Asian Thought and Culture – serie

Marriage as Political Strategy and Cultural Expression is the first comprehensive study of Mongolian royal marriages from World Empire (1206-1279) to the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) in Asia. This study examines the Mongolian royal family’s marriage strategies and the political implications of these royal marriages, specifically, the intermarriages between the Mongolian royal house and its allies, including the Onggirat, the Oirat, and other Mongol peoples as well as the Uighur State and Korea in Central and East Asia. This book concludes that the short lifespans of Mongol royalty after Khubilai Khan were the result of consanguineous marriage and inbreeding – genetic factors that contributed to the collapse of the Mongol dynasty.

Between Noble and Humble: Cao Xueqin and the Dream of the Red Chamber (曹雪芹新传, literally New Biography of Cao Xueqin) is a translation of a scholarly work by the famous mainland Chinese critic Zhou Ruchang. Written for the Western reader, it historicizes the life and times of the Chinese novelist Cao Xueqin (c. 1715-1763) and comprehensively introduces the origins of the novel Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng). This translation is unique because it offers the first book-length biography of Cao Xueqin in English. Zhou carefully historicizes the decline of the once illustrious Cao clan, and he demonstrates how Cao Xueqin’s own childhood experiences in a wealthy bondservant family during the Qing dynasty profoundly informed the encyclopedic narrative that he would later write. In Between Noble and Humble, Zhou also offers intriguing and controversial theories about Honglou meng based on decades of careful research, for instance, that the famous commentator Red Inkstone was in fact a female relative of Cao Xueqin.

Expressionism and Its Deformation in Contemporary Chinese Theatre provides both rigorous readings of dramatic works as well as a historical overview of Chinese theatre from the 1980s to the present. Expressionism becomes a discursive locus to be incorporated and even transformed during a critical phase in the modernization of Chinese drama during the post-Maoist era. Six leading Chinese dramatists (Gao Xingjian, Lin Zhaohua, Huang Zuolin, Xu Xiaozhong, Meng Jinghui, and Stan Lai) are clear representatives of opening up a new world of modern Chinese drama. They embody each of the major phases of the adoption, deformation, and multicultural infusion of Expressionism in the development of Chinese dramatic modernization. Approaching their dramatic works from multiple perspectives, including expressionist vision and techniques, comparative aesthetics, Bakhtinian chronotope and heteroglossia, semiotics, «psychic interiority», and concluding with Lu Xun’s definition of Expressionism as «to write a good deal about yourself», Chinese dramatists’ enthusiasm for Expressionism is not just an artistic rejoinder to the spiritual aspirations of life in a time of rapid industrialization and modernization but also a coming-to-terms with the ideological and aesthetic conflicts between different dramatic traditions. Expressionism and Its Deformation in Contemporary Chinese Theatre is the first scholarly book to explore the deep and intricate relationship between Expressionism and contemporary Chinese drama, attempting to assume the critical task of challenging these dramatists while delineating the contours of the most recent trends of Chinese theatre. This book could situate itself within the Chinese scholarly and theatrical contexts for English readers as it is an accessible text for both undergraduate students and graduates and scholars.

This work is about the swift process of acculturation of antisemitism in Japan – a Shintoist/Buddhist society with no Jews – in the decade following the First World War due to the impact of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Major Japanese primary sources related to the subject are introduced in detail and analyzed in the book for the first time in any language: the 1921 Imai Tokio–Yoshino Sakuzō impromptu debate, Higuchi Tsuyanoske’s best-seller Yudayaka [The Jewish Peril], the March 1929 roundtable on the «Jewish Problem» organized by the Heibon publishing house, and writings by Ariga Seika, Soebe Inchinoske, Yamanaka Minetarō, Kinoshta Masao, and others. This is also the case with most materials mentioned in the section on Japanese awareness of antisemitism before and during the First World War. In addition, the author proposes, defines, and demonstrates the applicability of the term «Conspiracy and Scapegoating Antisemitism» to both non-Japanese and Japanese milieux.

This book details the evolution of Bengali culture (in both Bangladesh and West Bengal) since antiquity and argues for its modernization. Originally peripheral to Hindu civilization based in North India, Bengali culture was subjected to various forms of Sanskritization. Centuries of invasions (1204-1757) resulted most notably in the Islamization of Bengal. Often there were conflicts between Sanskritization and Islamization. Later colonization of Bengal by Britain (1757) led to a process of Anglicization, which created a new middle class in Bengal that, in turn, created a form of elitism among the Bengali Hindu upper caste. After British rule ended (1947), Bengali culture lost its elitist status in South Asia and has undergone severe marginalization. Political instability and economic insufficiency, as reflected by many quantitative and qualitative indicators, are common and contribute to pervasive unemployment, alienation, vigilantism, and instability in the entire region. A Story of Ambivalent Modernization in Bangladesh and West Bengal is appropriate not only for Bengali intellectuals and scholars but for sociologists, political scientists, cultural anthropologists, historians, and others interested in a case study of how and why a given culture becomes derailed from its path toward modernization.

