Asia and the Historical Imagination

Asia and the Historical Imagination PDF Author: Jane Yeang Chui Wong
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811074011
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
This collection explores the interpretation of historical fiction through fictional representations of the past in an Asian context. Emphasising the significance of region and locality, it explores local networks of political and cultural exchanges at the heart of an Asian polity. The book considers how imagined pasts converge and diverge in developed and developing nations, and examines the limitations of representation at a time when theories of world literature are shaping the way we interpret global histories and cultures. The collection calls attention to the importance of acknowledging local tensions—both within the historical and cultural make-up of a country, and within the Asian continent—in the interpretation of historical fiction. It emphasizes a broad-spectrum view that privileges the shared historical experiences of a group of countries in close proximity, and it also responds to the paradigm shift in Asian Studies. Discussing how local conditions shape and create expectations of how we read historical fiction and working with the theme of fictionality and locality, the volume provides an alternative framework for the study of world literature.

Asia and the Historical Imagination

Asia and the Historical Imagination PDF Author: Jane Yeang Chui Wong
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811074011
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book Here

Book Description
This collection explores the interpretation of historical fiction through fictional representations of the past in an Asian context. Emphasising the significance of region and locality, it explores local networks of political and cultural exchanges at the heart of an Asian polity. The book considers how imagined pasts converge and diverge in developed and developing nations, and examines the limitations of representation at a time when theories of world literature are shaping the way we interpret global histories and cultures. The collection calls attention to the importance of acknowledging local tensions—both within the historical and cultural make-up of a country, and within the Asian continent—in the interpretation of historical fiction. It emphasizes a broad-spectrum view that privileges the shared historical experiences of a group of countries in close proximity, and it also responds to the paradigm shift in Asian Studies. Discussing how local conditions shape and create expectations of how we read historical fiction and working with the theme of fictionality and locality, the volume provides an alternative framework for the study of world literature.

Time, History and the Religious Imaginary in South Asia

Time, History and the Religious Imaginary in South Asia PDF Author: Anne Murphy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113670728X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Religious imaginary is a way of conceiving and structuring the world within the conceptual and imaginative traditions of the religious. Using religious imaginary as a reference, this book analyses temporal ideologies and expressions of historicity in South Asia in the early modern, pre-colonial and early colonial period. Chapters explore the multiple understandings of time and the past that informed the historical imagination in various kinds of literary representations, including historiographical and literary texts, hagiography, and religious canonical literature. The book addresses the contributing forces and comparative implications of the formation of religious and communitarian sensibilities as expressed through the imagination of the past, and suggests how these relate to each other within and across traditions in South Asia. By bringing diverse materials together, this book presents new commonalities and distinctions that inform a larger understanding of how religion and other cultural formations impinge on the concept of temporality, and the representation of it as history.

Music and the Historical Imagination

Music and the Historical Imagination PDF Author: Leo Treitler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674591295
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Leo Treitler is a central figure in American musicology, both for his writings on medieval and Renaissance music and for his influential work on historical analysis. In this elegant book he develops a powerful statement of what music analysis and criticism in relation to historical understanding can be. His aim is an understanding of the music of the past not only in its own historical context but also as we apprehend it now, and as we assimilate it to our current interests and concerns. He elucidates his views through unique new interpretations of major works from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries.

Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination

Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination PDF Author: Joyce Appleby
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674530133
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
The author claims that liberal assumptions color everything American, from ideas about human nature to fears about big government. Not the dreaded "L" word of the 1988 presidential campaign; liberalism in its historical context emerged from the modern faith in free inquiry, natural rights, economic liberty, and democratic government. The author contrasts this view with classical republicanism--ornate, aristocratic, prescriptive, and concerned with the common good. The two concepts, as the author shows, posed choices in their day and in ours, specifically in addressing the complex relations between individual and community, personal liberty and the common good, aspiration and practical wisdom.

The East Is Black

The East Is Black PDF Author: Robeson Taj Frazier
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822376091
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
During the Cold War, several prominent African American radical activist-intellectuals—including W.E.B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois, journalist William Worthy, Marxist feminist Vicki Garvin, and freedom fighters Mabel and Robert Williams—traveled and lived in China. There, they used a variety of media to express their solidarity with Chinese communism and to redefine the relationship between Asian struggles against imperialism and black American movements against social, racial, and economic injustice. In The East Is Black, Taj Frazier examines the ways in which these figures and the Chinese government embraced the idea of shared struggle against U.S. policies at home and abroad. He analyzes their diverse cultural output (newsletters, print journalism, radio broadcasts, political cartoons, lectures, and documentaries) to document how they imagined communist China’s role within a broader vision of a worldwide anticapitalist coalition against racism and imperialism.

