30% OFF on Music and Performing Arts of Asia and the Pacific

USE CODE SEM2023

Free U.S. domestic shipping on orders of $100 or more
Offer ends November 30, 2023

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE MUSIC AND PERFORMING ARTS OF ASIA AND THE PACIFIC SERIES


Online only. Must be in stock. No phone orders. No combined coupons. Allow 2-6 weeks for delivery.

Continue reading “30% OFF on Music and Performing Arts of Asia and the Pacific”

Honoring David L. Rolsten, Sonic Narratives in Modern Korea  + Girls in Japanese Literature

CHINOPERL

Volume 41, Number 1 (2022)

Special Issue: Honoring David L. Rolston

Associate Editor Catherine Swatek and Editorial Board Member Robert E. Hegel remember Rolston in the following introduction:

Given his publication record, one might assume that David L. Rolston is a scholar of narrative fiction. For his first major publication, David served as editor of How to Read the Chinese Novel, a milestone in providing English-language readers a glimpse of reading practices and practical criticism contemporaneous with Ming and Qing novels themselves. Not merely the compiler of the translations that comprise six of the book’s seven chapters, David’s work can be seen throughout the volume, from adding innumerable notes and explanations to the “How to Read” (dufa讀法) translations; to writing essays on the sources, history, and formal aspects of traditional fiction criticism; to compiling explanatory appendices and an extensive bibliography for each of the masterworks covered. This project was completed before David finished his Chicago doctorate.

Find more special features and articles at Project MUSE.

Korean Studies 46 (2022)

Korean Studies

Volume 46, Number 2 (2021)

Special Section: “Music That Moves: Sonic Narratives in Modern Korea”

This Special Section features discussion on 1960’s protect songs to K-pop idols. Editor Cheehyung Harrison Kim notes:

Culture is at once a medium through which we make sense of the
world (for good or ill), a field of empowerment for the underprivileged, and a source of hegemony for the state and corporations. This cultural complexity is discernible in South Korea’s current political landscape, and it is also the very theme explored in this volume’s Special Section “Music That Moves: Sonic Narratives in Modern Korea,” dexterously guest edited by Dafna Zur and Susan Hwang. In Katherine Lee’s elegant piece on the World Vision Korean Orphan Choir, musical performance is at the heart of transnational religiosity and Cold War politics. Transnationalism is also the framework of Dafna Zur and Yoon Joo Hwang’s original research on children’s music during the colonial period, when the merger between western style of songwriting and Korean emotionality unevenly transpired in the genre of tongyo. Music as a field of popular resistance is the core of Pil Ho Kim’s audacious piece on South Korea’s 1960s protest songs, which, for Kim, is a pre-minjung expression of the multitude. Susan Hwang’s emotionally prodigious article, too, is on the resistive and resilient aspect of music, which, in the aftermath of the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, served as a crucial repertoire for the counter-state. From the opposite side, music as practice of hegemonic efficacy is dealt with in Alexandra Leonzini and Peter Moody’s intricate article on North Korea’s sonic culture, as it is done in Roald Maliangkay’s perspicacious study on South Korea’s use of K-pop in marketing. Whether the hegemonic entity is the state or a corporation, music is, in these two articles, a potent medium of influence.

Find more special features and articles at Project MUSE.

USJWJ62

U.S. Japan Women’s Journal

Volume 62 (2022)

Special Issue: Girls and Literature

As expressed by authors Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase and Wakako Suzuki in the introduction:

The literary genre shōjo shōsetsu emerged in conjunction with the rise of girls’ education in the Meiji period. Early stories were meant to educate readers to become “good wives and wise mothers.” Accordingly, shōjo shōsetsu endured restrictions on the narratives they could tell, limiting the breadth of their authors’ artistic and literary possibilities. Shōjo shōsetsu evolved and diversified in the postwar era and, especially starting in the 1980s, became a means for young female authors to empower themselves. Shōjo shōsetsu have declined in popularity recently as readers consume stories more broadly across media and genres. The goal of this special issue is to contemplate the function, meanings, and problems of shōjo shōsetsu. Instead of merely confining ourselves to a rigid, unified notion of shōjo shōsetsu, we consider shōjo characters from the wider literary world, investigating their roles, functions, and cultural implications.


