne Levin
Gill net pyramid, Keauhou Bay, Hawai‘i, 2009. Photograph by Wayne Levin

UHP: How do you feel Wayne Levin and Geoffrey Fricker’s photography complements your work?

TF: Water friendships! I first saw Wayne’s marvelous ocean photographs when I was dreaming toward the book that became On Water (1994). My collaborations with Wayne include Through A Liquid MirrorOther Oceans (UH Press), and Akule. As for freshwater, I’d been part of a Geoff Fricker project about the upper Sacramento River. Then in the late 1990s Geoff asked me write text for his haunting photographs of the ruined Hamakuapoko sugar mill.

Sugar water-cooling system, Pu‘unēnē, Maui, 1997. Photograph by Geoffrey Fricker
Sugar water-cooling system, Pu‘unēnē, Maui, 1997. Photograph by Geoffrey Fricker

UHP: As the author of more than 25 books, how does Acting My Age differ from your other work?

TF: A return to first person nonfiction, something I’d not done for many years, it picks up after the impending heart surgery looming at the end of Here and GoneActing My Age is, not surprisingly, much concerned with aging and mortality—author seventy-one to seventy-five in the telling—but also speaks from my ongoing love of and fear for the ocean. My dismay with the mess humans can make of things. As for how the stories are told, well, I’ve had a long love affair with words, tried to draw on all I’ve learned in my writing life.

UHP: The revisions for Acting My Age were completed in the first days of the COVID-19 pandemic. How does this find you—and your writing—nearly a year later?

TF: Like everyone, I’m much sobered by the pandemic. Too many apprehensions realized.

Meanwhile, no one writes or lives forever. About to turn seventy-seven, clearing books and papers from my garage library, I feel like a surfer in a long lull. Waiting for the next set. Staying very close to home, perforce, has encouraged me to be the kind of reader I was as a child—(re)reading for the deep pleasure of it. No product quite yet in mind. Savoring company I’ve kept. Jim Harrison’s late poems, Dead Man’s Float. J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine.  Calvino’s Invisible Cities. These “colleagues” I’ve learned from, have tried to measure up to.


THOMAS FARBER has been a Fulbright Scholar, awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and three times National Endowment fellowships for fiction and creative nonfiction, recipient of the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, and Rockefeller Foundation scholar at Bellagio. His recent books include Here and Gone, The End of My Wits, Brief Nudity, and The Beholder. Former visiting writer at Swarthmore College and the University of Hawai‘i, he teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. www.thomasfarber.org

Manoa MA 32-2 Acting My Age Cover Thomas Farber
MĀNOA Vol. 32 Issue 2 (2020)

Read Free on Project MUSE:

Author’s Note

Buy the Volume

Print copy of Acting My Age, $24.99

Subscribe to MĀNOA

Like Acting My Age? MĀNOA publishes two compelling issues annually of international literature. Subscribe here. 

Tyranny Lessons: 60 International Writers on Contemporary Tyranny (MĀNOA Vol. 32 Issue 1)

In Tyranny Lessons, the newest volume from MĀNOA, international writers from two dozen countries in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas address the challenges of contemporary tyranny as only literary writing can: through the perspective of lived experiences, imagined futures, and personal struggles.

Tyranny Lessons also features the photography of Danny Lyon, the first photographer of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, whose work documented the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s.

Alok Bhalla and Ming Di guest edited this issue alongside MĀNOA editor Frank Stewart, who shares how this issue came together and some of the pieces in the issue.


University of Hawai‘i Press: Tell us how this special issue came together.

MĀNOA: As an international literary publication, MĀNOA tries to engage with the most urgent issues of our time. We have compiled volumes on freedom, unending wars, reconciliation, and, most recently the displacement of people due to climate change, ethnic conflicts, and other causes. Tyranny Lessons grew out of these global concerns.

UHP: Why is this issue important now?

MĀNOA: Literary writing is often about individuals, not statistics or abstract groups. Many millions of people have been displaced around the world, and tens of millions are living under authoritarian governments or in intolerant communities. These numbers blur the fact that they comprise individuals, each of whom struggles, suffers, or is hurt. Good literature helps us live through the experiences of everyday people in difficult circumstances, enlarging our understanding and compassion.

UHP: How do you see this issue being used in the world?

MĀNOA: Writers from nearly two dozen countries contributed to this volume—many from places that Americans seldom hear from: India, Indonesia, Tibet, Latvia, Slovenia, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Syria, and others. Their experiences, languages, and viewpoints are diverse. When American readers see them side-by-side in MĀNOA—and when the writers themselves see their work in this international context, across political and national boundaries—lives of others become more immediate, and our feelings of kinship grow larger and more inclusive.

