Journals: Founders of Asian Theatre, a Comparative Study of Empire + More

ATJ 40-1

Asian Theatre Journal

Volume 40, Number 1 (2023)

This new issue commemorates key individuals in Asian theatre. Editor Siyuan Liu explains:

This issue starts with two long-planned articles in ATJ’s ‘founders of the field’ series that started with two clusters of articles in 2011 (28.2) and 2013 (30.2), followed by a number of ‘founding mothers’ articles between 2014 and 2017 (31.1, 32.2, 33.2, 34.1), continuing in this issue with Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei’s profile of Betty Bernhard and Julie Iezzi’s article on Jonah Salz. Sorgenfrei focuses on Bernard’s extraordinary capacity in discovering and promoting aspects of Indian performance to the world through fundraising and sponsoring international engagements by India artists, students training and productions of India plays with Indian artists at Pomona College, as well as several research based films and videos, all of which made Bernard, as Sorgenfrei puts it, ‘an important influencer well before that concept became a social media meme.’

The second ‘founder’ article, written by Julie Iezzi, focuses on Jonah Salz, who stands out, in comparison to other founders profiled in this series, as a Western theatre director, producer, teacher, scholar, and translator primarily based in an Asian country, in his case Kyoto, Japan. Among Salz’s wide-ranging accomplishments, Iezzi focuses on his co-founded Noho Theatre Group that has produced hundreds of shows and toured internationally over forty years; his co-established Traditional Theatre Training (TTT) program that since 1984 has trained hundreds of artists in noh, kyōgen, and nihon buyō; and his research and publications, most notably as editor-in-chief of A History of Japanese Theatre, a monumental achievement via international collaboration.

Find more articles at Project MUSE.

Journal of World History

Special Issue: Global Travel, Exploration, and Comparative Study of Empire

Volume 34, Number 1 (2023)

In this new special issue Guest Editor Scott C. M. Bailey discusses the fascinating study of long-distance travelers during the late nineteenth century in this introduction:

This special issue addresses what can be gained from a comparative examination of long-distance travelers during the age of empire. Questions to address include: to what extent did the individual identities, personalities, and backgrounds of elite travelers relate to their opinions on the state of colonial or imperial affairs which they observed in their travels? Were imperial travelers’ observations representative of the imperial core’s opinions and assumptions about imperial spaces, including peripheral ones? To what degree did individual travelers who were traveling to destinations which were under the control of a rival imperial power provide descriptions or impressions which confirmed or rejected assumptions about the colonial or imperial relationship? Can travelers’ descriptions (those travelers from outside or competing empires) be used to provide an objective view of the nature of competing empires? How did factors like the occupations, educational backgrounds, class identifications, gender, life experiences, race, identity, or cultural backgrounds of individual travelers define or shape their descriptions? How did the purposes of these travels relate to the kinds of observations which were made? The articles in this special edition address these important questions, while also highlighting reasons why this era saw an increase in the volume and frequency of international long-distance travel.

Find more articles, review articles, and book reviews at Project MUSE.

Journal of World History, vol. 29, no. 1 (March 2018)

Journal of World History volume 29, number 1 arrives with three articles covering Brazil, China, and India:

Articles

  • The British Empire and the Suppression of the Slave Trade to Brazil: A Global History Analysis by Tâmis Parron

    • Abstract: This essay examines the connections between the British free trade experiment, the reorganizing of the British Empire and the ultimate suppression of the transatlantic slave trade to Brazil in its fully global operative context. While most analyses of the nineteenth-century transatlantic slave trade focus on bilateral diplomatic relations or national decision-making processes, this essay puts forth a broader analytical framework. It places the end of the transatlantic illegal slave trade to Brazil in 1850 within the dynamics of the world-economy. In a broader sense, this essay sheds new light on debates about capitalism and slavery as it reveals nineteenth-century capitalism not as a static background for historical analysis, but rather as a dialectical process moving through a sequence of disruptive commodity market integrations, each of which posed specific economic and political challenges for slaveholders and antislavery actors alike.
  • The Rise of Nationalism in a Cosmopolitan Port City: The Foreign Communities of Shanghai during the First World War by Tobit Vandamme