The new issue includes the following articles:

Introduction: Girls and Literature
イントロダクション:少女と文学

Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase and Wakako Suzuki

Trees That Grow Kimono (1895)
着物のなる木

Wakamatsu Shizuko 若松賤子
Translated by Wakako Suzuki

Kawabata Yasunari’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa as the
Territory of the Dispossessed Girl

追い立てられた少女の領域としての『浅草紅団』
Barbara Hartley

Love and Sexuality in Postwar Girls’ Culture: Examining
Tomishima Takeo’s Junior Fictiona
戦後少女文化における恋愛と性愛:富島健夫の

ジュニア小説をめぐって
Hiromi Tsuchiya Dollase

Countdown to the Demise of Girls’ Novels
少女小説のカウントダウンの開始

Kume Yoriko 久米依子
Translated and Introduced by Barbara Hartley

Find more articles at Project MUSE.

New Journal Special Issues: The Religiosity of Tonghak, Vietnamese Linguistics + More

Oregon beautiful picture

Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistic Society

Special Issue:

Vietnamese Linguistics: State of the Field

The new issue features the following introduction by Trang Phan, John Phan, and Mark J. Alves

The current issue is the result of a workshop held at the Harvard Yenching Institute in April of 2021, entitled Vietnamese Linguistics, Typology and Language Universals, and which featured nineteen linguists working on diverse aspects of the Vietnamese language, ranging from semantics to historical phonology. Our purpose in gathering was to take stock of the great leaps in Vietnamese linguistic research that have occurred over the past few decades, to bring together cutting-edge research from each subdiscipline, and to begin a new collaborative dialogue on Vietnamese linguistics, typology, and language universals. Most of all, it was our belief that the time had come to reconsider Vietnamese linguistics as a unified field of inquiry. As a result, a new academic organization was founded: the International Society of Vietnamese Linguistics.
In the past twenty years, research into the Vietnamese language has advanced exponentially, in tandem with developments in our understanding of syntax, semantics, phonetics, and phonology—both on the synchronic and diachronic levels. Specific work on the Vietnamese language now informs and even leads broader linguistic inquiry in a number of unprecedented ways. These new developments invite a concentration of state-the-field research into a single volume, one that will serve not only to summarize current issues in each subdiscipline of Vietnamese linguistics, but also to initiate a longer, more collaborative conversation about the Vietnamese language.
Our goals in this special issue are thus twofold: first, we seek to provide a snapshot of current research into Vietnamese syntax, semantics, phonology, and phonetics, from both the historical and synchronic points of view, that may serve as a resource for linguists interested in exploring our current understanding of the Vietnamese language. Second, we hope that this issue will also serve as an invitation to all linguists working on the Vietnamese language or related languages to contribute to a broader, more cosmopolitan discussion—one in which discoveries of one subdiscipline may serve to inform or enlighten another.


Find more articles at eVols.

New Journal Issues: “Contagious Magic” in Japanese Theatre, Logistics of the Natural History Trade, Hawai‘i’s Toxic Plants + More

 

New Journal Issues: Schooling Journeys in the Southwestern Pacific, #KuToo Online Feminist Movement in Japan, Geographic Analysis of COVID-19 in L.A. + More

The Contemporary Pacific

Volume 22, Issue 2 (2021)

Special Issue: Schooling Journeys in the Southwestern Pacific

From the Guest Editors Rachel Emerine Hicks, Debra McDougall, and David Oakeshott in The Promise of Education: Schooling Journeys in the Southwester Pacific:

