ENG

Ancient China and Greece are two classical civilisations that have exerted far-reaching influence in numerous areas of human experience and are often invoked as the paradigms in East-West comparison. This book examines gender relations in the two ancient societies as reflected in convivial contexts such as family banquets, public festivals, and religious feasts. Two distinct patterns of interpersonal affinity and conflict emerge from the Chinese and Greek sources that show men and women organizing themselves and interacting with each other in social occasions intended for collective pursuit of pleasure. Through an analysis of the two different patterns, Yiqun Zhou illuminates the different socio-political mechanisms, value systems, and fabrics of human bonds in the two classical traditions. Her book will be important for readers who are interested in the comparative study of societies, gender studies, women's history, and the legacy of civilisations.

RUS

Древний Китай и Древняя Греция — две классические цивилизации, оказавшие существенное влияние на многие области человеческого опыта и часто упоминаемые в качестве парадигмы при сравнении «Восток — Запад». В данной книге упомянутые древние общества рассматриваются с точки зрения гендерных отношений, отражающихся в таких контекстах общения, как семейные пирше- ства, общественные праздники и религиозные празднества. В китайских и грече- ских источниках прослеживаются две различные модели межличностной близо- сти и конфликта, которые показывают, как мужчины и женщины самоорганизу- ются и взаимодействуют во время социальных мероприятий, предназначенных для получения коллективного удовольствия. Через анализ этих моделей Ицюнь Чжоу освещает различные социально-политические механизмы, системы ценностей и структуру человеческих связей в двух классических цивилизациях. Эта книга станет важным источником информации для тех, кто интересуется гендерными исследованиями, историей женщин, сравнительным анализом древних обществ и наследием цивилизаций.

ENG: The Great East Japan Disaster – a compound catastrophe of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown that began on March 11, 2011 – has ushered in a new era of cultural production dominated by discussions on safety and security, risk and vulnerability, and recovery and refortification. Gender, Culture, and Disaster in Post-3.11 Japan re-frames post-disaster national reconstruction as a social project imbued with dynamics of gender, race, and empire and in doing so Mire Koikari offers an innovative approach to resilience building in contemporary Japan.

RUS: Великое восточнояпонское землетрясение 2011 года — глобальная катастрофа, открывшая новую культурную эру, в которой доминируют дискуссии о безопасности, рисках и уязвимости, восстановлении и реорганизации. В книге Мирэ Коикари национальное возрождение после катастрофы рассматривается как социальный проект, опирающийся на дискурсы гендера, расы и империи.

ENG: Between the founding of Soviet Uzbekistan in 1924 and the Stalinist Terror of the late 1930s, a nationalist cinema emerged in Uzbekistan giving rise to the first wave of national film production and an Uzbek cinematographic elite. In Cinema, Nation, and Empire in Uzbekistan Cloé Drieu uses Uzbek films as a lens to explore the creation of the Soviet State in Central Asia, starting from the collapse of the Russian Empire up through the eve of WWII. Drieu argues that cinema provides a perfect angle for viewing the complex history of domination, nationalism, and empire (here used to denote the centralization of power) within the Soviet sphere. By exploring all of film's dimensions as a socio-political phenomenon-including film production, film reception, and filmic discourse-Drieu reveals how nation and empire were built up as institutional realities and as imaginary constructs.

RUS: Основываясь на исследованиях, проведенных в узбекских и российских государственных архивах, и на глубоком анализе четырнадцати полнометражных фильмов, Хлоя Дрийе описывает дискуссии о процессах государственного и национального строительства Узбекистана, а также о возникновении национализма в целом. Книга «Кино, нация, империя. Узбекистан, 1919–1937» помогает нам понять, как Центральная Азия, входившая в состав Российской империи, сначала была деколонизирована, а затем вновь оказалась под давлением Москвы.

ENG: Justin Jesty’s Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan reframes the history of art and its politics in Japan post-1945. This fascinating cultural history addresses our broad understanding of the immediate postwar era moving toward the Cold War and subsequent consolidations of political and cultural life. At the same time, Jesty delves into an examination of the relationship between art and politics that approaches art as a mode of intervention, but he moves beyond the idea that the artwork or artist unilaterally authors political significance to trace how creations and expressive acts may (or may not) actually engage the terms of shared meaning and value. Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan centers on a group of social realists on the radical left who hoped to wed their art with anti-capitalist and anti-war activism, a liberal art education movement whose focus on the child inspired innovation in documentary film, and a regional avant-garde group split between ambition and local loyalty. In each case, Jesty examines writings and artworks, together with the social movements they were a part of, to demonstrate how art—or more broadly, creative expression—became a medium for collectivity and social engagement. He reveals a shared if varied aspiration to create a culture founded in amateur-professional interaction, expanded access to the tools of public authorship, and dispersed and participatory cultural forms that intersected easily with progressive movements. Highlighting the transformational nature of the early postwar, Jesty deftly contrasts it with the relative stasis, consolidation, and homogenization of the 1960s.

