NUS Press catalog: Jan-June 2023

NUS PRESS NEW BOOKS

Academic Book Prizes

A.L. Becker Southeast Asian Literature in Translation Prize 2022

A New Sun Rises Over the Old Land: A Novel of Sihanouk’s Cambodia

Suon Sorin, translated by Roger Nelson

Humanities Book Prize, European Association for Southeast Asian Studies (EuroSEAS) 2022, Finalist

Seaways and Gatekeepers: Trade and State in the Eastern Archipelagos of Southeast Asia, c.1600–c.1906

Heather Sutherland

Social Science Book Prize, EuroSEAS 2022, Finalist

Celluloid Colony: Locating History and Ethnography in Early Dutch Colonial Films of Indonesia

Sandeep Ray

Specialist Publication Accolade, International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) Book Prize 2021

One or Two Words: Language and Politics in the Toraja Highlands of Indonesia

Aurora Donzelli

Hughes Prize, British Society for the History of Science (BSHS) 2021, Finalist

Imperial Creatures: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819–1942

Timothy P. Barnard

Best Book in the Social Sciences, ICAS Book Prize 2021, Finalists

Love, Money and Obligation: Transnational Marriage in a Northeastern Thai Village

Patcharin Lapanun

Imperial Creatures: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819–1942

Timothy P. Barnard

Humanities Book Prize, EuroSEAS 2021, Finalists

Wayang and Its Doubles: Javanese Puppet Theatre, Television and the Internet

Jan Mrázek

Imperial Creatures: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819–1942

Timothy P. Barnard

General Book Prizes

Singapore Literature Prize (Creative non-fiction) 2022

Home is Where We Are

Wang Gungwu with Margaret Wang

Best Non-Fiction Title, Singapore Book Awards 2021

lives & times of hrh

Herman Ronald Hochstadt

NUS Singapore History Prize 2021, Finalists

Home is Where We Are

Wang Gungwu with Margaret Wang

Imperial Creatures: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819–1942

Timothy P. Barnard

Dale Fisher chief editor

Infectious Disease Emergencies: Preparedness and Response

For too long, the theory and practice of infectious disease outbreak response has been the domain of a small number of experienced responders. The COVID-19 pandemic brought global attention to the requirements of effective outbreak response, and the need for preparation across the key pillars. Decisionmakers, early career practitioners and those in the field now have access to a comprehensive text that brings together evidence based and practical insights from the best in the business.

Dale Fisher, Professor of Medicine at the National University of Singapore, was chair of WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network prior to and throughout most of the pandemic. In this massive collaborative effort, he marshals nearly 100 top public health leaders and experts from the front lines to present 37 chapters on pandemic preparedness and response, drawing heavily on experiences from COVID-19, as well as from Ebola, MERS, SARS-1, influenza and other outbreaks of modern times. The contributors include experts from health ministries and Centres for Disease Control and national public health institutions around the world, from international organizations like the WHO, MSF, IFRC and UNICEF and from research institutions and various NGOs from dozens of countries, adding to the diversity and richness of the descriptions.

The book can be used as a reference or as a textbook, where each chapter describes the features of outbreak preparedness, including field epidemiology, risk communications, managing health services in a pandemic, vaccine management, leadership, contact tracing and laboratory management and testing amongst others.

Dale Fisher is Professor of Medicine at the National University of Singapore, head of Medical Services at the National University Hospital System, and senior advisor to the World Health Organization’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network.

February 2024

Hardback • S$72 / US$67

ISBN: 978-981-325-247-9

480pp / 254 x 178mm

150 charts and figures

Southeast Asia: The Story of a Region

The oldest cave paintings in the world are found on Sulawesi, now Indonesia, hand stencils and animals painted some 45,000 years ago. The story of how Southeast Asians have crafted their diverse cultures and societies stretches back further, but rarely has been told with this long-term perspective. Southeast Asia has been a remarkably diverse crossroads of global connections for millennia. Whereas other regions have been defined by centralizing forces, Southeast Asia's story is one of complex networks of trade, ideas, and social relationships. Southeast Asians have created, localized and remade ideas and ways of relating to others from around the world into their own. This readable single volume history centres regional perspectives, while reckoning with the narrative pull of more familiar colonial and national perspectives. Marshalling the latest literature from anthropology, archaeology, history and other disciplines, Eric C. Thompson highlights broad themes that cut across the region's history, including ideas of the state (or avoidance of them), modernity and ideas of identity, the region's histories of tolerance and flexibility regarding gender, and the consolidation of sovereignty across the region over the last few centuries.

