New Books:
Asia


Presenting an analysis of the tension between nationalism and globalization in China since the beginning of the ‘reform and opening’ period in the late 1970s to the present day, this book makes a unique contribution to the on-going debate on the nature of Chinese nationalism. It shows how nationalism is used to link together key areas of policy making, including economic policy, national unification and foreign policy.

Hughes provides historical context to the debate by examining how nationalism became incorporated into the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1980s and the ways in which this strengthened and combined with globalization discourse through the domestic crisis of the Tiananmen Massacre and the external shock of the Cold War’s conclusion. The different perspectives towards this resulting orthodoxy are discussed, including those of the state and dissent in mainland China and the alternative views from Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Based on Chinese sources throughout, this book offers a systematic treatment of Chinese nationalism, providing conceptual insights that allow the reader to grasp the complex weave of Chinese nationalist sentiment today and its implications for the future.

Hsiao-ting Lin, Tibet and Nationalist China's Frontier: Intrigues and Ethnopolitics, 1928-49.  Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006.   ISBN: 9780774813013.  List Price: (CA) $85.00 (Hardcover)

In this ground-breaking study, Hsiao-ting Lin demonstrates that the Chinese frontier was the subject neither of concerted aggression on the part of a centralized and indoctrinated Chinese government nor of an ideologically driven nationalist ethnopolitics. Instead, Nationalist sovereignty over Tibet and other border regions was the result of rhetorical grandstanding by Chiang Kai-shek and his regime. Tibet and Nationalist China's Frontier is invaluable for an understanding of past and present China-Tibet relations.

Penny Edwards, Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860-1945.  Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007.  ISBN: 9780824829230.  List Price: $62.00 (Cloth)

This strikingly original study of Cambodian nationalism brings to life eight turbulent decades of cultural change and sheds new light on the colonial ancestry of Pol Pot’s murderous dystopia. Penny Edwards recreates the intellectual milieux and cultural traffic linking Europe and empire, interweaving analysis of key movements and ideas in the French Protectorate of Cambodge with contemporary developments in the Métropole. From the naturalist Henri Mouhot’s expedition to Angkor in 1860 to the nationalist Son Ngoc Thanh’s short-lived premiership in 1945, this history of ideas tracks the talented Cambodian and French men and women who shaped the contours of the modern Khmer nation. Their visions and ambitions played out within a shifting landscape of Angkorean temples, Parisian museums, Khmer printing presses, world’s fairs, Buddhist monasteries, and Cambodian youth hostels. This is cross-cultural history at its best.

With its fresh take on the dynamics of colonialism and nationalism, Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation will become essential reading for scholars of history, politics, and society in Southeast Asia. Edwards’ nuanced analysis of Buddhism and her consideration of Angkor’s emergence as a national monument will be of particular interest to students of Asian and European religion, museology, heritage studies, and art history. As a highly readable guide to Cambodia’s recent past, it will also appeal to specialists in modern French history, cultural studies, and colonialism, as well as readers with a general interest in Cambodia.

Joel S. Kahn, Other Malays: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Malay World.  Honolulu: Asian Studies Association of Australia in association with the University of Hawaii Press, 2006.  ISBN: 9780824831073.  List Price: $28.00 (Paper)

This stimulating new reading of constructions of ethnicity in Malaysia and Singapore is an important contribution to understanding the powerful linkages between ethnicity, identity, and nationalism in multiethnic Southeast Asia.

The narrative of Malay identity devised by Malay nationalists, writers, and filmmakers in the late colonial period associated Malayness with the village (kampung), envisaged as static, ethnically homogenous, classless, indigenous, subsistence-oriented, rural, embedded in family and community, and loyal to a royal court. Joel Kahn challenges the kampung version of Malayness, arguing that it ignores the immigration of Malays from outside the peninsula to participate in trade or commercial agriculture, the substantial Malay population in towns and cities, and the reformist Muslims who argued for a common bond in Islam and played down Malayness.

Kyong Ju Kim, The Development of Modern South Korea: State Formation, Capitalist Development and National Identity.  London: Routledge, 2006.  ISBN: 9780415321921.  List Price: £65.00

The Development of Modern South Korea provides a comprehensive analysis of South Korean modernization by examining the dimensions of state formation, capitalist development and nationalism. Taking a comparative and interdisciplinary approach this book highlights the most characteristic features of South Korean modernity in relation to its historical conditions, institution traditions and cultural values paying particular attention to Korean's pre-modern civilization.

