Special Features: Korean LGBTQ+ Literature, Remembering Linguists Robert Andrew Blust and Thomas Edward Dutton and more

Azalea

Volume 15 (2022)

From the editor Young-Jun Lee:

A century’s worth of change looks quite remarkable in Korean literature. Today’s young Koreans cannot read the same newspapers read by their grandparents’ generation. In less than a hundred years, the national written language has shifted from Chinese characters to Korean hangul, then briefly to Japanese as enforced under colonial rule, and then to the modern Korean language that we know today. During this process, remarkable sociocultural transformations dominated daily life. Over the first half of the 20th century, Koreans endured enormous political shifts most notably marked by colonization, the Korean War, and the ensuing divide of the country into separate political nations. Along the way, Korean literature registered these upheavals and fluctuations.

Notably, the literature of totalizing grand narrative, which concerned itself with the trajectory of nation-building, persisted in Korea until the 1980s. Ever since the end of the military dictatorship and the establishment of a civil government in the 1990s, however, that literature began to shift its focus to the lives of women. Now, those long ignored and marginalized—including queer women, as well as other queer people such as those who are non-binary— have also begun to emerge more strongly as published authors, even as they have been increasingly centered as subjects of literary narratives. The ongoing impact of this inclusive, expansionary shift
can be seen directly in AZALEA’s decision to focus on LGBTQ+ literature for its fifteenth issue.

Find more poetry, fiction, graphic shorts, and images at Project MUSE.

Oceanic Linguistics

Volume 61, Number 1 (2022)

The new issue includes the following articles and reviews:

The Place of Space in Oceanic Linguistics
Leah Pappas and Alexander Mawyer

Semantics and Pragmatics of Voice in Central Malagasy Oral Narratives
Penelope Howe

On the Nature of Proto-Oceanic *o in Southern Vanuatu (and Beyond)
John Lynch

Rare, but Real: Native Nasal Clusters in Northern Philippine Languages
Robert Blust

The Greater West Bomberai Language Family
Timothy Usher and Antoinette Schapper

The Phonology and Typological Position of Waima’a Consonants
Kirsten Culhane

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

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

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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.

UH Press around the Web: Summer Snips 2013

The Summer 2013 issue of Hyphen Magazine (#27 – The Sex Issue) has an interview with Amy Sueyoshi on her book, Queer Compulsions: Race, Nation, and Sexuality in the Affairs of Yone Noguchi. 

Stephen Hong Sohn’s Asian American Literature Fans Megapost blog review for May 31 included one for Relative Histories: Mediating History in Asian American Family Memoirs by Rocío Davis. (Look for the third title from the top.)

There’s still time to donate to an IndieGoGo project to raise money for a CD of 26 original and unique songs inspired by the poetry of the late Wayne Kaumualii Westlake. UH Press published the posthumous 2009 collection, Westlake: Poems by Wayne Kaumualii Westlake (1947-1984).

Robert J. Cabin, author of Restoring Paradise: Rethinking and Rebuilding Nature in Hawai‘i, wrote a related article in Earth Island Journal on successful ecological restoration projects. He also addressed questions on restoration ecology in an article earlier this year in American Scientist, titled “Nature Is Dead. Long Live Nature!” (Full article requires subscription or institutional access.)

JANM’S “Discover Nikkei” Interviews Amy Sueyoshi

SueyoshiQueerCompulsionsOn Saturday, January 19, 2:00 p.m., SFSU associate dean Amy Sueyoshi will appear at the Japanese American National Museum for a reading, discussion, and signing of her book, Queer Compulsions: Race, Nation, and Sexuality in the Affairs of Yone Noguchi. In advance of her talk, JANM’s Discover Nikkei online network has published an in-depth interview by Andrew Way Leong (Northwestern University), posted in two parts.

Click here to read part 1, then link to part 2 from there (or simply click here).

Dr. Sueyoshi will also give a talk at the San Francisco Public Library on Tuesday, February 26. For more details, see the SFPL calendar.

A review of Queer Compulsions published in this month’s The Gay & Lesbian Review, which calls the book “…an important study. It is also worthwhile as a fascinating portrait of biracial and same-sex relationships at a pivotal time in American history.” An equally positive review appeared earlier in Nichi Bei Weekly.

Race, Nation, and Sexuality in the Affairs of Yone Noguchi

Queer CompulsionsWhile confessing his love to fellow writer Charles Warren Stoddard, Yone Noguchi (1875–1947) had a child (future sculptor Isamu Noguchi) with his editor, Léonie Gilmour; became engaged to Washington Post reporter Ethel Armes; and upon his return to Japan married Matsu Takeda—all within a span of seven years. According to Amy Sueyoshi’s Queer Compulsions: Race, Nation, and Sexuality in the Affairs of Yone Noguchi, Noguchi was not a dedicated polyamorist: He deliberately deceived the three women, to whom he either pretended or promised marriage while already married. Sueyoshi argues further that Noguchi’s intimacies point to little-known realities of race and sexuality in turn-of-the-century America and illuminate how Asian immigrants negotiated America’s literary and arts community. As Noguchi maneuvered through cultural and linguistic differences, his affairs additionally assert how Japanese in America could forge romantic fulfillment during a period historians describe as one of extreme sexual deprivation and discrimination for Asians, particularly in California.

“There is no question that Amy Sueyoshi is a very gifted historian who has mined every available source on Yone Noguchi. Her work is as exhaustive and deep in its interrogation of the extant literature as one could possibly hope for. Moreover, it has placed the life history of Yone Noguchi in a broad sweep of various fields of academic inquiry that gives his particular experiences relevance well beyond the field of Asian American history. The story of this rather unknown and unremarkable poet is rife with intellectual and academic meaning well beyond the significance of a late nineteenth-century historical biography.” —Tomas Almaguer, San Francisco State University

February 2012 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3497-5 / $40.00 (CLOTH)

Desire and Difference in Indonesia

Falling into the Lesbi WorldFalling into the Lesbi World: Desire and Difference in Indonesia, by Evelyn Blackwood, offers a compelling view of sexual and gender difference through the everyday lives of tombois and their girlfriends (“femmes”) in the city of Padang, West Sumatra. While likening themselves to heterosexual couples, tombois and femmes contest and blur dominant constructions of gender and heterosexuality. Tombois are masculine females who identify as men and desire women; their girlfriends view themselves as normal women who desire men. Through rich, in-depth, and provocative stories, author Evelyn Blackwood shows how these same-sex Indonesian couples negotiate transgressive identities and desires and how their experiences speak to the struggles and desires of sexual and gender minorities everywhere.

Falling into the Lesbi World sheds valuable light on the ways in which locally distinctive sensibilities articulate with regional, national, and transnational discourses bearing on the making of gender and sexual identities among Indonesia’s Minangkabau. This is a very sophisticated, nuanced, and theoretically provocative piece of work that is simultaneously lucid and compelling; it will be of great interest to Southeast Asianists and others committed to understanding gender diversity and sexual subjectivities in postcolonial contexts and beyond.” —Michael G. Peletz, Emory University

September 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3487-6 / $24.00 (PAPER)