    • Abstract: By the early 1900s, globalization and imperialism had created cosmopolitan cities such as the Chinese treaty port of Shanghai, where foreign minorities lived side by side. The outbreak of the First World War put enormous pressure on these multiethnic urban societies. By exploring how the war altered the cohabitation of Westerners in Shanghai, this article connects with current debates on the mechanisms of longdistance nationalism and cosmopolitanism as well as on the importation of conflict in diaspora communities. The many imperial diasporas of Shanghai mostly lived in the French- and British-controlled territories, where the balance of power was renegotiated during the war. Analyzing local community newspapers and diplomatic archives, this article explains why nationalism superseded the shared feeling of cosmopolitanism that prevailed before the war. The cosmopolitan tradition and political complexity clearly delayed the arrival of the war at Shanghai, but could not prevent the process.
  • Present at the Creation: India, the Global Economy, and the Bretton Woods Conference by Aditya Balasubramanian and Srinath Raghavan

    • Abstract: This article considers India’s participation in the Bretton Woods conference, where the framework for the post-World War II global economic order emerged. Building on the new historiography of Bretton Woods as well as a more specialized literature on the Indian economy, it shows India’s role in Bretton Woods at the confluence of national, imperial, and global historical processes. The article argues that India’s presence in the conference shaped the evolution of the country’s relationship to international economic institutions. The article addresses India’s changing role in the British Empire and world economy, the evolution of a discourse of Indian economic development alongside anti-colonial nationalism, the formulation of Indian objectives for the conference in the aftermath of the economic dislocations of World War II, and the interpretation of the outcomes of the meeting at home that informed India’s subsequent ambiguous relationship with international economic organizations.

Plus 15 book reviews and books received.


Find the full text of the issue at Project MUSE


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00_29.1coverAbout the Journal

The Journal of World History publishes research into historical questions requiring the investigation of evidence on a global, comparative, cross-cultural, or transnational scale. It is devoted to the study of phenomena that transcend the boundaries of single states, regions, or cultures, such as large-scale population movements, long-distance trade, cross-cultural technology transfers, and the transnational spread of ideas.

Subscriptions

Individual subscription is by membership in the World History Association. Institutional subscriptions available through UH Press.

Submissions

The Journal of World History is proud to introduce a new article and peer review submission system, accessible now at at jwh.msubmit.net.

Journal of World History, vol. 28, nos. 3 & 4 (2017)

Excerpt from La Vie Indo-Chinoise
Japanese sex workers occupied a special place in the desires and fantasies of French colonial men in Asia as seen in ‘Our Hungarians,’ La Vie Indo-Chinoise, November 13, 1897. From “Sex and the Colonial City” in this issue.

Journal of World History volume 28, numbers 3&4 is a special double issue guest edited by Tracey Rizzo on Gender and Empire. It includes more than 400 pages of articles and book reviews from world history scholars.

From the Editor’s Introduction:

Gender and Empire as a subfield of world history goes beyond the study of the men and women who made and unmade empires. Intimacies generated ties that facilitated or impeded the modernization of family and nation, demarcating contact zones. Bodies–adorned, fetishized, public–displayed and negotiated imperial relations. Detritus, the material remains of empire and intimacy, lodged itself in the institutions and discourses of modernity. When world historians talk across boundaries and borders, we situate disjointed ruins in broader trends and patterns, without which they are mere curiosities. Assembled here: a Chinese scalp; a silver buckle from Malaya; a bawdy cartoon from Hanoi; a hybrid recipe from Nigeria; dossiers from Lebanon and El Salvador; government orders promoting or suppressing prostitution… Confined to a national or even imperial history, such fragments do not tell us anything about coloniality. Here they do.

Articles

Plus five more articles, 13 book reviews, books received, and the volume index.


Find the full text of the issue at Project MUSE


JWH28_3-4_cover1About the Journal

The Journal of World History publishes research into historical questions requiring the investigation of evidence on a global, comparative, cross-cultural, or transnational scale. It is devoted to the study of phenomena that transcend the boundaries of single states, regions, or cultures, such as large-scale population movements, long-distance trade, cross-cultural technology transfers, and the transnational spread of ideas.

Subscriptions

Individual subscription is by membership in the World History Association. Institutional subscriptions available through UH Press.

Submissions

The Journal of World History is proud to introduce a new article and peer review submission system, accessible now at at jwh.msubmit.net.