UHP: Walk us through your table of contents: What’s not to miss?

MĀNOA: Well, there are more than sixty writers in the volume so it’s hard to answer this briefly. There are many excellent writers from the PRC, Hong Kong, and Tibet. Tang Danhong’s “Chairman Mao Is Dead!” is a wonderful, acerbic, and at times funny essay about a time in her childhood when a death in China turned the country, and her life, on its head. Other writers from China recall events in the recent past, the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. There are two wonderful allegorical tales by an Indonesian writer, Rio Johan, living in Paris. There are some unexpected pieces, such as an essay by Walter White, who headed the NAACP, on lynching, and some union songs by Joe Hill.

UHP: What was the most challenging thing about creating this issue?

MĀNOA: It was important to us that Tyranny Lessons not have an agenda or or be predictable. We wanted to understand tyranny as a condition that is common in our lives, in ways we don’t think about in that way—and not just government oppression. There’s a moving story in the issue by Ann Pancake, who lives in West Virginia, about a brother whose opioid addiction tyrannizes the well-being of a family. An essay by Thomas Farber comments on the scientific practice of capturing and experimenting on dolphins—surely an example of humans tyrannizing non-humans. And there’s a fine play by Catherine Filloux, “whatdoesfreemean,” concerning incarcerated women of color.

UHP: How does the artwork complement the written content?

MĀNOA: Acclaimed photographer Danny Lyon, the first official photographer of the Civil Rights Movement, gave us a suite of photographs from his book The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality. The images underscore the reality that tyranny is not something that happens only in totalitarian foreign countries. Communal violence and intolerance are present in the U.S. as well. And Americans too have lessons to teach the world about tyranny.

 

Manoa 32-1 Tyranny Lessons

Tyranny Lessons

Read Free on Project MUSE:

Editor’s Note

Poem: “Cry Out in Sorrow,” by Lin Zi
This poem was written for Li Wenliang (1986–2020), the Wuhan doctor who alerted his colleagues about the coronavirus in December 2019, and died of the disease in February 2020. When punished by the police for “spreading rumors,” he said, “A healthy society should allow more than one voice.” The poem calls for public mourning as a protest against censorship.

Buy the Volume

Print copy of Tyranny Lessons, $25

eBook of Tyranny Lessons, $9.99 (through Oct. 2020)
Amazon
Google Play
eBooks.com

Subscribe to MĀNOA

Like Tyranny Lessons? MĀNOA publishes two compelling issues annually of international literature. Subscribe here.

Journal of World History Special Issue: Crossing Companies (Vol. 31, Issue 3)

The September issue of the Journal of World History is a special issue, “Crossing Companies,” guest edited by Felicia Gottmann, a Senior Lecturer in History at Northumbria University, Newcastle,  and Philip Stern, the Gilhuly Family Associate Professor of History at Duke University. The issue includes five research articles, in addition to Gottmann and Stern’s introduction to the issue and a special digital-only afterword by Julia Adams and Isaac Ariail Reed (both available free on Project MUSE).

Here, Gottmann and Stern discuss how this special issue came together, editing during a pandemic, why this subject continues to interest scholars and students, and how teachers can use the issue in their classrooms.


University of Hawai‘i Press: Tell us how this special issue came together.

Gottmann and Stern: The issue was the result of many conversations among a number of scholars researching various novel ways chartered companies crossed national boundaries, some together as part of larger collaborative research projects. We decided that taken together our research would make for an interesting discussion and offered it as a panel for the 2017 American Historical Association annual meeting in Denver. This raised so many interesting points that we decided to we just had to publish the discussion as articles, and commissioned others to supplement. We proposed it as a dedicated special issue to JWH, and the rest is history. This took us three years, but we think it was worth it.

UHP: What was the most challenging thing about creating this issue as editors? 

Gottmann and Stern: For a subject as broad and involved as that of early modern chartered companies the greatest challenge was that even among all of us, one special journal issue could only skim the surface of what is a broad and expansive subject, so we were constantly feeling like we were leaving out far more than we were putting in. And of course, the final stages of a collaborative issue are hard under normal circumstances; when we started this together in Denver years ago, no one could have anticipated we would be doing it in the midst of a global pandemic. Both of us have small children, which made co-authoring and editing that much more demanding. Even meant even finding times to meet virtually across five time zones when one of us was not on childcare duty or utterly exhausted was… a challenge. Honestly, we couldn’t have gotten through it without the remarkable contributors, and of course the immensely patient and accommodating editors and staff at JWH.

