Asian Studies
Jacket image forthcoming
After the Post–Cold War
The Future of Chinese History Jinhua Dai & Lisa Rofel
Sinotheory November 2018 208pp 2 illus. 9781478000518 £18.99 PB 9781478000389 £73.00 HB DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Interrogates China’s status as a global economic power in relation to its socialist past, profoundly shaped by the Cold War. Dai reveals the narrative of China’s transformation leaves little hope of moving from the capitalist degradation of the present into a radical future that points to a socially just world. Drawing on Marxism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory, Dai examines recent Chinese films that erase the country’s socialist history to show how such erasure re-signifies socialism’s past as failure and thus forecloses the imagining of a future beyond that of globalized capitalism. She outlines the tension between China’s embrace of the free market and a regime dependent on a socialist imprimatur. She also offers a genealogy of China’s transformation from a source of revolutionary power into a fountainhead of globalized modernity. This narrative, Dai contends, leaves little hope of moving from the capitalist degradation of the present into a radical future that might offer a more socially just world.
Fall/Winter 2018
Jacket image forthcoming
Empire of Hope
The Sentimental Politics of Japanese Decline David Leheny
November 2018 246pp 7 b&w halftones 9781501729072 £31.00 HB CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
In a diverse array of cases from recent Japanese history, Leheny shows how sentimental portrayals of the nation and its global role reflect a durable story of hopefulness about the country’s postwar path. Expressions of national emotion do several things: they construct the boundaries of the national body, they inform and discipline appropriate expression, and they depoliticize messy problems that threaten to produce divisive questions about winners and losers. Most important, they work because they appear to be natural, simple and expected expressions of how the nation shares feeling, even when they paper over the extraordinary divergence in how the nation’s citizens experience each incident. Leheny challenges how we read the relations between emotion and politics by arguing—unlike those who build from the neuroscientific turn in the social sciences or those developing affect theory in the humanities—that the focus should be on emotional representation rather than on emotion itself.
Footbinding as Fashion
Ethnicity, Labor, and Status in Traditional China John Robert Shepherd
December 2018 264pp 7 b&w illus., 6 maps, 18 tables, 9 charts 9780295744407 £22.99 PB 9780295744414 £69.00 HB UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS
Previous studies of the practice of footbinding in imperial China have theorized that it expressed ethnic identity or that it served an economic function. By analyzing the popularity of footbinding in different places and times, this book investigates the claim that early Qing (1644–1911) attempts by Manchu rulers to ban footbinding made it a symbol of anti-Manchu sentiment and Han identity and led to the spread of the practice throughout all levels of society. Detailed case studies of Taiwan, Hebei, and Liaoning provinces exploit rich bodies of previously neglected ethnographic reports, economic surveys, and rare censuses of footbinding to challenge the significance of sedentary female labor and ethnic rivalries as factors leading to the hegemony of the footbinding fashion. The study concludes that, independently of identity politics and economic factors, variations in local status hierarchies and elite culture coupled with status competition and fear of ridicule for not binding girls’ feet best explain how a culturally arbitrary fashion such as footbinding could attain hegemonic status.
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Mafia Raj
The Rule of Bosses in South Asia Lucia Michelutti, Ashraf Hoque, Nicolas Martin, David Picherit, Paul Rollier, Arild E. Ruud & Clarinda Still
South Asia in Motion December 2018 360pp 9781503607316 £22.99 PB 9781503606388 £69.00 HB STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
"Mafia" has become an indigenous South Asian term. Like Italian mobsters, the South Asian "gangster politicians" are known for inflicting brutal violence while simultaneously upholding vigilante justice—inspiring fear and fantasy. But the term also refers to the diffuse spheres of crime, business, and politics operating within a shadow world that is popularly referred to as the rule of the mafia, or "Mafia Raj." Through intimate stories of the lives of powerful and aspiring bosses in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, this book illustrates their personal struggles for sovereignty as they climb the ladder of success. Ethnographically tracing the particularities of the South Asian case, the authors theorize what they call "the art of bossing," providing nuanced ideas about crime, corruption, and the lure of the strongman across the world.