“Schooling journeys” is more than a metaphor in the southwestern Pacific. To step into a classroom, children and youth often travel hours each day or live for months at a time away from their families. The journey of schooling is rarely direct; it often winds between formal and informal learning and in and out of school, work, and home life. And the journey is expensive; many families struggle mightily to gather the money for fees, school supplies, uniforms, and transportation. Young people embark on these precarious journeys, and their families make sacrifices to support them, because schooling promises a better life—a move away from the backbreaking labor of subsistence agriculture toward a reliable salary that will better support their family and community. Because of the structural inequalities in school and a lack of jobs for those who complete schooling, however, few experience the socioeconomic advancement schooling promises. Still, students and their families continue to hope that schooling will lead to well-paid work. Even more important, though, going to school is seen as key to being a competent and effective person in society—increasingly for both women and men.

Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers

Volume 83 (2021)

Editor Craig S. Revels reflects over the COVID-19 pandemic and how it has affected geographers and members as he states:

Last year’s volume was published in a time of great uncertainty as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world, and this year’s unfortunately arrives under similar conditions, slowly improving though they may be. The tragedies, disruptions, and general state of societal affairs during the pandemic will not soon be forgotten…

Geographers have been at the forefront of research into the spread of COVID-19 since the earliest days of the pandemic, and Steve Graves and Petra Nichols contribute an analytical perspective on infection rates in Los Angeles County. In particular, they statistically identify a causal relationship between infection and a range of key socioeconomic and demographic variables, a relationship influencing the location and rate of spread for the disease. They leave us to consider how those factors must be addressed in any preparations for future public health crises.

In a significantly different context, Ray Sumner and John Menary
demonstrate that taking students into the field, always a valuable exercise, is even more rewarding when it leads to unexpected discoveries and challenges our carefully laid plans. In this case, a straightforward field methods class oriented around the Los Angeles River instead became an open-ended, student-driven exploration into the social dimensions of heritage, ethnicity,
culture, and urban development.

New Journal Special Features: Gender Trouble in Korean Literature, Unsettling Korean Migration + Biography forum on Behrouz Boochani

Azalea 14 (2021)

Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture

Volume 14 (2021)

Special Feature: Korean Genre Fiction; O Chang-hwan; and Gender Trouble In Korean Literature

From the Editor Young Jung-Lee:

One of the most important recent shifts in Korean literature is found in gender conflict. This “Special Feature: Gender Trouble in Korean Literature and Society,” guest-edited by Hye-Ryoung Lee, shows a fundamentally new perspective through six scholars reading Korean Literature and Society. Over the past decade, the #MeToo Movement has shaken the world, and Korean society has been no exception, as can be seen in Choi Young-mi’s poem “En,”  introduced here with six critical essays. Even before its publication, “En” was the focus of media attention, and it remained a hot topic in Korean society for years due to Choi’s high-profile court battles.

biography

Volume 43, Number 4 (2020)

Special Feature: A Forum on Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains


From Coeditor Anna Poletti:

With this forum, we, the editors of Biography, inaugurate a new feature of the journal that aims to respond to and amplify specific examples of the power of life writing as a cultural, political, and social practice, and which document key moments in the evolution of that practice. In this forum, No Friend but the Mountains is discussed as both a profoundly localized text responding to, making knowledge about, and exposing a highly specific and complex set of conditions, and as a uniquely transnational text that speaks to and about a global phenomenon. Its highly innovative use of life writing as a narrative technique and epistemological practice warranted, in our minds, a concentrated response from the journal. Commissioning and editing this response has renewed my appreciation for the primary concerns of lifewriting scholarship: tracking the mercurial power of personal storytelling to crystalize the contemporary moment in such a way that new knowledge emerges from the entanglements it depicts, and the entanglements it drags its readers into.