Southeast Asia: The Story of a Region is a narrative history of the region like no other, written from a global and long-term perspective.

February 2024

Paperback • S$28 / US$26

ISBN: 978-981-325-234-9

368pp / 229 x 152mm

22 b/w maps

Eric C. Thompson is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore.

Andrew Hardy & Nguyễn Tiến Đông editors

Discovering Vietnam’s Ancient Capital: The Archaeology and History of the Imperial Citadel of Thăng Long-Hanoi

As Vietnam entered the 21st century it began to prepare for the 1000th anniversary of the founding of its capital Thăng Long, now Hanoi. In the heart of the city, a rescue excavation was launched on land earmarked for the construction of a new National Assembly building. Archaeologists unearthed thirteen centuries of vestiges of the ancient city of Thăng Long, yielding a richer record than anyone had dared to hope for. Construction plans were shelved, excavations widened, and at the city’s millennial celebrations in 2010, UNESCO announced its inscription of the Imperial Citadel of Thăng Long on its World Heritage List. This archaeological discovery has two histories. The first, told here by the archaeologists involved, is the story of the dig, as their trowels brought to light the bricks, tiles, pillars, sculptures and ceramics of countless ancient temples and palaces. The second is the history of the citadel itself, in its early years as an outpost of the Chinese empire, in its heyday as the Forbidden City of Vietnam’s emperors, and in its downgrading and eventual destruction at the hands of the Nguyen dynasty and French colonial rulers. The book presents a historical narrative of the continuous development of a regional political centre on this site. Bringing together history, archaeology and a fascinating interplay of influences from China and Southeast Asia, this is also the story of an Asian capital city coming to understand its history, and deciding how to preserve its archaeological remains.

Andrew Hardy is a historian of Vietnam, with research interests in migration and ethnic relations. He heads the Hanoi centre of the École française d’ExtrêmeOrient (EFEO).

July 2023

Paperback • S$36 / US$32

ISBN: 978-981-325-229-5

336pp / 229 x 152mm

40 b/w images

Nguyễn Tiễn Đông was an archaeologist at the Institute of Archaeology, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences.

Ang Cheng Guan

Singapore’s Grand Strategy

Even small states can have grand strategies. Singapore, despite its poor natural resource endowment, small population, and territory has often been described as punching above its weight in international affairs. Part of this stems from the way Singapore integrates the different diplomatic, political and defence-oriented tools at its disposal in a strategic manner. This is a fresh and useful diplomatic, defence, and security history of Singapore, from independence in 1965 through the 2020s period of strategic realignment.

Most previous studies of grand strategy have focused on super- or at least middle powers, but Ang’s book builds an important contribution to international relations and strategic studies in showing how the concept can help explain the strategic posture and achievements of small states as well. Moreover, he brings a historian’s perspective to a subject usually tackled by political scientists. The result will be useful and important for scholars in these fields. The author’s well-crafted retelling of the Singapore story from an external perspective will be compelling for more general audiences as well.

Ang Cheng Guan is Professor of the International History of Southeast Asia at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

July 2023

Paperback • S$32 / US$32

ISBN: 978-981-325-223-3

232pp / 229 x 152mm

Malaysiakini and the Power of Independent Media in Malaysia

Malaysiakini was founded in 1999 by Steven Gan and Premesh Chandran, two young Malaysians who met as overseas students in Australia. One of the many online portals that sprung up in the wake of Reformasi, a movement sparked by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad’s 1998 firing of his deputy Anwar Ibrahim, there was no reason to think that Malaysiakini would be different from the other blogs and portals that covered the trial of the charismatic former deputy PM. Yet this would be a mistake, as Malaysiakini wanted to do something much more important than just report on Reformasi: its founders intended to bring independent journalism to Malaysia in hopes of changing the country.

Based on more than fifteen years of observation of Malaysiakini's newsroom practices, this book is an intimate portrait of the people and issues behind Malaysia’s only truly independent media outlet. The author illustrates Malaysiakini’s particular mix of idealism in action, with attention to how “sensitive” issues such as race, religion, politics, and citizenship get worked out in practice in the newsroom. This attention to the inner workings of one of the most important media institutions in the region yields not only a deep newsroom ethnography, but a nuanced, rich history of modern Malaysia.