UHP: Why do you think early-modern trading companies continue to interest scholars and students?

Gottmann and Stern: The subject was actually one of great interest many decades ago—in some ways, our special issue is somewhat inspired by the fabulous book on Companies and Trade co-edited by Leo Blussé and Femme Gaastra in 1981. Around the same time, the fantastic work to “bring the state back in,” (to quote another important volume from the 1980s), certainly led to a generation of work that exposed the connections between state and empire formation across the globe. But since then, our attention has been drawn back to the ways in which private enterprises govern like states, making connections around the globe and building empires. While the analogy can be taken too far, the comparison—whether in terms of similarities or contrasts—with a similar phenomenon in the early modern world certainly promises fascinating insights into the origins of modern capitalism and globalization and raises questions about the role and nature of states and multinational companies. The past several decades have also seen increasingly broader interest in, and sophisticated approaches to colonial, imperial, and world history, which has no doubt been part of the renewed interest in colonial companies.

UHP: How do you see this special issue contributing to the field?

Gottmann and Stern: While scholars working on the theaters in which these companies operated, be that the Indian Ocean or the Atlantic World, have long since shown that their operations were resolutely transnational on the ground, those who study the companies qua companies continue to do so with the kind of “methodological nationalism” that Ulrich Beck has taught us to abandon long ago. Our special issue firmly demonstrates that these were transnational enterprises not just on the ground in Asia, Africa, or the Americas but that they were transnational through and through, from their very inception in Europe. So we turn the lens of World History back on Europe, demonstrating it to be part of much wider, not merely, national histories.

UHP: What advice would you give to a teacher who was interested in using your issue in their classroom?

Gottmann and Stern: We would encourage teachers to use this issue as a way into studying history away from national narratives of empire: as a way to motivate students to challenge their modernist assumptions about the coherence of notions of “nations”, “states”, and “companies”. Paired with some of the many surviving great primary sources, be that Ananda Ranga Pillai’s Diary or Bolt’s Considerations on India Affairs, this can be a brilliant way to get students to rethink world history as a history of more than just a world of nation-states.

Read the Journal of World History special issue, “Crossing Companies” on Project MUSE here.

 

New Journal Issues: Asian/Pacific Island Nursing Journal, Journal of Burma Studies, Language Documentation & Conservation + More (July 2020)

Asian/Pacific Island Nursing Journal
Front cover of Biography 42-4 (2020)

Biography

Academic Freedom, Academic Lives, Guest Edited by Bill V. Mullen and Julie Rak

Volume 42, Issue 4 (2019)

From the guest editors’ introduction:

Academic freedom is currently highly public and highly contested terrain. What academic freedom actually means has become an urgent question, as alt-right activists have turned the tenets of academic freedom to their own ends, whether on college and university campuses, or through the actions of right-wing governments as they move to suppress dissent. We want to reclaim the concept of academic freedom for the left and for academic activism, not through a debate about the concept as an abstraction, but in connection to what we see as the radical potential of academic lives. Thinking of academic lives as interpretation and critique is a way to disrupt the current alt-right control of public discourse about freedom of speech. Read the special issue introduction free here.

Front over of China Review International 25-2 (2018)
Journal of Burma Studies 24-1

The Journal of Burma Studies

Special Issue: Environment and Resources: Burma/Myanmar and the (Un)Natural

Volume 24, Issue 1 (2020)

The editor’s note for this special issue begins:

From touristic impressions to geopolitical analyses, ubiquitous are the tremendous and varied natural resources of Myanmar. Teak forests, oil and gas reserves, precious gemstones, biodiversity, and the list goes on. The very meaning of the concept of resource, however, suggests that the country contains things of tremendous potential human, economic use, and therefore value. With the resources, mapping, and study of them, there is the seemingly boundless potential for greater wealth to be accumulated. On the other hand, discourse regarding natural beauty and wonder can be a purposeful distraction from ongoing issues of war and exploitation. Discussing the country’s abundance of resources, however, is never a neutral proposition: for outsiders looking in, there is frequently a value-laden assumption which guides the observation that the various regimes and economic interests are not responsibly conserving these resources for the greater good (however nebulous that may be). Life itself (before we even label it a natural resource) is already an active zone of economic production, engineering, banking, commodification, and exchange (Palsson 2016:4). The definition, mapping, laws, and social relationships which name and frame resources in Myanmar are of ongoing heuristic, cultural, economic, and inevitably political concern.

