Series: Asia Shorts

Murakami Haruki on Film offers a timely look at the cinematic adaptations of Japanese writer Murakami Haruki's fiction over the past forty years. Films based on Murakami's work, including Tony Takitani (2004), Norwegian Wood (2010), Burning (2018), Drive My Car (2022), and many more, manifest a contradictory impulse to faithfully capture the author's literary worlds while expanding and developing these...

Who Is the Asianist? reconsiders the past, present, and future of Asian Studies through the lens of positionality, questions of authority, and an analysis of race with an emphasis on Blackness in Asia. From self-reflective essays on being a Black Asianist to the Black Lives Matter movement in Papua New Guinea, Japan, and Viet Nam, scholars grapple with the global...

Global Anti-Asian Racism, particularly in the guise of Yellow Peril, has endured for centuries around the world. In Europe and the Americas, Asian immigrants and refugees were, and are, treated as threats to national security. Yellow Peril and anti-Asian racism is also found in Africa, Australia, and in Asian nations as well. Wherever Asian immigrants and refugees found themselves, anti-Asian...

Japan on American TV explores political, economic, and cultural issues underlying depictions of Japan on U.S. television comedies and the programs they inspired. Since the 1950s, U.S. television programs have taken the role of "curators" of Japan, displaying and explaining selected aspects for viewers. Beliefs in U.S. hegemony over Japan underpin this curation process. Japan on American TV takes a...

What happens when liberal constitutional institutions are undone? Can freedom survive the loss of separation of powers with the associated legal and political accountability? The Chinese Communist Party has been at the forefront in its disdain for liberal institutions and promoting illiberal alternatives. This disdain placed Hong Kong people on the frontlines of the global struggle for freedom. Since its...

The Malaysian people have endured decades of economic decline, identity politics, and socio-political uncertainty. The country has also experienced a decline in international credibility due to the 1MDB corruption scandal of global proportions. Since obtaining independence in 1957, Malaysia has had two historic general elections, the first in 2018 (GE14), and the second in 2022 (GE15). GE14 brought the reformist...

What happens when a US cultural institution is imported to China, the purported chief rival of the United States in the twenty-first century? The first book-length account of university-based creative writing programs in China, The Transpacific Flow reveals how Chinese intellectuals adapt American-style writing programs, such as the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the International Writing Program at Chinese universities, to...

To overcome their "brain drain," some developing countries employ the "Diaspora Option," encouraging their overseas nationals to use the knowledge they gained abroad to help their motherland. Since the mid-1990s, China's party/state has vigorously used an extensive array of programs and incentives to persuade ethnic Chinese living in America to transfer their technological knowhow back home. Many Chinese working abroad...