The last century of Ming rule (1368-1644) in China saw an unparalleled and short-lived loosening of the restraints of conventional Confucian morality in both art and literature, and the two novellas translated in Of Woman by Woman are representative of that trend. Both were written under pseudonyms, and although there is evidence that both appeared first in the mid to late sixteenth-century, neither their authorship nor publication date can be established with any precision. Both were proscribed in the eighteenth-century literary inquisition of the Qianlong emperor, and remained banned in China until copies first appeared on the Internet in the 1990s. They are still largely unknown there, and hence have received scant attention from scholars both in East and West. Both, however, are milestones in China’s literary history.The first, Lord of Perfect Satisfaction (Ruyijun zhuan), recounts the amours of China’s one and only female emperor, Wu Zetian, who exercised power for her incompetent husband for almost three decades in the glorious Tang dynasty. In 690, she overthrew the Tang and proclaimed herself the «Holy and Divine Emperor,» of a new Zhou dynasty which she ruled until her forced abdication and the Tang restoration in 705. History tells us that after she was widowed, she embarked upon a number of sexual liaisons, and throughout her sixties and into her seventies enjoyed a series of young lovers. The boudoir scenes in the novella constitute China’s earliest examples of wholly explicit carnality, and can thus be regarded as the «fountainhead» of Chinese eroticism.The second, Memoir of a Crazy Old Woman (Chipozi zhuan), appeared a few decades later and, in semi-autobiographical style, tells the tale of an upper-class woman whose sexual appetites lead her to ruin and a reclusive old age. In this single work, we see the full spectrum of sexual decadence in the late-Ming – seduction and rape, group sex and incest, and even an encounter with a Buddhist abbot. In spite of the pseudonym «Madame Hibiscus», previous commentators have stubbornly refused to believe that a female could have penned such an erotic, even «pornographic», work. The translators challenge this view, suggesting that this is the earliest work of erotica in world literary history whose author was, indeed, a woman.

From Beauty Fear to Beauty Fever: A Critical Study of Contemporary Chinese Female Writers looks at a «glamorous» literary and cultural moment in China at the turn of the twenty-first century, namely that of the high-profile female writers born in the 1970s. Dubbed as «beauty writers», they brought to light a series of literary, cultural, and social issues at an important moment of institutional and ideological transformation, when China was more actively participating in the global market economy. The discourse of beauty writers is closely related to the changing ideology from «beauty fear» to «beauty fever». Beauty fear resulted from the revolutionary ambition of denouncing the old institutionalized ideologies and embracing gender equality. Beauty fever was driven by commercialization in the mid- and late 1990s, when globalization became the new social reality and broke the boundaries of world/China, official/folk, and elite/mass. After years of revolutionary policies of gender erasure, beauty fever was the product of the intertwined narratives of resistance politics, feminism, capitalism, consumerism, and the postmodern ludic carnival.From Beauty Fear to Beauty Fever: A Critical Study of Contemporary Chinese Female Writers takes an interdisciplinary approach and reads works of female writers born in the 1970s as both literary and social texts. Engaging in a literary and cultural analysis to scrutinize the interface between fiction, nonfiction, high culture, and low culture, this book explores the role that femininity plays in the reconfiguration of writing, and unravels the politics of gender, class, body, and technology in literary engagement in the post-revolution era.

Wandering Between Two Worlds: The Formative Years of Cao Xueqin 1715–1745 is a biographical account of the first 30 years of the life of the eighteenth-century Chinese novelist who wrote Honglou meng (Dream of the Red Chamber). It covers Cao Xueqin’s life from his birth in Nanjing in 1715 to the time when it is roughly estimated he began to seriously write his massive work. The book attempts to provide a brisk but broad overview of the important familial, social, historical, literary, and intellectual influences on Cao and his decision to write Honglou meng. Wandering Between Two Worlds relies upon extensive interviews done with noted mainland Chinese scholars on the novel, such as Zhou Ruchang, Cai Yijiang, Duan Jiangli, Shen Zhijun, Zhang Qingshan, and Sun Yuming, during the author’s eight-year stay in China; recent research done by Western scholars on Qing dynasty literature, gender, qing, philosophy, and education; and insights from the burgeoning field of the New Qing history. This is only the second biography of Cao Xueqin’s life to appear in English, and the first to examine in detail his early life and to be written by a non-Chinese. It is intended for students of traditional Chinese literature and culture, as well as general readers interested in the novel and features a special foreword written by the distinguished redologist Zhou Ruchang.

