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Korean Pop Culture beyond Asia

Race and Reception

By David C. Oh, Benjamin Min Han

Showcases the dynamism of cross-cultural engagement with Korean media

Korean media has exploded in popularity across the globe in the past decade: BTS and other K-pop groups have packed stadiums, Parasite garnered record-breaking critical success, The...

The Xi Jinping Effect

By Ashley Esarey, Rongbin Han

Assesses the broad impact of China's influential leader

The Xi Jinping Effect explores the relationship between the People's Republic of China's current "paramount leader"—arguably the most powerful figure since Mao Zedong (1893–1976)—and multiple areas of political...

Cold War Deceptions

The Asia Foundation and the CIA

By David H. Price

Investigates how the CIA tried to influence scholars and governments

During the early Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency created dozens of funding fronts to support work that aligned with CIA goals, from clandestine operations and...

Fukushima Futures

Survival Stories in a Repeatedly Ruined Seascape

By Satsuki Takahashi. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

A probe of the environmental and sociocultural effects of industrialization and nuclear disaster on coastal livelihoods

Both before and after the 2011 "Triple Disaster" of earthquake, tidal wave, and consequent meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear...

Turning Land into Capital

Development and Dispossession in the Mekong Region

By Philip Hirsch, Kevin Woods, Natalia Scurrah, Michael B. Dwyer, K. Sivaramakrishnan

In Southeast Asia reversals of earlier agrarian reforms have rolled back "land-to-the-tiller" policies created in the wake of Cold War–era revolutions. This trend, marked by increased land concentration and the promotion of export-oriented agribusiness at...

Pure and True

The Everyday Politics of Ethnicity for China's Hui Muslims

By David R. Stroup

What are the boundaries of Hui identity?

The Chinese Communist Party points to the Hui—China’s largest Muslim ethnic group—as a model ethnic minority and touts its harmonious relations with the group as an example of the...

Greening East Asia

The Rise of the Eco-developmental State

By Ashley Esarey, Mary Alice Haddad, Joanna I. Lewis, Stevan Harrell

A timely collection examining a diverse region’s environmental shifts

East Asia hosts a fifth of the world’s population and consumes over half the world’s coal, a quarter of its petroleum products, and a tenth of its...

Shifting Livelihoods

Gold Mining and Subsistence in the Chocó, Colombia

By Daniel Tubb. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Honorable Mention for the Society for the Anthropology of Work (SAW) Book Prize

The many dimensions of gold in a shadow economy

People employ various methods to extract gold in the rainforests of the Chocó, in northwest...

The Snow Leopard and the Goat

Politics of Conservation in the Western Himalayas

By Shafqat Hussain. Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan

Who should bear the cost of protecting charismatic wildlife?

Following the downgrading of the snow leopard’s status from “endangered” to “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2017, debate has renewed about the...

Top-Down Democracy in South Korea

By Erik Mobrand

While popular movements in South Korea rightly grab the headlines for forcing political change and holding leaders to account, those movements are only part of the story of the construction and practice of democracy. In...

Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State

By Justin M. Jacobs

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295806570

Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State views modern Chinese political history from the perspective of Han officials who were tasked with governing Xinjiang. This region, inhabited by Uighurs, Kazaks, Hui, Mongols, Kirgiz,...

The Dust of Life

America’s Children Abandoned in Vietnam

By Robert S. McKelvey

The Dust of Life is a collection of vivid and devastating oral histories of Vietnamese Amerasians. Abandoned during the war by their American fathers, discriminated against by the victorious Communists, and ignored for many years...

Perpetual Happiness

The Ming Emperor Yongle

By Shih-shan Henry Tsai

The reign of Emperor Yongle, or “Perpetual Happiness,” was one of the most dramatic and significant in Chinese history. It began with civil war and a bloody coup, saw the construction of the Forbidden City,...

Manchus and Han

Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861-1928

By Edward J. M. Rhoads

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295997483

China’s 1911–12 Revolution, which overthrew a 2000-year succession of dynasties, is thought of primarily as a change in governmental style, from imperial to republican, traditional to modern. But given that the dynasty...

Mediating Islam

Cosmopolitan Journalisms in Muslim Southeast Asia

By Janet Steele

Broadening an overly narrow definition of Islamic journalism, Janet Steele examines day-to-day reporting practices of Muslim professionals, from conservative scripturalists to pluralist cosmopolitans, at five exemplary news organizations in Malaysia and Indonesia. At Sabili, established...

Disarmament Sketches

Three Decades of Arms Control and International Law

By Thomas Graham, Jr.

Thomas Graham Jr. played a role in the negotiation of every major international arms control and non-proliferation agreement signed by the United States during the past thirty years. As a U.S. government lawyer and diplomat,...

The Anguish of Surrender

Japanese POWs of World War II

By Ulrich A. Straus

On December 6, 1941, Ensign Kazuo Sakamaki was one of a handful of men selected to skipper midget subs on a suicide mission to breach Pearl Harbor’s defenses. When his equipment malfunctioned, he couldn’t find...

War and Politics by Other Means

A Journalist's Memoir

By Shelby Scates

Shelby Scates’s thirty-five-year career as a prize-winning journalist and columnist for International News Service, United Press International, the Associated Press, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has taken him to centers of action across this country and...

Protracted Contest

Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Twentieth Century

By John W. Garver

Ever since the two ancient nations of India and China established modern states in the mid-20th century, they have been locked in a complex rivalry ranging across the South Asian region. Garver offers a scrupulous...

Women Playing Men

Yue Opera and Social Change in Twentieth-Century Shanghai

By Jin Jiang

This ground-breaking volume documents women's influence on popular culture in twentieth-century China by examining Yue opera. A subgenre of Chinese opera, it migrated from the countryside to urban Shanghai and morphed from its traditional all-male...