A Legendary Painter：In commemoration of ZhangDaqian＇s 110th anniversary

Zhang Daqian is celebrated as a legendary Chinese painter of international renown in the 20th century, With extraordinary skills, he is considered the most outstanding artist in carrying forward the traditions of Chinese ink painting. Zhang began to stand out in the 1920s and obtained a leading status in the then painting arena in the 1930s His replicas of ancient master artists＇ paintings are so superb that they can be hardly distinguished from original works. Mr. Xu Jichuan, a prestigious collector, recalled an interesting experience as evidence to highlight Zhang＇s unparalleled ability to replicate ancient painting masterpieces.     

杜氏家族与偃师杜甫墓地

杜氏家族，自汉初以来，历代任官为宦。汉武帝时，南阳人杜周为廷尉，他治狱苛酷，被司马迁写入了《酷吏列传》。自杜周开始，杜氏一家由南阳迂至茂陵(今陕西兴平县东北)。杜周有三子：延寿、延考、延年。延寿、延考都曾为郡守，延年在昭帝时官至太仆。他任朝官多年，治狱尚宽厚，比他的父亲名声要好。自延年开始，杜氏家族又从茂陵迁到了杜陵(今陕西省西安市东南)。     

The 60th anniversary of the Bandung Conference and Asia

The 60th anniversary of the Bandung Conference adopted the Bandung Message 2015, suggesting Asia and Africa be committed to eradicating poverty, narrowing the gap in living standards, and fostering closer cooperation across the regions. Whilst the historic 1955 Bandung Conference can be understood as a reaction to the Cold War system in the form of an alternative framework for cooperation among nations that resisted the hegemony of economic and military alliances dominated by specific countries, present day Asia witnesses significant attempts to reshuffle the world order; such as the Asia-Pacific system and China's “One Belt One Road” project. Equally, there are also signs of a determination towards openness and to cross boundaries in a spatial sense that may lead to the reshuffling of both institutions and everyday lives. These attempts are aimed at realizing a different Asia and a different world, rather than becoming part of a world order led by a specific country. The “people” of Asia have experienced colonization and forced emigration, drifting around the region while, at the same time, fleeing from one place to another, resulting in numerous interactions with diverse social systems and cultures. In this process they have shaped new spaces, places and social relations within the shifting landscapes of imperialism, the Cold War and globalization. These could be defined as a “historicized Asia” in which various movements, ruptures and hostilities generated by imperialism and the Cold War overlap, but at the same time crystallize the reality of Asia in the era of globalized capitalism. In this context, it is important to explore the way Asia is being constructed within the everyday lives of people as well as from the top; to focus on a different Asia that sits outside modern constructions of ethnicity and nation state, and to locate Asia in the context of its relationship with Africa and Latin America in this historic moment of the 60th anniversary of the Bandung Conference. Therefore, this is the time we may need to question whether or not “Asians in Asia are still alive and well.”     

The Poet and Daughter of the Sea: Animated Ships in Andalusian Arabic Poetry

The Mediterranean Sea has stirred the imagination of Andalusian poets of the tenth and eleventh centuries. They wrote many poetic maritime scenes with lively details about sea and ships. Describing ships as camels ranging over the land is the central core-image of these scenes. The poets’ perspective of ships reveals their unique character and aspires to an aesthetic truth. This article will concern itself with some of the ships’ depictions in Andalusian Arabic poetry, and will illustrate, in particular, the ways by which poets refer to the ships’ external characteristics in order to represent them as animated beings in the sea vista. These epithets coincide with the medieval perception of animals that generally particularize their appearance by some qualitative characteristics. By means of some of animal epithets like physiological features, anatomical references, behavioural traits and feminine characters, poets succeeded in referring to ships as the most animated objects on the maritime scene.     

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.     

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.