Select Books – the struggle of an independent bookshop

Abstract

This is a first‐hand account of the initial 28 years of Select Books, an independent bookshop, located in Singapore, but with a regional Southeast Asian focus and a global reach. Select Books carved a niche for itself by specializing in books about Southeast Asia and published in Southeast Asia. Its comprehensive and in‐depth book stock gave it an edge over formidable competition at home and abroad. The author relates the difficulties encountered and the novel solutions Select Books employed to overcome administrative problems and sidestep bureaucratic red tape. Select Books operated on all levels of the book trade: as bookseller, distributor, library supplier and publisher. Equally important is its intangible role as a promoter of Southeast Asian authors and their works in Singapore as well as to the first world. Select Books provided a cultural space where authors could meet with their readership. Turning to the broader book community, the author is critical of the Eurocentric mindsets of public and academic institutions in Singapore. She is equally critical of the parochial and prejudiced international market that dismisses books about Asia as insufficiently ‘mainstream’ for their market.     

In/Out: Hong Kong Tongzhi Creative Workshop and Exhibition

Abstract

Critics of postcolonial theory have provided this theory with a genealogy in which it appears as the poisoned fruit of a period when revolutionary energies were ebbing and in retreat. This essay seeks to provide an alternative genealogy, suggesting that the Subaltern Studies project, and postcolonial theory more generally, were enabled and in important ways shaped by the Maoist upsurge in some parts of India in the latter 1960s and early 1970s. The critiques of modernity, of nationalism and the nation‐state, and of homogenizing narratives of progress which mark, and in the eyes of its critics, mar these intellectual currents, far from being reflections of their disassociation from radical politics, are here presented as the indirect outcome of a profound cultural and intellectual shift, which has been the consequence of the Naxalite movement of this period. This alternative genealogy proceeds through an alternative reading of the Naxalite movement. This essay asks why this movement was so important, given that its ideology was naïve, and its political successes short‐lived. The Naxalite strategy of ‘annihilating’ feudal landlords, and the urban ‘statue‐smashing’ campaign of Naxalite youth in 1970 – commonly regarded and condemned as juvenile and ultra‐leftist – are here instead interpreted as an incipient critique of aspects of Marxist theory, a critique subsequently given more explicit and elaborate exposition in the writings of the Subaltern Studies group, and in postcolonial theory.     

In the ruins of truth: the work of melancholia and acts of memory

Abstract

This paper seeks to problematize and render inadequate the ‘truth’ of Truth Commissions, which have proliferated globally. It does so by questioning the relationship of ‘truth’ to ‘testimony’ by offering a critical account of their relationship to ‘trauma,’ on the one hand and by questioning the location of ‘testimony’ in relation to ‘resistance,’ on the other hand. Moving away from this ‘psycologistic register,’ the paper rehearses a re‐reading of Freud, which attempts to question the sharp distinction between mourning and melancholia, in his 1917 essay. Given this, a complex, psychoanalytic subject is constructed, whose psychic and social ‘work of melancholia,’ and ‘acts of memory,’ cannot be straightforwardly rendered in testimony or recollection, and is unavailable for nationalist appropriation. Empirical material is drawn from field work in Eastern Sri Lanka, on the after life multiple massacres that took place in the early 1990s, and is juxtaposed with Commissions of Inquiry into these events in the late 1990s.     

‘Envisioning the Past: Art,Historiography and Public History’*

Abstract

This essay considers the role that art and history might play together in public history projects. It discusses public history not in terms of ‘learning lessons’, ‘public debate’ and ‘transferable skills’ but instead in terms of creative thinking in the public sphere. The essay draws upon the author’s experiences of working with artists on a series of exhibitions themed around the history of an arts centre’s late Georgian and Victorian buildings and their inhabitants in Sheffield. It explores the synergies between artistic and historical ways of knowing and argues that collaborations with artists provide an opportunity for academic historians to reengage the imaginative aspects of professional academic history. It also explores the value of art’s expressive power and its potential to pose new questions and suggest new answers for both public and historians’ understanding of the past.     

