Category: Southeast Asia

After the New Order: Space, Politics, and Jakarta

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After the New Order: Space, Politics, and JakartaThis new work explores the formation of populist urban programs in post-Suharto Jakarta and the cultural and political contradictions that have arisen as a result of the continuing influence of the Suharto-era’s neoliberal ideology of development. Analyzing a spectrum of urban agendas from waterfront city to green environment and housing for the poor, Kusno deepens our understanding of the spatial mediation of power, the interaction between elite and populist urban imaginings, and how past ideologies are integral to the present even as they are newly reconfigured.

After the New Order will be essential reading for anyone—including Asianists, urban historians, social scientists, architects, and planners—concerned with the interplay of space, power, and identity.

November 2013 | 304 pages | 33 illustrations
ISBN: 978-0-8248-3745-7 | $60.00s | Cloth

Writing Past Colonialism

UHM First Annual Filipino Books and Curriculum Fair

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In recognition of Filipino American History Month, the 1st Annual Filipino Books & Curriculum Fair will be held at the UHM College of Education on Tuesday, October 29, 1:30 to 4:00pm. Come by Wist Hall 133 and visit our display, as well as that of UH Bookstore and 15 other exhibitors.

Titles that we’ll be showing and taking orders for include language books by Teresita Ramos and Precy Espiritu, novels by José Rizal, and a sampling from distributed publishers Ateneo de Manila University Press and the University of the Philippines Press — the former is the publisher of Patricio Abinales’ Making Mindanao and Orthodoxy and History in the Muslim Mindanao Narrative. Works by Filipino American writers include Peter Bacho’s Entrys and Gabe Baltazar’s If It Swings, It’s Music and interviews of Jessica Hagedorn and Al Robles are featured in Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers. Our display will also show books on the Hawai‘i plantation experience, for example, Tomorrow’s Memories: A Diary, 1924–1928 by Angeles Monrayo.

For more information, click here.

Upcoming Talk by L. Ayu Saraswati, 2013 NWSA Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize Winner

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Saraswati-SensingBeautyOn Friday, October 18, 12:30–2:00 pm, author L. Ayu Saraswati, assistant professor in women’s studies at UH-Manoa, will speak on the topic of her book, Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia. Dr. Saraswati recently received the 2013 National Women’s Studies Association Gloria Anzaldúa book prize for her work, which explores and analyzes Indonesia’s changing beauty ideals.

Sponsored by the UHM Women’s Studies Colloquium Series and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, the free event will take place in Saunders Hall 244. University of Hawai‘i Bookstore will have books available for purchase. The public is invited to the talk, followed by a book signing and refreshments.

Sounding Out Heritage: Cultural Politics and the Social Practice of Quan Họ Folk Song in Northern Vietnam

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Tang China in Multi-Polar Asia

Sounding Out Heritage explores the cultural politics that have shaped the recent history and practice of a unique style of folk song that originated in Bắc Ninh province, northern Vietnam. The book delves into the rich and complicated history of quan họ, showing the changes it has undergone over the last sixty years as it moved from village practice onto the professional stage. Interweaving an examination of folk music, cultural nationalism, and cultural heritage with an in-depth ethnographic account of the changing social practice of quan họ folk song, author Lauren Meeker presents a vivid and historically contextualized picture of the quan họ “soundscape.”

Village practitioners, ordinary people who love to sing quan họ, must now negotiate increased attention from those outside the village and their own designation as “living treasures.” Professional singers, with their different performance styles and representational practices, have been incorporated into the quan họ soundscape in an effort to highlight and popularize the culture of Bắc Ninh province in the national context. Sounding Out Heritage offers an in-depth account of the impact of cultural politics on the lives and practices of quan họ folk singers in Vietnam and shows compellingly how a tradition can mean many things to many people.

2013, 200 pages, 18 illustrations
$45.00 ISBN: 978-0-8248-3568-2, Cloth
Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory

The Buddhist Schools of the Small Vehicle

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The Buddhist Schools of the Small VehicleAndré Bareau (1921–1993) was one of the foremost scholars of Buddhism of his generation. Dissatisfied with piecemeal and contradictory information on early Buddhist schools, he set out to construct a coherent and authoritative overview, which has remained the standard treatment in the field since its appearance in 1955. This book offers a close description and analysis of Bareau’s findings on the history, geographical whereabouts, and doctrinal positions of early schools of Buddhism. The Buddhist Schools of the Small Vehicle will be used by students and scholars as a primary resource and starting point for any discussion on the history and doctrines of early Buddhism and Buddhist schools. This seminal work is translated by Sara Boin-Webb, who across a career of four decades translated into English some of the most important French-language works of Buddhist scholarship.