October 2023

Paperback • S$32 / US$32

/ MYR 88

ISBN: 978-981-325-240-0

232pp / 229 x 152mm

11 b/w photos

Janet Steele is Professor of Media and Public Affairs and International Affairs at George Washington University.

Jakarta: The City of a Thousand Dimensions

A megacity of 30 million, under threat from rising sea levels and temperatures, Jakarta and its resilient residents improvise and thrive. Indonesian writer Seno Gumira Ajidarma calls Jakarta a city of a thousand dimensions. That suggests not only a picture represented in concepts such as “messy urbanism”, “emergent urbanism”, “incremental urbanism”, “mega-urban region” or “megacity”, it further suggests a form of governmentality (a political rationality, for better or worse) that has been formed through sedimented layers of time, that have shaped the sociocultural and political life of the city.

This book teases out some of the dimensions that have given shape to contemporary Jakarta, including the city’s expanded flexibility in accommodating capital and labour, the formal and the informal, and the consistent lack of planning which can be understood as both politics and poetics of governing. Required reading for those seeking to understand one of Asia’s most dynamic cities.

Abidin Kusno is a professor at the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University, Toronto, and former director of the York Centre for Asian Research.

May 2023

Paperback • S$34 / US$28

ISBN: 978-981-325-226-4

280pp / 229 x 152mm

33 b/w images

edited by Justin Zhuang

A New World in the Making: Life and

Architecture in Tropical Asia

Veteran architect Tay Kheng Soon’s book brings together memoir, a selection of writings on identity, landscape and belonging, and on the architecture and urbanism most appropriate for a tropical city in Asia. Born in British-ruled Singapore, Tay was deeply engaged in the debates about building a new world that attended the end of colonialism. His focus, but far from his only concern, was Singapore’s built environment—and its spiritual one—since the early 1960s. Architecture, he says, is politics by other means. As Singapore moved further into what Tay describes as “ruthless pragmatism”, the cost of his critical posture became more clear, and he left for some years.

Kheng Soon stayed his own course, later returning to Singapore and building his own firm. He became sought after around the world for his thoughts on regionalism and tropical architecture. He taught at the NUS School of Architecture, headed the Singapore Institute of Architects, and was Founding Chair of independent arts centre The Substation. Ever ready with the trenchant one-liner, and a willingness to provoke, to challenge orthodoxy, Tay Kheng Soon occupies a unique position in Asia’s intellectual and cultural landscape. Things must change, says Tay Kheng Soon. Or, maybe, he admits, it’s just him. The book is a must-read reflection on tropical Asia, on architecture and urbanism, always looking ahead to the always urgent task of building a new world.

Tay Kheng Soon is one of Singapore’s most important public intellectuals and thinkers, and a pioneering architect of Singapore’s post-independence era.

May 2023

Paperback • S$28 / US$24

ISBN: 978-981-325-169-4

256pp / 229 x 152mm

36 b/w images

Tienshi Lara Chen

translated by Louis Carlet

Stateless: Ethnography of Statelessness

Written by a Stateless Academic

“In the springtime of the year that I was twenty-one, I found myself stuck at the border between two familiar countries, unable to enter either. I had never felt my statelessness so keenly.”

Japan’s 1971 termination of diplomatic ties with the Republic of China left 9,200 Chinese residents stateless. Tienshi “Lara” Chen was one of them, born to Chinese parents in Yokohama’s Chinatown. What does it mean to be stateless? What does it feel like?

In a lively blend of life writing, auto-ethnography, and study of stateless communities around Asia, this book unpacks the idea of citizenship by showing the hidden everyday narratives and lived experiences of stateless persons who have no legal ties to any nation state. Originally published in Japanese, this adapted and updated English edition critically engages with questions of borders, mobility, belonging, and identity.

We follow Chen’s engaging autobiographical account of her bi-cultural upbringing and Japanese education, and how her experience of statelessness eventually led her into a career spanning academia and activism. Across different levels of analysis, the author points out the contradictions inherent in the concepts of nationality, nation-state and citizenship, in a world where individual nationality, identity and experience are increasingly complex. She concludes that the current system of regulating individuals with citizenship is unworkable in the long run. Stateless is a fascinating read on borders, states and identities.

Tienshi Lara Chen is a professor at the School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University. Louis Carlet is a translator and interpreter.

