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The Politics of Imagining Asia

Author: Hui Wang

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2011-07-15

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0674061357

In this bold, provocative collection, Wang Hui confronts some of the major issues concerning modern China and the status quo of contemporary Chinese thought. The book’s overarching theme is the possibility of an alternative modernity that does not rely on imported conceptions of Chinese history and its legacy. Wang Hui argues that current models, based largely on Western notions of empire and the nation-state, fail to account for the richness and diversity of pre-modern Chinese historical practice. At the same time, he refrains from offering an exclusively Chinese perspective and placing China in an intellectual ghetto. Navigating terrain on regional language and politics, he draws on China’s unique past to expose the inadequacies of European-born standards for assessing modern China’s evolution. He takes issue particularly with the way in which nation-state logic has dominated politically charged concerns like Chinese language standardization and “The Tibetan Question.” His stance is critical—and often controversial—but he locates hope in the kinds of complex, multifaceted arrangements that defined China and much of Asia for centuries. The Politics of Imagining Asia challenges us not only to re-examine our theories of “Asia” but to reconsider what “Europe” means as well. As Theodore Huters writes in his introduction, “Wang Hui’s concerns extend beyond China and Asia to an ambition to rethink world history as a whole.”

Imagining Asia in the Americas

Author: Zelideth María Rivas

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2016-09-16

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 0813585236

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For centuries, Asian immigrants have been making vital contributions to the cultures of North and South America. Yet in many of these countries, Asians are commonly viewed as undifferentiated racial “others,” lumped together as chinos regardless of whether they have Chinese ancestry. How might this struggle for recognition in their adopted homelands affect the ways that Asians in the Americas imagine community and cultural identity? The essays in Imagining Asia in the Americas investigate the myriad ways that Asians throughout the Americas use language, literature, religion, commerce, and other cultural practices to establish a sense of community, commemorate their countries of origin, and anticipate the possibilities presented by life in a new land. Focusing on a variety of locations across South America, Central America, the Caribbean, and the United States, the book’s contributors reveal the rich diversity of Asian American identities. Yet taken together, they provide an illuminating portrait of how immigrants negotiate between their native and adopted cultures. Drawing from a rich array of source materials, including texts in Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Gujarati that have never before been translated into English, this collection represents a groundbreaking work of scholarship. Through its unique comparative approach, Imagining Asia in the Americas opens up a conversation between various Asian communities within the Americas and beyond.

Re-Imagining Creative Cities in Twenty-First Century Asia

Author: Xin Gu

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-11-20

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 3030462919

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This book responds to the lack of Asian representation in creative cities literature. It aims to use the creative cities paradigm as part of a wider process involving first, a rapid de-industrialisation in Asia that has left a void for new development models, resulting in a popular uptake of cultural economies in Asian cities; and second, the congruence and conflicts of traditional and modern cultural values leading to a necessary re-interpretation and re-imagination of cities as places for cultural production and cultural consumption. Focusing on the ‘Asian century’, it seeks to recognise and highlight the rapid rise of these cities and how they have stepped up to the challenge of transforming and regenerating themselves. The book aims to re-define what it means to be an Asian creative city and generate more dialogue and new debate around different urban issues.

Imagining Japan in Post-war East Asia

Author: Paul Morris

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-03-26

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1134684975

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In the decades since her defeat in the Second World War, Japan has continued to loom large in the national imagination of many of her East Asian neighbours. While for many, Japan still conjures up images of rampant military brutality, at different times and in different communities, alternative images of the Japanese ‘Other’ have vied for predominance – in ways that remain poorly understood, not least within Japan itself. Imagining Japan in Postwar East Asia analyses the portrayal of Japan in the societies of East and Southeast Asia, and asks how and why this has changed in recent decades, and what these changing images of Japan reveal about the ways in which these societies construct their own identities. It examines the role played by an imagined ‘Japan’ in the construction of national selves across the East Asian region, as mediated through a broad range of media ranging from school curricula and textbooks to film, television, literature and comics. Commencing with an extensive thematic and comparative overview chapter, the volume also includes contributions focusing specifically on Chinese societies (the mainland PRC, Hong Kong and Taiwan), Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore. These studies show how changes in the representation of Japan have been related to political, social and cultural shifts within the societies of East Asia – and in particular to the ways in which these societies have imagined or constructed their own identities. Bringing together contributors working in the fields of education, anthropology, history, sociology, political science and media studies, this interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to all students and scholars concerned with issues of identity, politics and culture in the societies of East Asia, and to those seeking a deeper understanding of Japan’s fraught relations with its regional neighbours.