The changing shape of the book: From cultural evolution to technological revolution

Electronic media would appear to offer the prime forms of communication for the future. Television, the internet, the mobile phone and any number of other innovations present an apparently overwhelming threat to the continuation of the paper‐based media with which most of the adult community is familiar.

The book, in particular, would seem an anachronism. Its production methods, its distribution systems, the physical entity itself, belong not even to the century just finished but to an earlier era altogether. It finds its provenance in a mediaeval technology, its purpose in a society that could accept a pedestrian form of communication, well suited to sharing the printed word with the few who could read it and afford it.

And yet the market for the conventional book remains buoyant. Statistics indicate decline in neither the number of titles published nor sales revenues.

In fact, the new media are indeed impinging on the book market but more slowly than might be imagined. The technologies which have brought us screen‐based devices and telephonic communication have also brought dramatic improvements in the speed and economics of book manufacturing and are beginning to offer highly competitive solutions to both the production and the distribution of conventional books.

This chapter begins with a look ahead to the alternatives shapes of the book of the future. It then accounts for the continuing presence of the conventional book in this scenario by briefly tracing the development of an ancient craft which has evolved through technological innovation into a sophisticated production process which transformed the economics of production.

These technological and economic changes in conventional book manufacturing are set against the advantages and challenges of new media to show how all future forms of the book have a competing place in the market.     

The politics of national atonement and narrations of war

Abstract

In March 2007, Japan’s ‘national atonement project’ for survivors of military sexual slavery was officially concluded. The atonement project that was implemented by a Japanese government‐established non‐governmental organization – the Asian Women’s Fund – has distributed its fund to a number of survivors in the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and the Netherlands since its inception in 1995. Over the years, intense politicization around the project has made it extremely difficult for most observers to assess whether the project was successful or not. Several prominent scholars in Japan and South Korea have called for a more compassionate and positive assessment of the project’s good intentions, while feminist activists continue to critique the project’s negative interventions in the process of redress and reconciliation in Asia. This essay is an attempt to open up a space to rethink the felicitousness of the atonement project by focusing on the ways in which the project told its own story of war, violence, and gender. By juxtaposing stories told by Filipina survivors of the ‘comfort women’ system with one that has been told by the atonement project implemented by the Asian Women’s Fund, it seeks to find a way to reassess whether the project acknowledged the survivors’ claims for justice and compensation.     

The ‘Non‐dit’ in the Zenana: representations of Muslim women in Islamic canonical texts,the neo‐colonial imagination and a feminist response from Bangladesh

Abstract

This essay recognizes that representations of the ‘Muslim woman’ as the Othered ‘object’ of the ‘Western’ gaze and the domesticated ‘object’ which the Islamic apologists strive hard to defend, are both constructions and false antitheses of each other. It seeks not the ‘truth’ regarding the Muslim women in the world of social reality but to examine how various representations of the women are constructed and to what effects and consequences these representations are mobilized. The essay proceeds in three stages. The first stage shows how the patriarchy mobilizes the Qur’an and the Hadith in order to construct the woman as the negative, the inessential and the abnormal of the man so as to exert complete subordination over her. However, the very act of attempting to mute the woman in Islam is the most strident proof that she is engaged in resistance against patriarchal control and the degree of resistance must be judged by the degree of patriarchal control. The second stage demonstrates how patriarchy operates in colonial and neo‐imperial landscape: it legitimizes the appropriation of Muslim woman ‘possessed’ by the Other (as exemplified by the orientalist seduction fantasy in William Dalrymple’s The White Mughals), but, haunted by the fear of rape and anxieties regarding the sexuality of the White woman possessed by the Self, it attempts to maintain strict control over her (as in the cases of Miss Wheeler in the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857 and Private Jessica Lynch in the Iraq War). This struggle over the feminine body is perfectly in line with Islam’s hyper‐anxiousness to hide the female body and rigorously ensure monopolic possession over her. The third stage shows how Taslima Nasreen, a late‐20th century feminist from Bangladesh, speaks the unspoken and thereby attempts to subvert the normative representation of the muted women in her autobiographical novella, entitled āmār Meyebelā. In thus examining the representations of the Muslim women, this essay seeks an alternative ‘third space of enunciation’ and takes a distinct political stand located outside of the axis of the dichotomy of the ‘Western’ gaze and the construction of the Islamic theologians.     