Korean Studies

Volume 45 (2021)

Special Section: Unsettling Korean Migration: Multiple Trajectories and Experiences

From the Editor Cheehyun Harrison Kim:

This analytic potency of migration is superbly demonstrated in this volume’s Special Section Unsettling Korean Migration: Multiple Trajectories and Experiences, guest edited by Sunhee Koo (The University of Auckland) and Jihye Kim (The University of Central Lancashire). Sunhee Koo and Jihye Kim have brought together papers on labor (Yonson Ahn and Jihye Kim), ritual life (Marcus Bell), cultural identity (Sunhee Koo), and artistic production (Hee-seung Irene Lee and Soojin Kim). The six engrossing articles deal with how the Korean diaspora—in Argentina, Germany, Japan, China, and the United States—have shaped and represented their particular situations through negotiation, resilience, and creativity. The authors are highly critical of any national framework, and they see diasporic life as contexts of not only sorrow and sacrifice but also innovation and regeneration. Sunhee Koo and Jihye Kim offer a detailed explanation in their Introduction.

Oceanic Linguistics

Volume 60, Number 1 (2021)

The new issue includes the following articles:

Avaipa, a Language of Central Bougainville
Jason Brown,Melissa Irvine

East Polynesian Subgrouping and Homeland Implications Within the Northern Outlier–East Polynesian Hypothesis
William H. Wilson

Toward a Comparative Typology of ‘Eating’ in Kanak Languages
Anne-Laure Dotte, Claire Moyse-Faurie

Find more research articles and reviews at Project MUSE.

Philosophy East and West

Volume 71, Number 4 (2021)

The new issue included the following articles and translations:

Jian’Ai: Considerations From the “Greater Selection”
Susan Blake

Patterning the Myriad Things: Holism, Harmony, and Anthropogenic Influence in the Huainanzi
Matthew Hamm

Confucianism and Totalitarianism: An Arendtian Reconsideration of Mencius versus Xunzi
Lee Wilson

“America’s National Character” by Watsuji Tetsurō: A Translation
Kyle Michael James Shuttleworth, Sayaka Shuttleworth, Watsuji Tetsurō

Find more research articles, translations, and reviews at Project MUSE.

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.

Profile of Jazz Artist Gabe Baltazar Airs on Voice of America

The Paul Togawa Quartet, circa late 1950s.
The Paul Togawa Quartet, circa late 1950s. L to R: Gabe Baltazar, Paul Togawa, Dick Johnston, Buddy Woodson.

Broadcast journalist Heidi Chang‘s story on Gabe Baltazar Jr. as a pioneering Asian American jazz musician aired internationally on Voice of America. The show is archived on the VOA website; click here to read and listen (and comment!). It reveals just a sampling of what is in Gabe’s autobiography, If It Swings, It’s Music.

Four Plays from the Bunraku Puppet Theater

The Bunraku Puppet Theatre of JapanThe plays presented in The Bunraku Puppet Theatre of Japan: Honor, Vengeance, and Love in Four Plays of the 18th and 19th Centuries, translated and annotated by Stanleigh H. Jones, were first performed between 1769 and 1832, a time when the Japanese puppet theatre known as Bunraku was beginning to lose its pre-eminence to Kabuki. During this period, however, several important puppet plays were created that went on to become standards in both the Bunraku and Kabuki repertoires; three of the plays in this volume achieved this level of importance. This span of some sixty-odd years was also a formative one in the development of how plays were presented, an important feature in the modern staging of works from the traditional plebeian theatre. Only a handful of complete and uncut plays—often as much as ten hours long—are produced in Bunraku or Kabuki nowadays; included here is one of these. Two among the four plays contained in this volume are examples of the much more common practice of staging a single popular act or scene from a much longer drama that itself is seldom, if ever, performed in its entirety today.

Newly translated and illustrated for the general reader and the specialist, the plays are accompanied by informative introductions, extensive notes on stage action, and discussions of the various changes that Bunraku underwent, particularly in the latter half of the eighteenth century, its golden age.

December 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3680-1 / $29.00 (PAPER)