Imagining the Nation

Author: David Leiwei Li

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 9780804741309

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This book identifies the forces behind the explosive growth in Asian American literature. It charts its emergence and explores both the unique place of Asian Americans in American culture and what that place says about the way Americanness is defined.

Techno-Orientalism

Author: David S. Roh

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2015-04-17

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0813575559

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What will the future look like? To judge from many speculative fiction films and books, from Blade Runner to Cloud Atlas, the future will be full of cities that resemble Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, and it will be populated mainly by cold, unfeeling citizens who act like robots. Techno-Orientalism investigates the phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hyper-technological terms in literary, cinematic, and new media representations, while critically examining the stereotype of Asians as both technologically advanced and intellectually primitive, in dire need of Western consciousness-raising. The collection’s fourteen original essays trace the discourse of techno-orientalism across a wide array of media, from radio serials to cyberpunk novels, from Sax Rohmer’s Dr. Fu Manchu to Firefly. Applying a variety of theoretical, historical, and interpretive approaches, the contributors consider techno-orientalism a truly global phenomenon. In part, they tackle the key question of how these stereotypes serve to both express and assuage Western anxieties about Asia’s growing cultural influence and economic dominance. Yet the book also examines artists who have appropriated techno-orientalist tropes in order to critique racist and imperialist attitudes. Techno-Orientalism is the first collection to define and critically analyze a phenomenon that pervades both science fiction and real-world news coverage of Asia. With essays on subjects ranging from wartime rhetoric of race and technology to science fiction by contemporary Asian American writers to the cultural implications of Korean gamers, this volume offers innovative perspectives and broadens conventional discussions in Asian American Cultural studies.

Imagining Germany Imagining Asia

Author: Veronika Fuechtner

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1571135480

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This collection of new essays explores how Germany's imagined Asia informed its national fantasies at crucial historical junctures. It will influence future scholarly explorations of Asian-German cultural transfer. The first collection of essays in the new field of Asian-German Studies, Imagining Germany Imagining Asia demonstrates that Germany and Asia have always shared cultural spaces. Indeed, since the time of the German Enlightenment, Asia served as the foil for fantasies of sexuality, escape, danger, competition, and racial and spiritual purity that were central to foundational ideas of a cohesive German national culture during crucial historical junctures such as fascism or reunification. By exploring the complex and varied phenomenon of German "Orientalism," these essays argue that the relation between an imagined Germany and an imagined Asia defies the idea of a one-way influence, instead conceiving of their cultural transfers and synergies as multidirectional and mutually perpetuating. Examining literary and non-literary texts from the eighteenth century to the present, these essays cover a wide rangeof topics and genres in disciplines including philosophy, film and visual culture, theater, literary studies, and the history of science. Ideally positioned to shape further contributions, Imagining Germany Imagining Asiawill attract a wide range of readers interested in German, Asian, colonial, postcolonial, and transnational studies. Contributors: Sai Bhatawadekar, Petra Fachinger, Veronika Fuechtner, Randall Halle, David D. Kim, Hoi-eun Kim, Kamakshi Murti, Perry Myers, Mary Rhiel, Qinna Shen, Quinn Slobodian, Chunjie Zhang Veronika Fuechtner is Associate Professor of German at Dartmouth College. Mary Rhiel is Associate Professor of German at the University of New Hampshire.

The Interethnic Imagination

Author: Caroline Rody

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 0195377362

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Rody proposes a new paradigm for understanding the changing terrain of contemporary fiction. She claims that what we have long read as ethnic literature is in the process of becoming 'interethnic'. Examining an extensive range of Asian American fictions, she offers readings of three especially compelling examples.

India in the Chinese Imagination

Author: John Kieschnick

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2014-01-23

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0812245601

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In this collection of original essays, leading Asian studies scholars take a new look at the way the Chinese conceived of India in their literature, art, and religious thought in the premodern era.