How and why do some places in the world become symbols of illusive paradise, and what does this mean for their residents? Moving between anthropology, tourism, and the increasingly influential cultural heritage movement, Partners in Paradise examines the origins of a Euro-American fascination with places imagined to exist outside of Modernity. Focusing on the emergence of Tibet and Bali as, in turn, anthropological field sites, tourist destinations, and cultural heritage sites, it argues that the work of academic researchers, tourists, and cultural preservationists inform and constitute each other, in the process constructing particular places as «paradise». Unpacking this process is a necessary first step in understanding how Tibetans and Balinese negotiate their place in a modern world in which the meaning of «paradise» is contested. Drawing on anthropology, history, and tourist studies, Partners in Paradise offers a unique lens on the politics of development, modernization, and cultural preservation.

Women and Malay Voices examines Malay literature by Chinese peranakan authors in the Dutch East Indies between 1915 and 1940. The narratives, some of them based on sensational murder trials reported in the news, offer insights into women’s lives and experiences and glimpses of female agency. With its primary focus on Malay texts and Asian women, this book offers a unique opportunity to hear subaltern voices and understand the lives of colonized women in new ways. Using feminist and postcolonial theories, this study juxtaposes the Malay texts with Dutch fiction and newspaper accounts to gain insight into how gender, race, and class are represented and what ideologies marked power relations in Dutch East Indies society.

While Indian visual culture and Tantric images have drawn wide attention, the culture of images, particularly that of the divine images, is broadly misunderstood. This book is the first to systematically address the hermeneutic and philosophical aspects of visualizing images in Tantric practices. While examining the issues of embodiment and emotion, this volume initiates a discourse on image-consciousness, imagination, memory, and recall. The main objective of this book is to explore the meaning of the opaque Tantric forms, and with this, the text aims to introduce visual language to discourse. Language of Images is the result of a long and sustained engagement with Tantric practitioners and philosophical and exegetical texts. Due to its synthetic approach of utilizing multiple ways to read cultural artifacts, this work stands alone in its attempt to unravel the esoteric domains of Tantric practice by means of addressing the culture of visualization.

This book guides the reader to the emerging Ecozoic Era when humans will be present upon the Earth in a mutually enhancing manner. Indeed, this book calls for an Ecozoic spirituality that is timely and much needed. It also illustrates an important direction for theology and spirituality and for deep ecumenism that is yet to be fully realized and opens more doors for such dialogue. By giving special attention to the integral relationship among God, the cosmos, and humanity, the works of Thomas Berry (1914–2009, USA) and Zhou Dunyi (1017–1073, China) provide insights that speak to the current ecological crisis, a cosmological context for developing an Ecozoic spirituality, while helping to advance clear values and ethical parameters that lead to a more authentic human presence on Earth.

The fascinating story of Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) changing himself while trying to change the religious faith of the Chinese has been told many times. As a Jesuit, Ricci pushed Christian evangelism by claiming a theistic affinity with Confucianism and by presenting himself as a defender of Confucian orthodoxy from Buddhism. Already in his day, Ricci’s unusual cultural adaptation was controversial; not surprisingly, scholarly studies have hitherto focused almost exclusively on variations of this controversy. Reacting mostly to Ricci’s account of events, this line of research has provided insight, but much more can be learned about the early-modern cross-cultural encounter of Europe and China if the perspective is broadened to include his intricate and intriguing relationships with his Chinese friends. With his distinctively different religiosity, personal charisma, and knowledge of European science and mathematics, Ricci impressed the social and cultural elite of late Ming China, many of whom befriended him and some of whom became Christian converts. However, between him and his Chinese friends there were always disagreements, resulting sometimes from a lack of understanding or misunderstanding, and sometimes even when they apparently understood each other perfectly. Followed closely as the investigative thread of this book, the many kinds of disagreement cast an unusual light on an otherwise long familiar subject and are instructive for the at times tense and even hostile, but in reality always mutually energizing relationship of both competition and complement between China and the West in the early twenty-first century.

This volume engages with the work of E. Douglas Lewis, who has made major contributions to the understanding of Eastern Indonesia, ethnography, culture, and religion, as well as a neurobiologically informed anthropology. Lewis’ work on the Ata Tana ‘Ai (People of the Forest) of Flores has long been regarded as a seminal work on culture and society in Eastern Indonesia. His ‘precedence theory’ became highly influential among anthropologists in their interpretations of other social groups in the region. In this volume, however, a group of scholars influenced by his work undertake diverse and thought-provoking excursions from Lewis’ work, shedding light on his insights on subjects ranging from Eastern Indonesian ethnography, to theorizing culture change, to development, and to the nascent field of ‘neuroanthropology’. Of particular note, this book also features an extended contribution by Lewis that is, as Professor James J. Fox notes in this book’s foreword, ‘the kind of serious contemplation of an intellectual trajectory that every senior anthropologist should be urged to write’.