September 2023

Paperback • S$36 / US$34

ISBN: 978-981-325-232-5

296pp / 229 x 152mm

12 b/w images

de Ferranti, Masaya Shishikura and Michiyo Yoneno-Reyes editors

Unsilent Strangers: Music, Minorities, Co-existence, Japan

This collection of essays on the music of migrant minorities in and from Japan examines the central role music plays in the ongoing adjustment, conciliation and transformation of newcomers and “hosts” alike. It is the first academic text to address music activities across a range of migrant groups in Japan––particularly those of Tokyo and its neighbouring areas. It is also the first to juxtapose such communities with those of Japanese emigrants as ethnic minorities elsewhere. It presents both archival and fieldwork-based case studies that highlight music in the dynamics of encounter and attempted identity making, under a unifying framework of migration.

A radical change in policy with the 2019 introduction of a new “Specified Skilled Worker” visa category marked the beginning of Japan’s “new immigration era” (imin gannen). The authors in this volume interrogate and shed light on the bureaucratically disseminated slogan of tabunka kyōsei, rendered in English as “multicultural coexistence”. The concept itself and the many problems of realizing this ideal are examined through ethnography-based accounts of current minorities, including South Indians, Brazilians, Nepalis, Filipinos, Iranians and Ainu domestic migrants, and in light of comparative historical accounts of California and Australia. This volume will be of interest to ethnomusicologists, students of the cultures of migrant communities, and those engaged with cultural change and diversity in Japan and East Asia.

Hugh de Ferranti is a researcher of Japanese music culture and history. He is the author of The Last Biwa Singer (Cornell University Press, 2009).

Masaya Shishikura is an associate professor at Huizhou University and a research fellow at Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Michiyo Yoneno-Reyes is an associate professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia (IASA), University of Tokyo.

June 2023

Paperback • S$42 / US$38

ISBN: 978-981-325-236-3

352pp / 229 x 152mm

16 figures, 11 tables, 37 b/w images

Hugh

Images of War: The Cultural Construction of Qing Martial Prowess

The mechanisms by which the Manchu rulers of Qing dynasty China maintained their hegemony over a vast empire have long fascinated scholars, with New Qing History models challenging older Sinicization models in recent years. This book adds a new dimension to these debates, from an unlikely source: art history. Two seemingly disparate fields of enquiry are brought together in this innovative work, its English translation long-awaited. Ming and Qing painting and visual culture and Ming and Qing history, especially military history are brought into dialogue here.

This book interprets Manchu rule over China proper through the lens of how the Qing emperors modified Han scholar-officials’ culture to construct imperial power. Manchu military culture, in particular, is re-examined by investigating the history of the visual commemoration of military accomplishments. While images of war have long been a marginal topic in the history of Chinese art and politics, government officials’ military achievement pictures featured in numerous literati writings of the Ming dynasty. Their popularity was not confined to circles of Han elites but also took on commercial potential, and went beyond Chinese borders including influencing Manchu leaders, later to become Qing rulers. This trajectory of development took such images from celebrations of individual deeds and personal accomplishments to manifestations of the military might of the Qing empire and revealed that martial ethos and its expression was not a static part of the Manchu formula. Rather, much of the military culture of the Qing empire was appropriated from Han elite culture. This is an innovative work of disciplinary boundary-crossing.

Ma Ya-Chen is a professor at the Institute of History, National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan.

August 2023

Paperback • S$82 / US$72

ISBN: 978-981-325-212-7

256pp / 235 x 187mm

100 images in full colour

Stephen A. Murphy

Buddhist Landscapes of the Khorat Plateau: Art and Archaeology of the 7th–11th Centuries

The Khorat Plateau is a landscape of some 155,000 square kilometres of what is now northeast Thailand and central Laos. Despite the rich evidence for the region’s dynamism and development in the metal age, knowledge of subsequent first millennium developments on the Khorat Plateau remains limited.

This important new work, built on extensive fieldwork and archaeological surveys, reveals the Khorat Plateau as having a distinctive Buddhist culture, including new forms of art and architecture, and a characteristic aesthetic. Moreover, by combining archaeological and art historical analysis with an historical ecology approach, Murphy traces the outlines of Buddhism’s spread into the region, along its major river systems. He is able to read this history into and against the Khorat landscape, attending to the emergence of monumental architecture such as stūpas and Buddha images carved into the rock faces of hills and mountainsides, and the importance on the Khorat Plateau of the use of boundary markers, or sīmā. This book provides a new picture of the region in the first and early second millennia, adding to our understanding of the development of Buddhism in Southeast Asia, and offering a new basis for other regionally-focused scholarship to thrive—from textual Buddhology to history to anthropology. It opens up new possibilities for understanding the early spread of Buddhism within different landscapes across Asia.