In the heat of the moment: South Asian responses to the events of 11 September 2001

Abstract

This review article looks at three books, published in 2002, which provide from different perspectives a response by South Asian Muslims to the new interest in Islam evoked by the events of 9/11. Written from different vantage points, they represent an intellectual effort to come to grips with the notion of an ‘Islamic’ identity – debating notions of jihad, and its connections with Islamic faith, with the notion of an Islamic umma or nation, and where Muslim societies are headed to in the 21st century. It is not only the emergence of the Taliban movement in the North‐western portion of South Asia that has brought the focus on South Asian Islam. As M.J. Akbar has observed, South Asia forms the demographic heartland of Islam. The books reviewed do not fall into the category of the myriad publications that have become a kind of apology for Islam, but represent an effort at understanding the connections between geo‐political concerns and intellectual academic approaches to the subject of Islam.     

Transpacific precarities: responding to Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Found and Rita Wong’s forage in East Asia

ABSTRACT

This essay investigates the stakes involved in responding to transpacific texts in East Asia, specifically in universities in Macau and Taiwan. It focuses on responses to two texts that represent in distinct ways precariatized lives in a transpacific frame: Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Found, a text that uncovers a path from Laos to a refugee camp in Thailand to Canada, a path made legible through a scrapbook kept by Thammavongsa’s father; and Rita Wong’s forage, a text that cuts across and between South China and North America to track the movements of peoples and goods and waste, including the movement of electronic waste (or “e-waste”). By discussing selected responses to these texts, this essay investigates how such responses can be considered as part of a long-term pedagogical process of cultivating imaginations and striving to develop forms of responsibility to what this essay calls transpacific precarities. It suggests that carefully attending to such responses, always partial and in progress, can help us to better understand Asian American studies in East Asia as it continues to evolve through acts of teaching and learning in different sites.     

Diaspora as method: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and the Asian Australian Studies Research Network

ABSTRACT

What is the place of the diasporas within the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies movement, and how can Asian diasporas in the West contribute to Inter-Asia's intellectual project of “problematising Asia”? Developing a notion of diaspora as method, this essay highlights the complementary relationship between the Asian Australian Studies Research Network and the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies network. It argues that the Inter-Asia network has much to gain from embracing the Asian Australian diaspora as an interlocutor with shared priorities and concerns, and that Asian Australian studies can also productively learn from Inter-Asia's alternative model of institutionalisation, thereby expanding its theoretical and methodological frames of reference.     

Nomadic trajectories: mapping short film production in Singapore 1

Abstract

The short film form in Southeast Asia is a potent form of cultural production and one that contributes compellingly to the development and continued growth of the region’s moving image culture. This essay provides a preliminary theoretical framework within which to map the intricacies of the short film within Southeast Asia and offers a case study of short film production in Singapore. The essay grapples with the polymorphous and itinerant qualities of the production, distribution, and/or exhibition of short films through the concepts of modes of production, object, text, and/or trace. It identifies and examines two key traces in contemporary Singapore film production: merantau and motley urbanisms.     

Decolonizing educational/curriculum studies in East Asia: problematizing shadow education in South Korea

This essay review critically engages Young Chun Kim's book, Shadow Education and the Curriculum and Culture of Schooling in South Korea, by responding to two central questions at its heart: What does decolonization of educational research mean and what does it look like? In what way can cultural studies of countries with histories of colonized educational systems challenge the inertia to recapitulate colonized historical consciousness? Kim provides theoretical and empirical foundations for generating intellectual space that reveals the dialectical relationship between the dominant modes of discourse in educational research and aspirations of the colonized to envision their own educational culture and history.     

