Asian Studies

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Writing Early China

Considers what unearthed documents reveal about the creation and transmission of knowledge in ancient China.

Wonder in South Asia

A comparative study of wonder in South Asian religions.

Curses of the Kingdom of Xixia

By Xue Mo
Translated by Fan Pen Li Chen
Subjects: General Interest
Series: Excelsior Editions

Reality merges with illusion in this novel of northwestern China.

The Ethnography of Tantra

Presents Tantra from an ethnographic vantage point, through a series of case studies grounded in diverse settings across contemporary Asia.

Daoism, Dandyism, and Political Correctness

Argues that Daoism and dandyism, linked by likeminded philosophies of “carefree wandering,” deconstruct the puritanism and political correctness sought by Confucianism, Victorianism, and contemporary neoliberal culture.

A Sourcebook in Classical Confucian Philosophy

Applies a method of comparative cultural hermeneutics to let the tradition speak on its own terms.

The Annotated Laozi

A clear translation and helpful explanations illuminate this ancient classic of self-cultivation for a modern audience.

The Sound of Vultures' Wings

Explores the music of the Tibetan Chöd tradition.

The Philosophy of Change

An analysis of the philosophy of the Yijing in comparison to modern Western philosophies.

An American Girl in India

Offers a portrait of India as seen through the eyes of a sensitive, sharp-eyed, and witty young scholar in the early 1960s.

From Metaphysical Representations to Aesthetic Life

Reevaluates Western and Chinese philosophical traditions to question the boundaries of entrenched conceptual frameworks.

The Craft of Oblivion

Examines the intersections between forgetting and remembering in classical Chinese civilization.

The Festival of Indra

Details the textual and performative history of the South Asian festival of Indra and its role in the development of classical Hinduism.

Negotiation Dynamics to Denuclearize North Korea

Comprehensive examination of the goals, strategies, and motives of the six parties involved in North Korea denuclearization talks through the lens of negotiation theory.

The Chinese Love Story from the Tenth to the Fourteenth Century

Traces the development of the Chinese love story during the Song and Yuan dynasties.

The Humanist Ethics of Li Zehou

By Li Zehou
Edited and translated by Robert A. Carleo III
Subjects: Asian Studies
Series: SUNY series, Translating China

Presents Li Zehou's culminating views on ethics in a series of works that highlight the importance of Confucian philosophy today.

Introduction to Buddhist East Asia

Offers a variety of pedagogical and theoretical essays designed to assist professors in introducing undergraduate students to Buddhism in China, Korea, and Japan.

China and Its Small Neighbors

Analyzes the nature, processes, and political consequences of the asymmetrical relationships between China and its six small neighbors in Asia.

Searching for Ashoka

Reveals how the persona of India's most famous emperor was constantly reinvented in ancient times to suit a variety of social visions, political agendas, and moral purposes.

A Walk in the Night with Zhuangzi

A complete translation and analysis of "All Things Flow into Form" (Fan wu liu xing), a recently discovered manuscript from the Warring States period (481–221 BCE).

The China Record

Detailed assessment of the People's Republic of China as an alternative mode of political system and as a distinctive model of socioeconomic development.

Crossing Boundaries and Confounding Identity

Examines literary, historical, and cultural portrayals of Chinese women, across centuries and continents.

Confucian Liberalism

Offers a renovated form of Confucian liberalism that forges a reconciliation between the two extremes of anti-Confucian liberalism and anti-liberal Confucianism.

The Future of China's Past

Addresses the question of China's rise and what it portends for the future.

The Many Lives of Yang Zhu

Presents the most important portrayals of the Daoist master Yang Zhu throughout Chinese history, from the Warring States period until today.

Cinema of Discontent

Uses popular films to reveal the tensions generated during Japan’s postwar "economic miracle," challenging the prevailing view that it was a story of great national success.

Early Buddhist Society

A richly scholarly yet accessible and imaginative account of society in the time of the Buddha.

New Perspectives in Modern Korean Buddhism

Offers alternative approaches to the study of colonial and postcolonial Korean Buddhism, suggesting new directions for scholarship.

Approaches to Chan, Sŏn, and Zen Studies

A comprehensive treatment of the shared traditions of Chan, Sŏn, and Zen in dynamic interaction across East Asia, acknowledging the changing and growing parameters of the field of Zen studies.

Honeymoon Couples and Jurassic Babies

Contextualizes Sabha Theatre historically, politically, and aesthetically, revealing how it expresses a Tamil Brahmin identity that is at once traditional and modern.

A Conceptual Lexicon for Classical Confucian Philosophy

Uses a comparative hermeneutical method to explain the most important terms in the classical Confucian philosophical texts, in an effort to allow the tradition to speak on its own terms.

