Leader Symbols and Personality Cult in North Korea (Routledge Advances in Korean Studies)
by Jae-Cheon Lim
The legitimacy of the North Korean state is based solely on the leaders' personal legitimacy, and is maintained by the indoctrination of people with leader symbols and the enactment of leadership cults in daily life. It can thus be dubbed a "leader state". The frequency of leader symbols and the richness and scale of leader-symbol-making in North Korea are simply unrivalled. Furthermore, the personality cults of North Korean leaders are central to people's daily activity, critically affecting th...
The Ethics of Aesthetics in Japanese Cinema and Literature (Routledge Contemporary Japan, #10)
by Nina Cornyetz
This is an innovative, scholarly and original study of the ethics of modern Japanese aesthetics from the 1930s, through the Second World War and into the post-war period. Nina Cornyetz embarks on new and unprecedented readings of some of the most significant literary and film texts of the Japanese canon, for instance works by Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, Abe Kobo and Shinoda Masahiro, all renowned for their texts' aesthetic and philosophic brilliance. Cornyetz uniquely opens up the field...
This powerful study reconceptualizes ideas of ethnic literature while investigating the construction of ethnic heroines, shifting the focus away from cultural politics and considering instead narrative or poetic qualities which involve surprising relationships between Anglo-American women's writing and fiction produced by Asian American and African American women authors.
NATO and the Middle East (Routledge Studies in Middle Eastern Politics)
by Mohammed Moustafa Orfy
Despite having been active in the region since the mid-1990s, the role of NATO in the Middle East has attracted particular attention since the events of 11th September 2001. This book analyses the limits of NATO's role in the Middle East region and examines whether or not the Alliance is able to help in improving the fragile regional security environment through cooperative links with select Middle Eastern partners. The author reviews the strategic importance of the region from a Western persp...
Taking cognisance of the lack of studies on leadership in modern India, this book explores how leadership is practiced in the Indian context, examining this across varied domains - from rural settings and urban neighbourhoods to political parties and state governments. The importance of individual leaders in the projection of politics in South Asia is evident from how political parties, mobilisation of movements and the media all focus on carefully constructed personalities. Besides, the politic...
War and Nationalism in South Asia (Routledge Advances in South Asian Studies)
by Marcus Franke
This book presents and analyses the oldest sub-national war of postcolonial South Asia, between the Indian state and the Nagas of Northeast India. It offers a serious and thorough political history on the Naga region over three periods, pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources and comparative and theoretical literature, Marcus Franke demonstrates that agency and identity-formation are an on-going process that neither started nor ended with colonialism. Al...
Tang provides a coherent and systematic exploration of social evolution as a phenomenon and as a paradigm. He critically builds on existing discussions on social evolution, while drawing from a wide range of disciplines, including archaeology, evolutionary anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, the philosophy of social sciences, and evolutionary biology. Clarifying the relationship between biological evolution and social evolution, Tang lays bare the ontological and epistemologi...
Based on interviews with sources ranging from dissidents to diplomats, the book takes the reader behind the wall of piety and medievalism that guards Saudi sensitivities. Discussing the ruling family's self-awarded birthright to wealth and power, Anders Jerichow questions whether it is possible to ignore the rules of the world and still enjoy the protection of the international community?
Japan held a profound fascination for western artists in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the influence of Japonisme on western art was pervasive. Paradoxically, just as western artists were beginning to find inspiration in Japan and Japanese art, Japan was opening to the western world and beginning a process of thorough modernisation, some have said westernisation. The mastery of western art was included in the programme.This book examines the nineteenth century art world against t...
Shortlisted for the 2014 BAAL Book Prize This book explores the meaning of modernization in contemporary Chinese education. It examines the implications of the implementation of reforms in English language education for experimental-urban schools in the People’s Republic of China. Pérez-Milans sheds light on how national, linguistic, and cultural ideologies linked to modernization are being institutionally (re)produced, legitimated, and inter-personally negotiated through everyday practice in t...
Japan: A Documentary History: v. 2: The Late Eighteenth Century to the Present
by David J. Lu
Seeks to show how the US immigration policy was designed by political considerations. Briggs argues that policy neglected immigration's economic impact at a time when the country was entering a fundamental economic adjustment, the results of which are inconsistent with US national interest.
Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan's National Shame (Studies of the Pacific Basin Institute)
by Honda Katsuichi and Katsuichi Honda
This book is based on four visits to China between 1971 and 1989 by Honda Katsuichi, an investigative journalist for Asahi Shimbun. His aim is to show in pitiless detail the horrors of the Japanese Army's seizure and capture of Nanjing in December 1937. Unvarnished accounts of the testimony - Chinese victims and Japanese perpetrators - to the rape and slaughter are juxtaposed with public relations announcements of the Japanese Army as printed in various Japanese newspapers of the time. The bland...
This book describes the rise of independent mass media in Russia, from the loosening of censorship under Gorbachev's policy of glasnost to the proliferation of independent newspapers and the rise of media barons during the Yeltsin years. The role of the Internet, the impact of the 1998 financial crisis, the succession of Putin, and the effort to reimpose central power over privately controlled media empires mark the end of the first decade of a Russian free press. Throughout the book, there is a...
Toward an Animist Reading of Postcolonial Trauma Literature (Routledge Contemporary Africa)
by Jay Rajiva
This book uses the conceptual framework of animism, the belief in the spiritual qualities of nonhuman matter, to analyze representations of trauma in postcolonial fiction from Nigeria and India. Toward an Animist Reading of Postcolonial Trauma Literature initiates a conversation between contemporary trauma literatures of Nigeria and India on animism. As postcolonial nations move farther away from the event of decolonization in real time, the experience of trauma take place within and is generat...
This book looks at the patterns and trends of participation in Indian elections since 1952 – the first elections held in independent India. It engages with debates around the nature of the multi-party electoral politics in India and its impact on the voting behaviour of Indian voters. The book uses extensive empirical data from the state and national elections to analyze the history and evolution of the country’s electoral systems as well as the challenges and safeguards for conducting fair ele...
The Demoralization of Teachers (Emerging Perspectives on Education in China)
by Dan Wang
Religious Organizations and Democratization: Case Studies from Contemporary Asia
by Tun-Jen Cheng and Deborah A Brown
Since the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the political roles of religious institutions and groups have captured inernational attention. This book examines how religious institutions and organizations in various Asian countries are influencing democratic development and the shaping of government policies. Religious Organizations and Democratization covers Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mainland China, Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Japan. The chapters specifically address the engageme...
Though there are a number of well-written works on Chinese divination, there are none that deal with the three sophisticated devices that were employed by the Chinese Astronomical Bureau in the eleventh century and for hundreds of years thereafter. Chinese experts applied the methods associated with these devices to both weather forecasting and to the interpretation of human affairs. Hidden by a veil of secrecy, these methods have always been relatively little known other than by their names....
Mixed-Race and Modernity in Colonial India (Intersections: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories)
by Adrian Carton
Focusing on Portuguese, British and French colonial spaces, this book traces changing concepts of mixed-race identity in early colonial India. Starting in the sixteenth century, it discusses how the emergence of race was always shaped by affiliations based on religion, class, national identity, gender and citizenship across empires. In the context of increasing British power, the book looks at the Anglo-French tensions of the eighteenth century to consider the relationship between modernity and...
This book seeks the fundamental causes of the widespread upheavals in African states today and finds them in the inadequate colonial preparation of African leaders for the responsibilities of independence.