SERIES: ART & ARCHAEOLOGY OF SOUTHEAST ASIA: HINDU BUDDHISTTRADITIONS

October 2023

Hardback • S$78 / US$56

ISBN: 978-981-325-213-4

288pp / 235 x 187mm

15 maps and 95 images in full colour

Stephen A. Murphy is the Pratapaditya Pal Senior Lecturer in Curating and Museology of Asian Art at SOAS, University of London.

Ella Raidel

Of Haunted Spaces: Cinema, Heterotopias, and China’s Hyperurbanization

As amalgams of the different spatial logics of other places, reassembled by globalization and the fantasies of real estate development, cities today are becoming what Michel Foucault has termed heterotopias. Assemblies of ruins, theme parks, entirely copied towns, simulacra, business districts on a globalized template, reconstructed historic districts, settlements, and ghost towns are finding a new expression in the contemporary world. Nowhere is this more visible recently than in China, and in areas coming under China’s developmental influence. Copied cities, ghost cities and large scale Chinese investments in Africa are heterotopias because they contain the idea of accumulating different times, cultures, and countries within one place, just as a theme park contains all these different place experiences in a bounded zone outside of its own time and culture.

Ella Raidel has explored these phenomena through film and cinematic virtual reality, and this artist’s book reviews and reflects on the last two decades of her award-winning work. In Ella Raidel’s films urbanism and architecture, theory, politics, social change and image production are intertextually presented, and open a discursive space for investigation and commentary. This book will be interesting for art and film practitioners, and students of architecture, film, urbanization, and infrastructure, especially those who see cinema as a way of exploring these subjects.

Ella Raidel is a filmmaker and visual artist. She is assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

DISTRIBUTED BY NUS PRESS FOR THE NTU CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

August 2023

Paperback • S$28 / US$24

ISBN: 978-981-18-5893-2

84pp / 190 x 250mm

80 Illustrations in full colour

Elaine Ng and H.G. Masters editors

Extreme Beauty: 12 Korean Artists Today

On the biggest international stages, from the Venice Biennale to museums around the world, contemporary art from Korea excites and challenges viewers wherever it is shown. In Extreme Beauty: 12 Korean Artists Today, leading curators and critics explore the complex creative practices of some of the most exciting artists active in Korea and internationally. From the ultra-minimal to the hyper-conceptual, the monstrous and the science-fictional, each of these 12 Korean artists and groups are highly original figures, having spent decades developing their unique styles and approaches to making art. Readers will get an inside look at the complex processes behind these artworks through this generously illustrated volume, which was designed by the acclaimed London-based creative studio Barnbrook.

Extreme Beauty features artists Koo Jeong A, Lee Dong-gi, Suki Seokyeong Kang, Lee Wan, Meekyoung Shin, San Keum Koh, Seulgi Lee, Mire Lee, Kang Seung Lee, Yeesookyung, Nam Tchun Mo, and Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho.

Elaine Ng is Editor and Publisher at ArtAsiaPacific. H.G. Masters is Deputy Editor and Deputy Publisher at ArtAsiaPacific. DISTRIBUTED FOR ARTASIAPACIFIC

December 2022

Paperback • S$42 / US$48

ISBN: 978-0-9896885-7-4

256pp / 190 x 254 mm

162 color plates

Colonial Law Making: Cambodia under the French

An important case study in the history of law under colonialism, Colonial Law Making explores the structural forces and contingent exchanges that shaped colonial law in Cambodia, draws comparisons across the region and examines Cambodia's post-independence colonial legacy.

The court of King Norodom and the temples of Angkor Wat became orientalist icons in the French colonial imagination, perpetuating an image of the Protectorate (1863–1953) as special and worthy of preservation. This contributed to a certain exceptionalism in the way the Kingdom was colonised, including through law. Drawing on previously unexamined archival material, Sally Low presents a comparative case study of French approaches to colonial law, jurisdiction and protection. Although the voices of non-elite Cambodians are largely absent from the archives, their influence on colonial law is evident as they resisted efforts to regulate their lives and their land. Low argues that the result was a set of state legal institutions and an indigenous jurisdiction that blended Cambodian and French notions of patronage and royal power as the source and authority for law. This work is a case study of colonial law as an instrument of control and administration in an indirectly ruled colony. It adds depth to our understanding of the impact of European colonial law and the significance of different forms of colonial rule—direct, indirect and unofficial. It is easily accessible for non-lawyers and is a must-read for those interested in the recent past of Southeast Asia and the countries that were previously colonised as French Indochina.