“Bareau’s Les sectes bouddhiques was—and remains—a highly influential contribution to the study of Indian Buddhism in general, and of the doctrinal debates of the various schools or sects of Indian Buddhism in particular. More than half a century after its original publication, Les sectes remains a standard reference work. . . . This book will stimulate research for years to come. . . . A reliable English translation of this work, then, is a welcome and timely contribution. It will be of interest to upper-level undergraduate students in Asian religions, Asian history, and philosophy. It will be required reading for graduate students in Asian religions.” —Shayne Clarke, McMaster University

Published in association with The Buddhist Society Trust
July 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3566-8 / $65.00 (Cloth)

The Ancient Sites of Southeast Asia and Their Conservation

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A Heritage of RuinsThe ancient ruins of Southeast Asia have long sparked curiosity and romance in the world’s imagination. They appear in accounts of nineteenth-century French explorers, as props for Indiana Jones’ adventures, and more recently as the scene of Lady Lara Croft’s fantastical battle with the forces of evil. They have been featured in National Geographic magazine and serve as backdrops for popular television travel and reality shows. Now A Heritage of Ruins: The Ancient Sites of Southeast Asia and Their Conservation, William Chapman’s expansive new study explores the varied roles these monumental remains have played in the histories of Southeast Asia’s modern nations.

“William Chapman has produced a remarkably cogent and well-balanced portrayal of an emblematic Southeast Asian building type—the monumental ruin. He impressively presents the full array of influences—natural context, social history, and heritage protection legislation—that shape the existence of these architectural remains, and comments eloquently and insightfully on how they influence those who experience them today.” —John H. Stubbs, author of Time Honored: A Global View of Architectural Conservation, and director of the Preservation Studies program, Tulane University

July 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3631-3 / $59.00 (CLOTH)

Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive

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Situated TestimoniesThe Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer made a distinction between a “downstream” literary reality and an “upstream” historical reality. Pramoedya suggested that literature has an effect on the upstream flow of history and that it can in fact change history. In Situated Testimonies: Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive, Laurie J. Sears illuminates this process by considering a selection of Dutch Indies and Indonesian literary works that span the twentieth century and beyond and by showing how authors like Louis Couperus and Maria Dermoût help retell and remodel history.

“This is a remarkable book in the way it attempts to tease out and crash through the barriers of self-restricting and self-restraining area studies. Situated Testimonies poses a challenge to Indonesianists as well as to many beyond the field. It is an adventure embarked upon with the help of Freud, Lacan, and other friends and foes. Sears demonstrates both the benefits and tribulations of such an endeavor. At its best, her book attains an impressive simplicity as it uncovers a sense of the world in both its subjects—the colonial and postcolonial literary figures—and its author as she thinks and writes about them.” —Rudolf Mrazek, University of Michigan

June 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3683-2 / $57.00 (CLOTH)

New in the Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory Series

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Potent LandscapesPotent Landscapes: Place and Mobility in Eastern Indonesia, by Catherine Allerton, is an ethnographic investigation of the power of the landscape and the implications of that power for human needs, behavior, and emotions. Based on two years of fieldwork in rural Flores, the book situates place-making and mobility of the Manggarai within the larger contexts of diverse human-environment interactions as well as adat revival in postcolonial Indonesia. Although it focuses on social life in one region of eastern Indonesia, the work engages with broader theoretical discussions of landscape, travel, materiality, cultural politics, kinship, and animism.

“Potent Landscapes is a brilliant new work that breaks fresh ground in the anthropological study of place and culture in Southeast Asia. Bringing a phenomenological interest in ‘dwelling’ to her ethnographic portrayal of everyday life in the southern Manggarai settlements of West Flores, Indonesia, Catherine Allerton takes readers on a revealing and richly rewarding journey into the ‘shape of the land’ there. Her book offers a wealth of ideas and comparative material for scholars working in other parts of Asia and the Pacific, and an accessible account sure to fascinate and inspire students of anthropology.” —Kenneth M. George, University of Wisconsin-Madison

April 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3800-3 / $25.00 (PAPER)

Forest of StruggleIn a village community in the highlands of Cambodia’s Southwest, people struggle to rebuild their lives after nearly thirty years of war and genocide. Recovery is a tenuous process as villagers attempt to shape a future while contending with the terrible rupture of the Pol Pot era. Forest of Struggle: Moralities of Remembrance in Upland Cambodia, by Eve Monique Zucker, tracks the fragile progress of restoring the bonds of community in O’Thmaa and its environs, the site of a Khmer Rouge base and battlefield for nearly three decades between 1970 and 1998.