Yoko's Story and the battle of memory: fragmentation and suture of national memory and gender in the age of globalization

Abstract

Since its publication in 1986, Yoko Watkins’ So Far from the Bamboo Grove has been used as a textbook by some primary and middle schools in the US. The book is an autobiographical novel about the experiences of a Japanese girl named Yoko who returns to her home country with her mother and sister with an anti‐war and peace message. However, it became the center of attention and was referred to as the Yoko incident when, in January 2007, it became known to the Koreans that the book was being used as a textbook by American students and contained a story about Japanese women raped by Korean men at the end of Japanese colonial rule. It immediately incited outcries from the Korean media and online communities, complaining that any suggestion of the rape of Japanese women by Korean men at the end of Japanese colonial rule is a grave distortion of history and a reversal of the perpetrator and the victim. This paper analyzes how the memory structure of the Koreans regarding colonialism is based on a victim nationalism and how Korean feminism has intervened in the fragmentation and suture of national memory since the 1990s. Furthermore, the paper reveals how American multiculturalism turns a blind eye to, or even promotes, the clashing of collective identities in the age of globalization. The so called Yoko incident illustrates how the competition of East Asian countries for a historical position of ‘victim’ in a battle of memory in the US not only strengthens exclusive nationalism in the area but also connives in ‘Americanization of world justice’.     

Vicarious Vagrants: Incognito Social Explorers and the Homeless in England, 1860–1910. Edited by Mark Freeman and Gillian Nelson

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to place the debate about affluent working-class people in the inter-war and post-war periods within the broader context of long-term economic and social change. It explores why important structural changes were ignored for a long time, and how they came into view as the focus of professional social inquiry shifted following the Second World War, only to be reconceptualized as a new ‘social problem’ in the politically driven controversy about ‘affluence’ in the late 1950s. The article argues that we need to pay more attention to the gulf between official and vernacular understandings of social class in twentiethcentury Britain, drawing a distinction between everyday usage and professional languages of class.     

Editorial Introduction

ABSTRACT

Eighteenth-century England saw a close association between personal decency and the condition, cleanliness and quality of underwear – this shirt or shift, usually made from linen, was used to judge status and respectability. Novels and a pawnbroker’s book reveal that inadequate underwear shamed its owner. Bodily intimacy had the potential to create emotional attachments, illustrated by the poignant Derwentwater sheet. However quantitative analysis of wills and textiles from the Foundling Hospital, which continues as the children’s charity Coram, indicate that bodily intimacy did not automatically create emotional meaning and economic value could have primacy over emotional attachment.     

“A living archive of modern protest”: Memory-making in the Women’s March

ABSTRACT

The Women’s March, held on January 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration as President of the United States, made news across the world as a surprisingly powerful current event that signaled possible political and social futures. Yet this event was also threaded with the past. This essay examines the uses and constructions of memory in the marches and their mediation, drawing on news and social media coverage, on my own on-site experience at the Washington, DC, march, and interdisciplinary scholarship that may provide theoretical context for understanding the event’s nature and lasting importance. It considers the rhetorical and material memory work, on the ground, of both the official ceremonies and the marchers’ more vernacular expressions, as well as the complex interplay of mediation, resulting in definitions of the event as historic in its own right and as a map for the future.     

‘Of lost fathers and broken sons’: Farish Noor on the politics of love and the new thought in Malaysia

Abstract

This paper addresses the polemical and intimate writings of one of Malaysia’s leading public intellectuals, Farish Noor. Straddling secularism and Islamism, Noor’s ideas are informed by a compassion that seeks to bypass monotheism and an ethnically informed nationalism. An advocate of a multiethnic and plural society, Noor does not merely reject Islamism; rather, his thinking seeks to reconcile and transcend what he perceives as a false dichotomy between a system of reason and a system of belief. The achievement of this transcendence is a fraught one for it sometimes seems that Noor involuntarily contradicts himself. To resolve this contradiction I turn to Gille Deleuze’s work, Pure Immanence, which, I argue, provides a key in‐road into understanding the complexivity of Noor’s thought, in particular his valorization of love and his canny and novel attempts to interpret what he calls an ‘other Malaysia.’     