Sally Frances Low holds a doctorate in legal history from the University of Melbourne and has worked extensively in Cambodia and Southeast Asia.

September 2023

Paperback • S$38 / US$36

ISBN: 978-981-325-244-8

288pp / 229 x 152mm

2 maps, 6 b/w images, 1 diagram, 2 tables

Dwi Noverini

and

Signs of Deference, Signs of Demeanour: Interlocutor Reference and Self-Other Relations across Southeast Asian Speech Communities

In selecting terms to refer to themselves and their addressees, speakers express, define and create a field for working out social relations. Because, up until now, sociolinguistic research in this domain has focused primarily on Indo-European languages, it has tended to dwell on pronominal reference to the addressee, for example the choice between tu and vous in addressing someone in French. This book theorises interlocutor reference more broadly, based on the study of Southeast Asian languages, thereby deepening our understanding of the ways in which selfother relations are linguistically mediated in social interaction. Bringing together studies from both small-scale and large, urbanised communities across Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia, this book is an important contribution to the sociolinguistics and anthropology of Southeast Asia. In addition, the editors’ introduction lays out a framework for investigating and analysing interlocutor reference in any language, in any part of the world.

Jack Sidnell is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.

February 2023

Hardback • S$42 / US$48

ISBN: 978-981-325-184-7

269pp / 229 x 152mm

3 figures, 11 b/w images,

1 table

Dwi Noverini Djenar is Associate Professor of Indonesian Studies at the University of Sydney.

Djenar

Jack Sidnell editors

“These issues are of central importance in social interaction in all human languages. By systematically clarifying such processes for a group of languages, this book provides tools for analyzing social interaction that will interest scholars who study social interaction anywhere in the world.”

– Hy V. Luong, University of Toronto

John F. McCarthy, Andrew McWilliam and Gerben Nooteboom editors

The Paradox of Agrarian Change: Food

Security and the Politics of Social Protection in Indonesia

Economic growth in Indonesia has led to a marked decline in poverty. But while poverty has declined, one of its worst impacts — nutritional insecurity — remains high, particularly in rural areas. Patterns of food poverty persist across Indonesia, despite a fall in poverty rates. What explains this troubling paradox? How does it relate to Indonesia's enthusiastic embrace of the "entitlements revolution", the use of direct cash transfers as a tool for reducing poverty and building social inclusion? This book analyses the nature and social consequences of economic development and agrarian change processes in rural Indonesia in relation to the scope and effectiveness of Indonesia’s social protection programmes.

The authors conclude that while existing social assistance approaches soften the experience of poverty, they generate mistargeting problems, produce new patterns of inclusion and exclusion and provoke a contentious politics of distribution. The richly detailed findings in this study provide a novel multidimensional vision of processes of agrarian change.Its findings are of crucial importance to Indonesian policymakers, but will also be of relevance to scholars and practitioners of rural development in other middle income countries seeking to further their agrarian transitions.

John F. McCarthy is an associate professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.

Andrew McWilliam is professor of Anthropology in the School of Social Science, Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia.

Gerben Nooteboom is an associate professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam (UvA), The Netherlands.

January 2023

Paperback • S$42 / US$38

ISBN: 978-981-325-183-0

488pp / 229 x 152mm

10 maps, 37 figures,

14 b/w images, 32 tables

"This is a remarkably rich, ambitious and carefully curated book. It explores an important paradox: why has ‘development’ delivered wealth and reduced poverty in rural Indonesia but also created precarity?"

– Jonathan Rigg, University of Bristol

Joseph Conrad

edited with an introduction by Kevin Riordan

Tales of an Eastern Port: The Singapore Novellas of Joseph Conrad

In the 1880s, Joseph Conrad had three stints in Singapore while working on ships around the region. Over the next thirty years, he would return to the colonial port city in his memory and his writing. Paired here for the first time are two Conrad novellas that start in Singapore: The End of the Tether and The ShadowLine. First published in 1902 and 1917, these stories provide a fleeting portrait of the developing city itself, before Conrad’s characters set sail into “the shallow sea that foams and murmurs on the shore of a thousand islands”. Conrad’s Singapore is the site of arrivals and departures, his fiction tracing the tidelines of the surrounding archipelagoes.