With this problematic in mind, in this Special Issue of The Journal of Burma Studies (JBS) we have gathered together an interdisciplinary set of research articles surrounding questions of what nature is and what its resources might be. With the four authors’ varied focus on historical and contemporary Myanmar, this set of papers offers challenging new vistas for the exploration and interrogation of how resources and the environment have been approached and brokered by local and transnational actors. Read the special issue introduction free here.

Language Documentation & Conservation
Front cover of U.S.-Japan Women's Journal 55/56 (2019)

New Journal Issues: Asian Theatre Journal, Cross-Currents, Journal of Korean Religions + More (June 2020)

Asian Theatre Journal 37-1

Asian Theatre Journal

The Field of Ramila, guest edited by Pamela Lothspeich

Volume 37, Issue 1 (2020)

This special issue is intended to briefly introduce the field of Ramlila, as a performance practice and as an idea. It is designed to give a taste of its geographic range and a sample of its multiple and diverse manifestations in India and the Indian diaspora. The Introduction briefly discusses the literary sources of Ramlila, its history, chief styles, and emerging trends. It also includes a synopsis of the story of Ram in Ramlila. Following this, a translation of three scenes from the Lav-Kush Ramlila in Old Delhi, with a critical introduction, sheds light on the mounting politicization of Ramlila by the Hindu Right. Two articles, one on Nautanki and one on Ramayan Gaan, illustrate that Ramlila is a form of theatre very much in dialogue with other forms of popular performance in the Hindi belt and along its linguistic borders, narratively, aesthetically, and ideologically. A review-essay of two documentaries and an interview with an expert on Kumaoni Ramlila further demonstrate the diversity of Ramayan-themed performance, despite the continued homogenization and commercialization of Ramlila. An article on a distinctive Ramlila in Trinidad and another in the United States (North Carolina) speak to the global reach of Ramlila, and its important role in “homemaking.” Finally, a report on a festival to commemorate a Ramayan-themed dance drama (wayang wong) at Prambanan recalls the Ramayan’s early journey from South to Southeast Asia.

Cross-Currents 9-1 CC Cover

Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review

Global Island: Taiwan and the World, guest edited by James Lin, Graeme Read, and Peter Thilly

Volume 9, Issue 1 (2020)

In October 2018, the University of Washington Taiwan Studies Program hosted a workshop featuring a wide range of diverse humanities and social science research centered on the theme of “Global Island: Taiwan and the World.” The impetus for the workshop was to reimagine Taiwan outside the traditional confines of comparative and cross-Strait studies that have predominated in academic research on Taiwan. The articles that emerged from the workshop and have been assembled in this issue instead understand Taiwan as an actor embedded within global networks and spaces or, alternatively, as a unique site or producer of globally circulating knowledge. At a time when Taiwan studies is gaining increased visibility, exploring Taiwan’s linkages to the greater world showcases underexplored facets of Taiwan and the potential contributions of this field to interdisciplinary studies of society and culture.

Journal of Korean Religions JKR 11-1

Journal of Korean Religions

Yogācāra Studies of Silla, guest edited by A. Charles Muller

Volume 11, Issue 1 (2020)

One area in particular wherein interest in Korea has been relatively strong since earlier days is that of Silla-period Buddhist scholarship. Within Silla scholasticism, one of the most influential areas has been that of Yogācāra and related studies—which in Korea, tends to include much of what is usually categorized as the Buddhological strain of Tathāgatagarbha. Silla-period scholars were in close contact with their Chinese colleagues on the mainland, reading and writing the same Sinitic script. They had ready access to newly composed texts and translations soon after their production in Chang’an and elsewhere, and they were intimately aware of all of the most pertinent doctrinal discussions and debates occurring in the Tang capital and its surroundings, and were deeply engaged in all of these. One of Silla’s own sons, Wŏnch’ŭk 圓測 (613–696), was situated in the Tang capital and was working directly with Xuanzang and his team, although sometimes not seeing eye-to-eye with other of Xuanzang’s followers, such as Kuiji 窺基 (632–682). Other Silla scholars, such as Chajang 慈藏 (sixth-seventh centuries) and Ŭisang 義湘 (625–702) (just to name a few of the better-known figures) went to Tang for serious and sustained study, making their own mark, and bringing their new knowledge home to the peninsula.