Vatthana Pholsena, Post-War Laos: The Politics of Culture, History, and Identity.  Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.  ISBN: 9780801473203.  List Price: $22.95 (Paper)

Three decades after the conclusion of the civil war that brought the communist Pathet Lao to power, the leaders of the Lao People's Democratic Republic are still searching for a compelling and unifying national identity. As detailed in Postwar Laos—a rigorously researched, cogently argued, and pathbreaking book—Laotian nationalism is caught between the rhetoric of preservation and the desire for modernity. Using fine-grained analysis of substantial ethnographic and archival material, Vatthana Pholsena sheds light on the politics of identity, the geographies of memory, and the power of historical narrative in contemporary Laos.

Pholsena pays particular attention to the country’s ethnic minorities, who had been marginalized—politically, administratively, and symbolically—by the French colonial government, which ruled for fifty years, and by its Royal Lao successor. Many members of these minorities fought for the Lao People’s Liberation Army in the country’s civil war (1960–1975), though, and were thus exposed to the processes of modern politics. The first book to examine the impact of such forces on Laos’s ethnic minorities and their perception of Laotian nationalism, Postwar Laos also refines established theories of nationalism. Pholsena addresses a weakness common to all: the tendency to deny agency to individuals, who may in fact interpret their relationship to, and place within, the nation in a variety of ways that change according to time and circumstance.

Craig J. Reynolds, Seditious Histories: Contesting Thai and Southeast Asian Pasts.  Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006.  ISBN: 0295986107.  List Price: $35.00 (Paper)

This collection of eleven essays by senior Asianist Craig Reynolds features debates about meaning in Southeast Asian and Thai history. He explores themes that have hitherto been treated superficially in Thai historical writing, including Siam's semicolonialism in the late nineteenth century, the concepts of militarism and masculinity, collective memory and dynastic succession, the relationship of manual knowledge to ethnoscience, and the dialectics of globalization. Other more familiar topics under Reynolds's microscope, treated with new material and approaches, include cultural nationalism and religious history.

Naoko Shimazu, Nationalisms in Japan.  London: Routledge, 2006.  ISBN: 9780415400534.  List Price: £65.00 (Hardcover)

Nationalisms in Japan brings together leading specialists in the field to discuss how notions of ‘nationalism’ in modern Japan impinges on all aspects of social, political and cultural understanding of the Japanese nation or the Japanese state. This book is clearly presented and jargon-free, and encompasses a chronological period of roughly two hundred years, beginning with a discussion of some of the early Japanese national thinkers of the Mito School, and ending with a contemporary discussion of the official visits made by Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichiro to the highly controversial Yasukuni Shrine. This wide chronological period allows for important observations about the evolution of nationalism, suggesting that Japan actually houses multiple ‘nationalisms’.

Gi-Wook Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006.  ISBN: 080475071.  List Price: $65.00 (Cloth).  ISBN: 080475408X.  List Price: $24.95 (Paper)

This book explains the roots, politics, and legacy of Korean ethnic nationalism, which is based on the sense of a shared bloodline and ancestry. Belief in a racially distinct and ethnically homogeneous nation is widely shared on both sides of the Korean peninsula, although some scholars believe it is a myth with little historical basis. Finding both positions problematic and treating identity formation as a social and historical construct that has crucial behavioral consequences, this book examines how such a blood-based notion has become a dominant source of Korean identity, overriding other forms of identity in the modern era. It also looks at how the politics of national identity have played out in various contexts in Korea: semicolonialism, civil war, authoritarian politics, democratization, territorial division, and globalization

Dennis Washburn, Translating Mount Fuji: Modern Japanese Fiction and the Ethics of Identity.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.  ISBN: 023113892X.  List Price: $40.00 (Cloth)

Dennis Washburn traces the changing character of Japanese national identity in the works of six major authors.  By focusing on certain interconnected themes, Washburn illuminates the contradictory desires of a nation trapped between emulating the West and preserving the traditions of Asia.

Washburn begins with Ueda's Ugetsu monogatari (Tales of Moonlight and Rain) and its preoccupation with the distant past, a sense of loss, and the connection between values and identity. He then considers the use of narrative realism and the metaphor of translation in Soseki's Sanshiro; the relationship between ideology and selfhood in Ogai's Seinen; Yokomitsu Riichi's attempt to synthesize the national and the cosmopolitan; Ooka Shohei's post-World War II representations of the ethical and spiritual crises confronting his age; and Mishima's innovative play with the aesthetics of the inauthentic and the artistry of kitsch.

Washburn's brilliant analysis teases out common themes concerning the illustration ofmoral and aesthetic values, the crucial role of autonomy and authenticity in defining notions of culture, the impact of cultural translation on ideas of nation and subjectivity, the ethics of identity, and the hybrid quality of modern Japanese society. He pinpoints the persistent anxiety that influenced these authors' writings, a struggle to translate rhetorical forms of Western literature while preserving elements of the pre-Meiji tradition.