But how do we read Conrad, and his complicated legacy, in the twenty-first century? In the introduction, Kevin Riordan makes the case that Conrad’s Southeast Asian stories reward both our historical and literary interests. The End of the Tether and The Shadow-Line have renewed relevance as part of global modernist and oceanic literature, and they recall one chapter in Singapore’s long history as a vital site of cultural exchange, as a place that harbours and inspires distinctive storytelling traditions.

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) is one of the world’s great modern novelists. His most famous works include Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Nostromo Kevin Riordan is an assistant professor in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

March 2023

Paperback • S$24 / US$24

ISBN: 978-981-325-218-9

248pp / 229 x 152mm

3 b/w images

Marnie Feneley

Reconstructing God: Style, Hydraulics, Political Power and Angkor’s West Mebon Visnu

In December 1936, a villager was led by a dream to the ruins of the West Mebon shrine in Angkor where he found the remains of a bronze sculpture. This was the West Mebon Viṣṇu, the largest bronze remaining from pre-modern Southeast Asia, and a work of great artistic, historical and political significance. Prominently placed in an island-temple in the middle of the vast artificial reservoir, the West Mebon Viṣṇu sculpture was a key focus point of the Angkorian hydraulic network. Interpretations of the statue, its setting, date and role, have remained largely unchanged since the 1960s, until now. Integrating the latest archaeological and historical work on Angkor, extensive art historical analysis of the figure of Viṣṇu Anantaśāyin in Hindu-Buddhist art across the region, and a detailed digital reconstruction of the sculpture and its setting, Marnie Feneley brings new light to this important piece.

Framed with a useful update on the latest archaeological and historical insights into the history of the Angkor World Heritage Site, this new understanding of the West Mebon Viṣṇu sculpture reorients our understanding of religious and political change in Angkor in the 12th century. Fully illustrated in colour throughout, the book will be of interest to art historians and curators, historians of Southeast Asia, and anyone with an interest in the art and history of Angkor.

Marnie Feneley is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of New South Wales School of Art and Design, Australia.

March 2023

Hardback • S$72 / US$60

ISBN: 978-981-325-053-6

256pp / 235 x 185mm

40 colour plates, 80 halftones

Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia

Established by a collective of scholars and curators with the aim of looking and listening closely to the discursive spaces of art in, from, and around the region we refer to as Southeast Asia, from an historical perspective. The journal presents a necessarily diverse range of perspectives not only on the contemporary and modern art of Southeast Asia, but indeed of the region itself: its borders, its identity, its efficacy, and its limitations as a geographical marker and a conceptual category. As such, the journal is defined by a commitment to the need for and importance of rigorous discussion, of the contemporary and modern art of the domain that lies south of China, east of India, and north of Australia. The journal publishes twice a year (March and October).

This journal is open access thanks to the support of the Chen Chong Swee Asian Arts Programme at Yale-NUS College and can be accessed at https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/716. Southeast of Now is indexed in Scopus and the Directory of Open Access Journals.

For editorial enquiries, contact the editors at southeastofnow@gmail.com For individual or institution subscription enquiries, email us at orders.nuspress@nus.edu.sg https://nuspress.nus.edu.sg/collections/southeastofnow

China: An International Journal (CIJ)

An internationally refereed journal published for the East Asian Institute, NUS in February, May, August and November by NUS Press. Based outside China, America and Europe, CIJ aims to present diverse international perceptions and frames of reference on contemporary China, including Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. The journal invites the submission of cutting-edge research articles, review articles and policy comments and research notes in the fields of politics, economics, society, geography, law, culture and international relations. The unique final section of this journal offers a chronology and listing of key documents pertaining to developments in relations between China and the 10 ASEAN member-states.

CIJ is indexed and abstracted in Social Sciences Citation Index®, Journal Citation Reports/Social Sciences Edition, Current Contents®/Social and Behavioral Sciences, International Bibliography of Social Sciences, Bibliography of Asian Studies and Econlit.

CIJ is also available online in Project Muse (an electronic database for journals in the humanities and social sciences). For more details, visit https://muse.jhu.edu or email muse@ muse.jhu.edu.