RUS: Книга Джастина Джести переосмысливает историю искусства в Японии после 1945 года. Автор углубляется в изучение отношений между искусством и политикой, но выходит за рамки идеи о том, что произведение искусства или художник являются только выразителями политических смыслов.

В центре книги — группа леворадикальных соцреалистов, надеявшихся соединить свое искусство с антикапиталистическим и антивоенным движением, движение либерального толка и региональная авангардистская группа, пытающаяся найти баланс между амбициями и преданностью локальной культуре.

ENG: "Currently there are more than 125 Chinese cities with a population exceeding one million. The unprecedented urban growth in China presents a crucial development for studies on globalization and urban transformation. This concise and engaging book examines the past trajectories, present conditions, and future prospects of Chinese urbanization, by investigating five key themes - governance, migration, landscape, inequality, and cultural economy.

Based on a comprehensive evaluation of the literature and original research materials, Ren offers a critical account of the Chinese urban condition after the first decade of the twenty-first century. She argues that the urban-rural dichotomy that was artificially constructed under socialism is no longer a meaningful lens for analyses and that Chinese cities have become strategic sites for reassembling citizenship rights for both urban residents and rural migrants."

RUS: В современном Китае насчитывается более 125 городов с населением свыше миллиона человек. Беспрецедентный их рост представляет собой важнейшее явление для исследований глобализации и трансформации Китая. В этой книге на основе изучения пяти ключевых тем — управления, миграции, ландшафта, неравенства и культурной экономики — рассматривается прошлое, настоящее и будущее китайской урбанизации.

On the Horizon of World Literature compares literary texts from asynchronous periods of incipient literary modernity in different parts of the world: Romantic England and Republican China. These moments were oriented alike by “world literature” as a discursive framework of classifications that connected and re-organized local articulations of literary histories and literary modernities. World literature thus provided—and continues to provide—a condition of possibility for conversation between cultures as well as for their mutual provincialization.

Geographical Imagination is an intellectual biography of Ishikawa Sanshirō (1876-1956), a Japanese anarchist active during the first half of the 20th century and a staunch opponent of any form of authoritarianism throughout his life. The book traces his travels, encounters, and ideological engagements, as he opposed war with Russia in the early 1900s, spent several years of self-imposed exile in France and Belgium in the 1910s, and explored European ideas – from anarchism and geographical thought to anti-Darwinism and ecological living. Ishikawa’s life and writings bear testimony to Japan’s undercurrent of political dissent and transnational revolutionary connections during the modern period.

The fifty months of the Siberian Intervention encompass the existential crisis which affected Japanese at virtually all levels when confronted with the new world situation left in the wake of the First World War. From elite politicians and military professionals, to public intellectuals and the families of servicemen in small garrison to wns, the intervention was perceived as a test of how Japan might fit itself into the emerging postwar world order. Both domestically and internationally Japan actions in Siberia were seen as critical proof of the nation’s ability, depending on one viewpoint, to embrace or to ride out the trends of the times, the seeming triumph of constitutional democracy and Wilsonian internationalism. The course of the Siberian Intervention illuminates the struggle to cement responsible party cabinets at the heart of Japanese decision making, the high water mark of efforts to bring the Japanese military under civilian control, the attempt to fundamentally reshape Japanese continental policy, and the hopes of millions of Japanese that their voices be heard and their desires respected by the nation’s leaders. The book attempts a broad examination of domestic politics, foreign policy, and military action by incorporating a wide array of voices through a detailed examination of public comment and discussion in journals and magazines, the major circulation daily newspapers of Tokyo and Osaka as well as those of smaller cities such as Nara, Mito, Oita, and Tsuruga.

In Erik Mueggler’s powerful and imaginative ethnography, an Indigenous community in the mountains of Southwest China struggles to find its place at the margins of a nation-state. Here, people describe the period that began with the Great Leap Famine of 1958-1960 and continued through the 1990s as the “age of wild ghosts.” Their stories of this age converged on a dream of community—a bad dream, embodied in the life, death, and spectral reawakening of a local political and ritual system that expired violently under the Maoist regime. Displaying a sensitive understanding of both Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman language of this community, Mueggler explores memories of this institution, including of the rituals and poetics that once surrounded it and the bitter conflicts that came to haunt it. To exorcise “wild ghosts,” he shows, is nothing less than to re-imagine the state and its power, to trace the responsibility for violence to its morally ambiguous origins, and to articulate demands for justice and longings for reconciliation.

Uneasy Warriors presents a rare and intimate view into the psychological and social workings of the Self-Defense Forces. As the first scholar permitted to participate in basic Self-Defense Forces training, Frühstück offers a firsthand look at an army trained for combat that nevertheless serves nontraditional military needs. She expertly describes their ambiguous status, revealing insights gained from several years of sustained research, including a stint "in uniform" at an army base near Mt. Fuji.