Communities of Imagination

Communities of Imagination PDF Author: Catherine Diamond
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824835840
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
Asian theatre is usually studied from the perspective of the major traditions of China, Japan, India, and Indonesia. Now, in this wide-ranging look at the contemporary theatre scene in Southeast Asia, Catherine Diamond shows that performance in some of the lesser known theatre traditions offers a vivid and fascinating picture of the rapidly changing societies in the region. Diamond examines how traditional, modern, and contemporary dramatic works, with their interconnected styles, stories, and ideas, are being presented for local audiences. She not only places performances in their historical and cultural contexts but also connects them to the social, political, linguistic, and religious movements of the last two decades. Each chapter addresses theatre in a different country and highlights performances exhibiting the unique conditions and concerns of a particular place and time. Most performances revolve in some manner around “contemporary modernity,” questioning what it means—for good or ill—to be a part of the globalized world. Chapters are grouped by three general and overlapping themes. The first, which includes Thailand, Vietnam, and Bali, is characterized by the increased participation of women in the performing arts—not only as performers but also as playwrights and directors. Cambodia, Singapore, and Myanmar are linked by a shared concern with the effects of censorship on theatre production. A third group, the Philippines, Laos, and Malaysia, is distinguished by a focus on nationalism: theatres are either contributing to official versions of historical and political events or creating alternative narratives that challenge those interpretations. Communities of Imagination shows the many influences of the past and how the past continues to affect cultural perceptions. It addresses major trends, suggesting why they have developed and why they are popular with the public. It also underscores how theatre continues to attract new practitioners and reflect the changing aspirations and anxieties of societies in immediate and provocative ways even as it is being marginalized by television, film, and the internet. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of theatre and performance, Asian literature, Southeast Asian studies, cultural studies, and gender studies. Travelers wishing to attend local performances as part of their experience abroad will find it an essential reference to theatres of the region.

The Mirror of the Medieval

The Mirror of the Medieval PDF Author: K. Patrick Fazioli
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785335456
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Since its invention by Renaissance humanists, the myth of the “Middle Ages” has held a uniquely important place in the Western historical imagination. Whether envisioned as an era of lost simplicity or a barbaric nightmare, the medieval past has always served as a mirror for modernity. This book gives an eye-opening account of the ways various political and intellectual projects—from nationalism to the discipline of anthropology—have appropriated the Middle Ages for their own ends. Deploying an interdisciplinary toolkit, author K. Patrick Fazioli grounds his analysis in contemporary struggles over power and identity in the Eastern Alps, while also considering the broader implications for scholarly research and public memory.

Kashmir’s Contested Pasts

Kashmir’s Contested Pasts PDF Author: Chitralekha Zutshi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199089361
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
A pioneering and comprehensive study of the historical imagination in Kashmir, this book explores the conversations between the ideas of Kashmir and the ideas of history taking place within Kashmir’s multilingual historical tradition. Analysing the deep linkages among Sanskrit, Persian, and Kashmiri narratives, Kashmir’s Contested Pasts contends that these traditions drew on and influenced each other to imagine Kashmir as far more than simply an unsettled territory or a tourist paradise. By offering a historically grounded reflection on the memories, narrative practices, and institutional contexts that have informed, and continue to inform, imaginings of Kashmir and its past, the book suggests new ways of understanding the debates over history, territory, identity, and sovereignty that shape contemporary South Asia.

Gender in South Asia

Gender in South Asia PDF Author: Subhadra Channa
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107043611
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
The book theorizes gender in terms of models generalizing upon historical sources and lived realities.

The Trans-Pacific Imagination

The Trans-Pacific Imagination PDF Author: Naoki Sakai
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9814324132
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Introduction: the trans-Pacific imagination - Rethinking boundary, culture and society / Naoki Sakai and Hyon Joo Yoo -- Towards a transnational history of victimhood nationalism: on the trans-Pacific space / Jie-Hyun Lim -- The trans-Pacific migrant and area studies / Lisa Lowe -- Imprinting the Empire: Western artists and the persistence of colonialism in East Asia / Tessa Morris-Suzuki -- The political formation of the homoerotics and the Cold War: the battle of gazes at and from Okinawa / Ikuo Shinjou -- Securing Okinawa for miscegenation: gender and trans-Pacific Empire of the United States and Japan / Annmaria Shimabuku -- The politics of postcoloniality and the literature of "Being-in-Japan" (Zainichi) / Hyoduk Lee -- The incurable feminine: women without a country in East Asian cinema / Hyon Joo Yoo -- Inter-Asia comparative framework: postcolonial film historiography in Taiwan and South Korea / Soyoung Kim -- Postcolonial Hiroshima, mon amour: Franco-Japanese collaboration in the American shadow / Yuko Shibata -- Reconceptualizing "East Asia" in the post-Cold War era / Sun Ge -- Trans-Pacific studies and the US-Japan complicity / Naoki Sakai