Books in the Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society series

Focusing on Japan, France, and the United States, this work reveals how the writing of national history in the late nineteenth century made the reshaping of the world by capitalism and the nation-state seem natural and inevitable. It also analyzes the rhetoric, narrative form, and intellectual genealogy of late-nineteenth-century texts.

Max Ward explores the Japanese state's efforts to suppress political radicalism in the 1920s and 1930s through the enforcement of what it called thought crime, providing a window into understanding how modern states develop ideological apparatuses to subject their respective populations.

Looking at a hundred-year history of film and capitalism, this title theorizes a cultural history that illuminates the spaces where film and the nation transcend their customary borders, where culture and capital crisscross - and in doing so, develops a new way of understanding historical change and transformation in modern Japan and beyond.

Examines the institutions and productions of area studies and explores what it takes to "learn a place."

Shows how female cosmopolitanism re-contextualises the well-known Western male romance with the Orient: Japanese women are now the agents, narrating their own desires for the "modern" West in ways that seem to defy Japanese nationalism as well as long-standing relations of power not only between men and women but between Japan and the West.

A collection of essays which use critical theory to reflect on issues pertaining to modern Chinese literature and culture. It addresses topics such as 20th-century literature produced in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China; film, art, history, popular culture, and literary and cultural criticism and the geographies of migration and diaspora.

An examination of the role of cinema and theater in representing urban transformations in China from 1949 to the present.

An analysis of the dominant patterns in the representation of erotic and romantic love between women in contemporary film, television, and fiction from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Analyzing the first Exposition Coloniale Internationale, held in Paris in 1931, this title shows how the exhibition's display of architecture gave a vision to the colonies that justified France's cultural prejudices, while stimulating the desire for further expansionism.

Examines the logic underlying the neoliberal welfare state that South Korea created in response to the devastating Asian Debt Crisis (1997-2001).

Focusing on Japan, scholars of history, literature, film, art history, and anthropology demonstrate the necessity of understanding fascisms cultural manifestations.

"Challenging, provocative, informative, and giving full substance to the interrelations of the global and local, these essays carry the reader through a marvelously rich range of materials just where intellectual life in the humanities and social sciences today is most vital."--Jonathan Arac, University of Pittsburgh

Monsters, ghosts, the supernatural, the fantastic, the mysterious. This title asserts that discourse on the fantastic was at the heart of the historical configuration of Japanese modernity - that the representation of the magical and mysterious played an integral part in the production of modernity beginning in Meiji Japan (1868-1912).

Traces the growth and evolution of a Taiwan's sense of itself as a separate and distinct entity by examining the diverse ways a discourse of nation has been produced in the Taiwanese cultural imagination.

Argues that although the last two decades of Korean history were a period of progress in political democratization, the country refused to part from a "masculine point of view" which is also mirrored in Korean cinema

Collection of essays by Cumings on the complex problems of political economy and ideology, power and culture in East and Northeast Asia, providing an understanding of the United States's role in these regions and the consequences for subsequent policy mak

This collection is the first volume in English to examine the entire span of modern Taiwanese literature, from the first decades of the twentieth century to the present.

Features the essays that examine philosophical issues concerning the concepts of poesis and praxis relevant to Marx's ideas of production.

The films of Akira Kurosawa have had an immense effect on the way the Japanese have viewed themselves as a nation and on the way the West has viewed Japan. This title analyses Kurosawa's entire body of work, from 1943's Sanshiro Sugata to 1993's Madadayo.

In The Sublime Perversion of Capital Gavin Walker examines the Japanese debate about capitalism between the 1920s and 1950s, using it as a "prehistory" to consider current problems of uneven economic development and contemporary topics in Marxist theory and historiography.

Presenting a social history of "the new woman" that emerged in Japanese culture between the world wars, this title shows how images of modern women burst into Japanese life in the midst of the urbanization, growth of the middle class, and explosion of consumerism resulting from the postwar economic boom, particularly in the 1920s.

Discusses how Chinese conceptions of nationalism were affected by the "discovery" of Hawaii as a centre of the Pacific, the Philippine revolution against the United States, and the relationship between nationality and ethnicity made apparent by the Boer War in South Africa.

Describes Mao Zedongs life and thought in relation to the Chinese revolution and twentieth-century history.

A Marxist interpretation of Korean migrant workers struggles in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s.

A work of history documenting the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century transformation of State Shinto into a radical ideology that ultimately drove Japan into a holy war against Western civilization.

Explores China's representations of Japan in the changing world of the late nineteenth century. This work examines the cultural and social borders between the two neighbours. Looking at Chinese accounts of Japan written during the 1870s and 1880s, it offers an analysis of the main genres the Chinese used to portray Japan.