Taming Oblivion examines the cultural construction of senility in Japan and the moral implications of dependent behavior for older Japanese. While the biomedical construction of senility-as-pathology has become increasingly the norm in North America, in Japan a folk category of senility exists known as boke. Although symptomatically and conceptually overlapping with Alzheimer's disease and other forms of senile dementia, boke is distinguished from unambiguously pathological conditions. Rather than being viewed as a disease, boke is seen as an illness over which people have some degree of control. John Traphagan's ethnographic study of older Japanese explores their experiences as they contemplate and attempt to prevent or delay the boke condition.

Born into a low-level literati family in the port city of Ningbo, the seventeenth-century Chinese Christian convert Zhu Zongyuan likely never left his home province. Yet Zhu nonetheless led a remarkably globally connected life. His relations with the outside world, ranging from scholarly activities to involvement with globalizing Catholicism, put him in contact with a complex and contradictory set of foreign and domestic forces. In Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled, Dominic Sachsenmaier explores the mid-seventeenth-century world and the worldwide flows of ideas through the lens of Zhu‘s life, combining the local, regional, and global. Taking particular aspects of Zhu‘s multiple belongings as a starting point, Sachsenmaier analyzes the contexts that framed his worlds as he balanced a local life and his border-crossing faith. At the local level, the book pays attention to the intellectual, political, and social environments of late Ming and early Qing society, including Confucian learning and the Manchu conquest, questioning the role of ethnic and religious identities. At the global level, it considers how individuals like Zhu were situated within the history of organizations and power structures such as the Catholic Church and early modern empires amid larger transformations and encounters. A strikingly original work, this book is a major contribution to East Asian, transnational, and global history, with important implications for historical approaches and methodologies.

This book identifies the crucial variables as classic Japanese forms of socio-political organization: the "circles of compensation." These cooperative groupings of economic, political, and bureaucratic interests dictate corporate and individual responses to such critical issues as investment and innovation; at the micro level, they explain why individuals can be decidedly cautious on their own, yet prone to risk-taking as a collective. Kent E. Calder examines how these circles operate in seven concrete areas, from food supply to consumer electronics, and deals in special detail with the influence of Japan's changing financial system. The result is a comprehensive overview of Japan's circles of compensation as they stand today, and a road map for broadening them in the future.

In this incisive analysis of one of the most spectacular economic breakthroughs in the Deng era, Jean C. Oi shows how and why Chinese rural-based industry has become the fastest growing economic sector not just in China but in the world. Oi argues that decollectivization and fiscal decentralization provided party officials of the localities—counties, townships, and villages—with the incentives to act as entrepreneurs and to promote rural industrialization in many areas of the Chinese countryside. As a result, the corporatism practiced by local officials has become effective enough to challenge the centrality of the national state.

Bruno De Nicola investigates the development of women’s status in the Mongol Empire from its original homeland in Mongolia up to the end of the Ilkhanate of Iran in 1335. Taking a thematic approach, the chapters show a coherent progression of this development and contextualise the evolution of the role of women in medieval Mongol society. The arrangement serves as a starting point from where to draw comparison with the status of Mongol women in the later period. Exploring patterns of continuity and transformation in the status of these women in different periods of the Mongol Empire as it expanded westwards into the Islamic world, the book offers a view on the transformation of a nomadic-shamanist society from its original homeland in Mongolia to its settlement in the mostly sedentary-Muslim Iran in the mid-13th century.

From April 1945, when Stalin broke the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact and Harry Truman assumed the presidency, to the final Soviet military actions against Japan, Hasegawa brings to light the real reasons Japan surrendered. From Washington to Moscow to Tokyo and back again, he shows us a high-stakes diplomatic game as Truman and Stalin sought to outmaneuver each other in forcing Japan’s surrender; as Stalin dangled mediation offers to Japan while secretly preparing to fight in the Pacific; as Tokyo peace advocates desperately tried to stave off a war party determined to mount a last-ditch defense; and as the Americans struggled to balance their competing interests of ending the war with Japan and preventing the Soviets from expanding into the Pacific.

This book investigates the connections between knowledge production and policy formation on the Kazak steppes of the Russian Empire. Tsarist officials were desperate to obtain reliable information about the unfamiliar environment and population of the steppe. This thirst for knowledge created opportunities for Kazak intermediaries to represent themselves and their environment to the tsarist state. Because tsarist officials were uncertain of what the steppe was, and disagreed on what could be made of it, Kazaks were able to be part of these debates, at times influencing the policies that were pursued. By the early 20 th century, though, the tsarist state’s pursuit of a policy of mass peasant colonization of the steppe region closed this space for debate. The same local knowledge that Kazak intermediaries had used to negotiate tsarist rule became, with this, a language of resistance.