Religion and Empire in Portuguese India

Examines the colonization of Goa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the durability of Portuguese rule.

The Truths and Lies of Nationalism as Narrated by Charvak

Edited by Partha Chatterjee
Notes by Partha Chatterjee
Subjects: Asian Studies

Rejects Hindu nationalism and pluralist secularism in favor of a revitalized politics of Indian federalism.

Adventures in Chinese Realism

Relates Chinese Realism to contemporary political and ethical challenges, such as in international relations and the morality of the public sector.

Orienting Italy

Explores Italian filmmakers' representations of China and the Chinese, both at home and abroad.

Hindutva and Violence

Examines the place of history in the political thought of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, one of the key architects of modern Hindu nationalism.

Amnesia

Describes the profound social impact of the overthrow of the Thai absolute monarchy in 1932, and explains the importance of democracy in a country long known for authoritarian politics.

Lore and Verse

Explores how poetry was used to disseminate and interpret history in early medieval China.

When Does History Begin?

Documents how the premodern techniques of narrating the past in South Asia were deeply transformed by colonial modernity, resulting in newer forms of truth-telling within the Sikh community.

Persons Emerging

Offers three neo-Confucian understandings of broadening the Way as broadening oneself, through an ongoing process of removing self-boundaries.

Nine Nights of Power

Explores the rich diversity of narratives, rituals, and participants connected with one of the most important celebrations for Hindus in South Asia and in the diaspora.

A Postcolonial Relationship

Offers an Asian immigrant perspective on US racial relations and explores the unique situations and challenges facing Asian immigrants in the United States.

Christianity and Politics in Tribal India

Chronicles the astonishing and counterintuitive spread of Christianity among a group of previously isolated tribes in a remote and hilly part of Northeastern India.

Crisis Narratives, Institutional Change, and the Transformation of the Japanese State

Looking at Japan, traces crisis narratives across three decades and ten policy fields, with the aim of disentangling discursively manufactured crises from actual policy failures.

Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future

Analyzes socially engaged art practices worldwide, linking them to decolonial struggle and critique.

Technical Arts in the Han Histories

The first concerted attempt to analyze how the histories Shiji and Hanshu described the technical arts as they were applied in vital areas of the administration of pre-Han and Han China.

Ziran

The ancient concept of spontaneous self-causation (ziran) from Daoism opens a path to understanding human action as self-organizing, attention as effortless, and art as somatic.

Self-Cultivation in Early China

An introduction to ancient Chinese ideas on how to live a good life.

The Emergence of Word-Meaning in Early China

Posits the origin of a specifically Chinese concept of “word-meaning,” and sheds new light on the linguistic ideas in early Chinese philosophical texts.

Cognition and Practice

Explores the aesthetic theory of one of China's most important and influential contemporary philosophers.

Singing the Goddess into Place

Explores how a folk ballad in southern India transforms the landscape and embeds the deities that are its subject within the social worlds of their devotees.

The Chinese Liberal Spirit

By Xu Fuguan
Edited and translated by David Elstein
Subjects: Asian Studies
Series: SUNY series, Translating China

The first English-language translation of an important figure in modern Confucian thought.

Post-Chineseness

Analyzes international and cultural relationships informed by "China," a category that is becoming ever more indispensable and yet unstable in everyday narratives.

The Coming Death

Explores questions of death and mortality in several key texts of East Asian literature and cinema.

Teaching, Tenure, and Collegiality

Questions universities’ increasing reliance on market-oriented metrics to determine their strategic directions and gauge faculty productivity.

A Philosophical Defense of Culture

Draws on two different but strikingly similar streams in our world tradition to argue for the contemporary philosophical relevance of “culture.”

The Hagiographer and the Avatar

Examines the key role of a hagiographer within a charismatic religious movement.

The Contemplative Foundations of Classical Daoism

Brings early Daoist writings into conversation with contemporary contemplative studies.

Friendship and Hospitality

Offers a comparative and deconstructive reading of the cross-cultural encounter between the Jesuits and their Confucian hosts in late Ming China.

The Mughals and the Sufis

Examines the relationship between Mughal political culture and the two dominant strains of Islam's Sufi traditions in South Asia: one centered around orthodoxy, the other focusing on a more accommodating and mystical spirituality.

Many Mahābhāratas

A major contribution to the study of South Asian literature, offering a landmark view of Mahābhārata studies.

Empire News

Examines English-language Indian newspapers from the mid-nineteenth century and their role in simultaneously sustaining and probing British colonial governance.

Moving for Marriage

Comparative, ethnographic study of women who migrate for marriage in rural north India.

Convenient Criticism

By Dan Chen
Subjects: Communication

Explains why and how local critical reporting can exist in China despite the kinds of media control that are the hallmarks of authoritarian rule.