Individual copies may be purchased through https://nuspress.nus.edu.sg For institution subscription enquiries, email us at orders.nuspress@nus.edu.sg For editorial enquiries, contact the editors at cij@nus.edu.sg https://nuspress.nus.edu.sg/collections/cij

Goh Geok Yian & John N. Miksic editors

Southeast Asian Site Reports

epress.nus.edu.sg/sitereports

The Southeast Asian Site Reports series is intended to make archaeological data available for comparative study to all scholars who work on Southeast Asian archaeology, as well as the active community of students of archaeology and volunteers in the region. Aside from descriptions of the archaeological project, these reports generally include:

• research questions addressed by the project, and analysis of results

• site maps and stratigraphic drawings

• tables providing quantitative data and statistics on specific types of artifacts

• illustrations of the main types of artifacts discovered (photographs and drawings)

• laboratory analyses of mineral composition, identification of organic materials, the ancient environment, dating methods and results

This information is typically difficult to obtain for Southeast Asian sites, especially for the historical period. It is hoped that these efforts to develop an online publication template, and tools for the management of images and other data, will encourage more sharing of data across national boundaries. The latest updates in Southeast Asian Site Reports are reports on:

• Pulau Saigon

• St. Andrew’s Cathedral

• The Istana Kampung Gelam

• The Empress Place

Goh Geok Yian is associate professor at the Nanyang Technological University. John N. Miksic is emeritus professor at the National University of Singapore.

Information for Authors

NUS Press (formerly Singapore University Press) originated as the publishing arm of the University of Malaya in Singapore, and between 1954 and 1971 published books under the University of Malaya Press imprint. The Singapore University Press imprint first appeared in 1971.

In 2006 Singapore University Press was succeeded by a new NUS Press to reflect the name of its parent institution and to align the Press closer to the university’s overall branding.

The Press publishes academic, scholarly and trade books of importance and relevance to Singapore and the region. While the Press has an extensive catalog that includes titles in the fields of medicine, mathematics, science and engineering, the Press is particularly interested in manuscripts that address these subjects:

• Japan and Asia

• The Chinese overseas and the Chinese diaspora

• The Malay World

• Media, cinema and the visual arts

• Science, technology and society in Asia

• Transnational labour and population issues in Asia

• Popular culture in transnational perspectives

• Religion in Southeast Asia

• Ethnic relations

• The city, urbanism and the built form in Southeast Asia

• Violence, trauma and memory in Asia

• Cultural resources and heritage in Asia

• Public health, health policy and history of medicine

• The English language in Asia

All books are subject to peer review, and must be approved by the University Publishing Committee, drawn from the NUS faculty. Download our detailed author’s guidelines at https:// nuspress.nus.edu.sg/pages/prospective-authors

Our home territory is Southeast Asia, and NUS Press works very closely with APD Singapore and APD Malaysia to distribute to libraries, institutions and to the bookstores in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the other countries of Southeast Asia. We service the NUS campus bookshops directly, and conduct sales to students and staff from our office on the NUS campus.

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AUSTRALIA / NEW ZEALAND

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NUS Press Pte Ltd (formerly Singapore University Press)

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Twitter @NUS_Press

Notes

1 S$ prices are applicable for purchases in Singapore only.

2 All prices and information in this catalogue are current at the time of printing (January 2023) and may be subject to change.

3 Potential authors are invited to download our author guidelines at https://nuspress.nus.edu.sg/pages/prospective-authors

Abbreviations and Icons

Singapore dollars

Available Worldwide US dollars

Available Worldwide except Hong Kong

S$

US$

Cover illustration: Drawing courtesy of Suryono Herlambang.

x HONG KONG

NUS Press

National University of Singapore

NUS Press publishes books and journals with a regional focus on Asia and a disciplinary focus on the humanities and social sciences.

As the university press of the National University of Singapore, NUS Press supports the university’s mission by publishing for Singaporean, Southeast Asian and global academic communities, for communities of practice and publics reading in English. Our books are available in more than 500 great bookshops around the world, and are held by top research and public libraries, in print and digital form. We love selling books in a competitive marketplace, but we are also active in developing Open Access models of scholarly communication.

NUS Press dates itself back 68 years, to the activities of the Publishing Committee of the University of Malaya, beginning in 1954.

NUS Press Pte Ltd

AS3-01-02, 3 Arts Link

National University of Singapore

Singapore 117569

T +65 6776 1148

F +65 6774 0652

E nusbooks@nus.edu.sg

https://nuspress.nus.edu.sg