“With an ethnographer’s acumen, Zucker shows us how the members of a community in post-conflict Cambodia have sought to rebuild their lives, a process involving complicated issues of trust, social memory, and moral order. Forest of Struggle is a must-read for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of social suffering and the remaking of social worlds after prolonged conflict and genocide.” —Alexander Hinton, Rutgers University

April 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3805-8 / $28.00 (PAPER)

View a full list of titles in the series Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning and Memory.

UH Press at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, March 21-24, San Diego

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AAS Annual ConferenceUniversity of Hawai‘i Press will be exhibiting at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, March 21-24, at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego.

Editors Patricia Crosby and Pamela Kelley will be attending, together with marketing director Colins Kawai and Asia studies product manager Steve Hirashima. Please visit us at booths 307, 309, and 311, where we will be offering a 20% discount and free shipping in the U.S. (Free shipping applies only to orders received or placed at the conference.)

Our publishing partners will be exhibiting nearby: Ateneo de Manila University Press/University of the Philippines Press (booth 313), Cornell University East Asia Program (booth 308), MerwinAsia/Seoul Selection/Shanghai Press and Publishing Development (booth 314), NIAS Press-Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (booth 312), and NUS Press-Singapore (booth 310). See you in San Diego!

Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia

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Seeing BeautyIn Indonesia, light skin color has been desirable throughout recorded history. Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia, by L. Ayu Saraswati, explores Indonesia’s changing beauty ideals and traces them to a number of influences: first to ninth-century India and some of the oldest surviving Indonesian literary works; then, a thousand years later, to the impact of Dutch colonialism and the wartime occupation of Japan; and finally, in the post-colonial period, to the popularity of American culture.

“In this book L. Ayu Saraswati offers a lucid and compelling accounting of how ideas of beauty and race circulate and become affective in transnational Indonesia. Offering a distinctive approach to global culture as an affective domain, as well a sharp and nuanced critique of histories of whiteness, this book will be of tremendous value to all scholars and students interested in unlearning the affective and aesthetic scripts of race.” —Sara Ahmed, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012)

Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning and Memory
March 2013 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3736-5 / $25.00 (PAPER)

New Catalog Available: Asian Studies 2013

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Asian Studies 2013
The UH Press Asian Studies 2013 catalog is now available! The catalog has been redesigned to showcase our new and forthcoming Asian studies titles. (All books published prior to late 2012 and currently in print can be found at our website.) To view the PDF, click on the catalog cover image to the left.

Highlights include:

* An illustrated anthology of well-known masterpieces and unusual writing from 18th-century Edo’s counterculture — An Edo Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Mega-City, 1750–1850

*Four new titles in the Spatial Habitus series — The Hermit’s Hut: Asceticism and Architecutre in India, China’s Contested Capital: Architecture, Ritual, and Response in Nanjing, Architecture and Urbanism in Modern Korea, and Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China

* Short fiction from Japan’s foremost Marxist writer, Kobayashi Takiji, including a new translation of an anticapitalist classic that became a runaway bestseller in Japan in 2008, nearly eight decades after its publication — The Crab Cannery Ship and Other Novels of Struggle

* A timely collection of essays exploring Japan’s role in global environmental transformation and how Japanese ideas have shaped bodies and landscapes over the centuries — Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power

* An expansive new study on the varied roles Southeast Asia’s monumental remains (Angkor, Pagan, Borobudur, and Ayutthaya, among others) have played in the histories of its modern nations — A Heritage of Ruins: The Ancient Sites of Southeast Asia and Their Conservation

* Close description and analysis of the history, geographical whereabouts, and doctrinal positions of early schools of Buddhism by André Bareau, one of the foremost scholars of Buddhism of his generation — The Buddhist Schools of the Small Vehicle

* Two volumes in the new series Korean Classics Library — Salvation through Dissent: Tonghak Heterodoxy and Early Modern Korea and Imperatives of Culture: Selected Essays on Korean History, Literature, and Society

New Books in East Asian Studies Podcasts

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Listen to the latest New Books Network podcasts featuring interviews with Press authors Kevin Carr, Barbara Ambros, and Luke Roberts.

Previous podcasts featured authors Hank Glassman, Bryan Cuevas, Lori Meeks, and Daniel Veidlinger.

The New Books Network “is a consortium of podcasts dedicated to raising the level of public discourse by introducing serious authors to serious audiences.”

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