Book Reviews

Religion and Culture in Medieval Islam RICHARD G. HOVANNISIAN and GEORGES SABAGH (Eds), 1999 Giorgio Levi della Vida Conferences, 14 Cambridge, Cambridge University Press viii_118 pp., UK£32.50 ISBN 0-521-623502 This book contains the proceedings of a conference whose speakers and theme were chosen by Professor George Makdisi, recipient of the Giorgio Levi della Vida Award in 1993. Although the theme is quite wide, the tone and viewpoint of the book are consistent with each other and coherent with Makdisi's own position, which he summarises in the first chapter, "Religion and culture in classical Islam and the Christian West". Here, Makdisi gives an overview of the fascinating theory which he has expounded in several works over the past decades (especially his The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West (Edinburgh, 1981) and The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West (Edinburgh, 1990)), explaining how came to be interested in this subject and linking it to the modern-day American situation. Makdisi's view is that the European scholastic and humanistic movements had their origin in two equivalent movements that had begun some centuries earlier in the Middle East and, through Spain and Sicily, reached the West. This first chapter sets the tone of the whole book, which deals with several Arabo-Islamic subjects, making ample references to equivalent or parallel themes in the medieval (and occasionally modern) Christian (and occasionally Jewish) world. W. Montgomery Watt's essay on The future of Islam" compares Jewish reactions to Hellenism in Antiquity with contemporary Muslim reactions to the Western, Christian culture. It is a very stimulating piece, and the daring juxtapposition of past and present provokes important questions: to what extent can one think, today, of different parts of our globalised world simply Muslim or Christian, albeit with varying degrees of secularism? How can one deal with the fact that large portions of all societies do not identify themselves in any religion? Returning to a medieval subject, the following two chapters illustrate aspects the relation between religion and literature. Merlin Swartz writes on "Arabic rhetoric and the art of the homily in medieval Islam", pointing to the lack of secondary scholarship on this genre, whose Christian parallel has instead received great attention. Swartz begins filling this gap by describing in great detail the norms laid out in two handbooks for preachers written by Ibn al-Jawzý¯ (d. 597/1201). The fourth chapter, by Irfan Shahý¯d ("Medieval Islam: the literary-cultural dimension") reflects on the Qur'a¯nic idea of i'ja¯z (inimitability) and its consequences for the field of literature, from the times of Muh_ammad to the present day. This is followed by George Saliba's more specific illustration of how three prominent Ash'arite authors refute astrology ("The Ash'arites and the science of the stars"); the issue is placed within the context of the Islamic-Arabic approach to classical Greek heritage. Roger Arnaldez ("Religion, religious culture, and culture") provides an outline of the development of Islam from starting point as a religion containing ancient practices whose origins were forgotten,     

What the ‘Third World’ means to me

Abstract

This essay offers an experience of how the author comes to understand the terms ‘Third World’ in a specific social, historical, and political context in Taiwan. For the author, his deepest understandings of the ‘Third World’ did not come from theoretical readings, but from several concrete personal experiences.     

A Thirteenth-Century Scholar in the Eastern Mediterranean: Sirāj al-Dīn Urmavī, Jurist,Logician, Diplomat

This essay examines the career of the Shafi?ī jurist and logician Sirāj al-Dīn Urmavī (1198–1283), who combined his scholarly and judicial activities with ambassadorial appointments to Frederick II, King of Sicily and Holy Roman Emperor, and the Ilkhan Hülegü. Originally from Azerbaijan, Sirāj al-Dīn spent most of his professional life in Ayyūbid Cairo and, from 1257, in Seljuk Konya, where he spent the final decades of his life as chief qadi. Through a contextualised reading of the extant biographical information for Sirāj al-Dīn, the article draws particular attention to two aspects of his physical and professional trajectory. First, the essay situates Sirāj al-Dīn's career in the context of processes of cultural change in thirteenth-century Anatolia. It seeks to demonstrate both the transfer and adaptation to the Anatolian urban milieu of social–cultural patterns attested for the a?yān in neighbouring predominantly Muslim societies, and the shaping of the social and cultural functions of immigrant scholars to Anatolia by local conditions. Second, the article identifies Sirāj al-Dīn as a prominent participant in an intellectual community engaged in inter-cultural exchange across political and confessional boundaries in the thirteenth-century eastern Mediterranean.