Journal of World History

Volume 31, Issue 2 (2020)

Research articles for this issue include:

  • The Prestige Makers: Greek Slave Women in Ancient India by Kathryn A. Hain
  • The Medieval Origin of the Factory or the Institutional Foundations of Overseas Trade: Toward a Model for Global Comparison by Louis Sicking
  • Between the Red Sea Slave Trade and the Goa Inquisition: The Odyssey of Gabriel, a Sixteenth-Century Ethiopian Jew by Matteo Salvadore
  • Greatness is Like a Rubbish Hole: Social Frictions and Global Connections in the Early-Swahili World by David Bresnahan
  • How Civic Virtue Became Republican Honor: Revolution and Republicanism in Venezuela, 1800–1840 by Reuben Zahler
  • Decolonizing Global History? A Latin American Perspective (Open Access) by Gabriela De Lima Grecco, Sven Schuster

Journal of World History Special Issue: Roads and Oceans, a 30th Anniversary Collection – Free!

The Journal of World History launches its first digital-only special issue, a 30th anniversary collection titled, “Roads and Oceans: Rethinking Mobility and Migrations in World History.” The issue is free on the Project MUSE platform through September 2020.

This week, world history scholars would have been gathering in Salt Lake City, Utah for the annual World History Association (WHA) conference, regretfully canceled in light of public health concerns during the coronavirus pandemic. 

This special issue provides accessible resources for scholars and teachers worldwide, pulled together by editor Matthew P. Romaniello. Here, Matt discusses “Roads and Oceans,” a central theme throughout the history of this journal founded by Jerry Bentley, a pioneer in the field who guided the journal through 24 volumes. 

Matthew P. Romaniello, editor of the Journal of World History
Matthew P. Romaniello, editor of the Journal of World History

University of Hawai‘i Press: Tell us how this special issue came together.

Matthew P. Romaniello: To celebrate the journal’s anniversary, we wanted to highlight a theme that has been important throughout the past thirty years. We reviewed the list of most frequently read articles available through Project Muse and developed three potential themes that would be a good fit. After consulting with a few members of the editorial board, “Roads and Oceans: Rethinking Mobility and Migrations in World History” seemed to best choice to encompass the journal’s history.

UHP: Why is this issue important now?

MPR: As I mention in the introduction, world history is not contained by border crossings or trade caravans but is instead defined by movement in general. Placing this selection of articles into context with each other opens a discussion on the importance of human migration, cultural exchanges broadly conceived, and the challenge crossing borders, either from state-imposed restrictions or geographic boundaries. As these articles highlight, the progress of history has been toward more exchanges, not obstacles.

UHP: How do you hope people will use this issue?

MPR: One of the most exciting opportunities resulting from this special online format is making older articles available free. While many scholars working at the university level will have access to the journal via their institutions, our secondary school colleagues are not so lucky. Getting more material into the hands of secondary school teachers to share with their students is a wonderful outcome of our anniversary celebration. Having a thematic collection available will lend itself to use at all levels as the basis for an in-depth discussion about the importance of migration and travel throughout the past, an issue that’s only more important in a Covid-19 world.

UHP: What was the most challenging thing about creating this issue?

MPR: The greatest challenge was the journal’s rich past. There are simply too many great articles worth highlighting. The editorial board and I debated a few different themes, any of which would have been capable to featuring ten wonderful articles. I’m pleased to say that the UH Press supports the idea of having a new online collection each year, which not only lets us cover a range of themes but also lets us keep sharing this research with a broader audience.

UHP: In lieu of this year’s World History Association meeting, what resources would you point your colleagues to?

MPR: “Roads and Oceans: Rethinking Mobility and Migrations in World History” is one great resource. It’s a chance to revisit the journal’s past and think about how current conditions are changing our ideas about migration and open borders. The World History Association has been producing new content to help with the current conditions with Under the Baobab, an extended conversation about how the pandemic is changing our research and teaching. And World History Bulletin, another official publication of the WHA, has just published a special issue on teaching during the pandemic.

UHP: Finally, how have the closures affected your own research and teaching? How are arranging your work in light of this year’s events?

MPR: Like so many of us, transitioning to full-time online teaching overnight was a huge change, but thankfully I’m getting a handle on our “new normal” by teaching this summer. I had enough time and support from my institution to try some new things and rethink how my courses are structured. For my scholarship, I can only say it’s a great time to be an editor, because all of the work is online so it’s not a dramatic shift. I’m pleased to have a new edited volume, Russia in Asia: Imaginations, Interactions, and Realities, getting published this summer in addition to the new JWH collection. It’s starting up a new research project that’s taken a backseat for the moment, but there is a wealth of online materials to get started with.