Abolishing Boundaries

Offers new perspectives on modern Chinese political thought.

Hu Feng

A study of Hu Feng as a literary critic and case study on how intellectual work can respond to political pressure.

Words of Destiny

Investigates the professional practices of astrologers in urban India and their popularity among the educated middle and upper classes.

Buddhist Literature as Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy as Literature

Explores the relationship between literature and philosophy in classical and contemporary Buddhist texts.

South of the Future

Unique interdisciplinary analysis of gendered and racialized economies of care in South Asia and the Americas.

Material Acts in Everyday Hindu Worlds

Broadens the parameters of religious studies by accounting for material acts that help shape religious worlds.

The Primary Way

A unique work on the underlying ontology, cosmology, and moral philosophy of the Yijing.

Till Kingdom Come

By Lokesh Ohri
Subjects: Asian Studies

The first book to offer a detailed framework, a fine-grained history, and an analytically nuanced understanding of one of the rarest branches of Hindu worship.

Human Beings or Human Becomings?

Argues that Confucianism and other East Asian philosophical traditions can be resources for understanding and addressing current global challenges such as climate change and hunger.

Before Identity

Aims to introduce a greater degree of theoretical rigor to the discipline of Japan studies as a whole.

Partition's Legacies

By Joya Chatterji
Introduction by David Washbrook
Subjects: Asian Studies

Essays on modern Indian history and the legacy of Partition.

The Awakening of Modern Japanese Fiction

Argues that the role of Buddhism in modern Japanese prose literature has been significantly overlooked.

Reconsidering the Life of Power

Offers a compelling intercultural perspective on body, art, self, and society.

Human Becomings

Offers an in-depth exposition of the Confucian conception of persons as the starting point of Confucian ethics.

Teardrops of Time

Investigates how the Thai poet Angkarn Kallayanapong adapts Buddhist concepts of time to create a modern Asian aesthetic imaginary.

The Other Rāma

A systematic analysis of the myth cycle of Paraśurāma (“Rāma with the Axe”), an avatára of Viṣṇu with a much darker reputation.

The Muslim World in Modern South Asia

Sets out the challenges presented to Muslim societies by Western dominance over the past two hundred years, and explores Muslim responses, particularly in the context of South Asia.

The World of Agha Shahid Ali

Critical essays on the transnational Kashmiri-American poet.

The Science of Satyug

The first in-depth study of the All World Gayatri Pariwar, a modern Indian religious movement.

Higher Education for Democracy

Uses a cross-national comparison of Los Angeles, New Delhi, and Hong Kong to develop strategies universities should employ to strengthen democracy and resist fascism.

Revealing/Reveiling Shanghai

Examines Shanghai both as a real city and an imaginary locale, from diverse cultural and disciplinary perspectives.

Urban Migrants in Rural Japan

Offers an in-depth ethnography of paradigm shifts in the lifestyles and values of youth in post-growth Japan.

From Situated Selves to the Self

Argues for an important transformation in the construction of the self among Japanese converts to Roman Catholicism.

China in Ethiopia

Examines China’s involvement in Ethiopia as the latter embarks on modernization and economic development.

Navigating Deep River

An interdisciplinary dialogue with Shūsaku Endō’s last novel offering new perspectives on Japanese culture, Christian doctrine, Hindu spiritualities, and Buddhist worldviews.

Confucian Role Ethics

Argues that the only way to understand the Confucian vision of the consummate moral life is to take the tradition on its own terms.

The Politics of People

Explores the cultural dimensions of protest and dissent in China, focusing on dramatic forms of bodily, spatial, strategic, and artistic performativity.

The State of Race

An innovative comparative study of the role of racial stereotypes in expressing state power under globalization.

The Political Logics of Anticorruption Efforts in Asia

Examines the political dynamics behind anticorruption efforts in Asia.

The Other Emptiness

Presents a new vision of the Buddhist history and philosophy of emptiness in Tibet.

Merleau-Ponty and Nishida

By Adam Loughnane
Subjects: Philosophy

Places the phenomenologies of Merleau-Ponty and Nishida in dialogue and uncovers a demand for a motor-perceptual form of faith in both philosophers’ meditations on artistic expression.

The Great Agrarian Conquest

Groundbreaking analysis of how colonialism created new conceptual categories and spatial forms that reshaped rural societies.

Confucianism's Prospects

Challenges descriptions of East Asian societies as Confucian cultures and communitarian Confucian models as a political alternative to liberal democracy.

Fiction as History

Explains the Hindi novel’s role in anticipating and creating the story of middle-class modernity and modernization in North India.

Living Landscapes

Explores the role of meditation on the five elements in the practice of Yoga.

Zhuangzi and the Becoming of Nothingness

Investigates the cosmological and metaphysical thought in the Zhuangzi from the perspective of nothingness.