Contemporary global culture is inevitably culture in translation. It encompasses encounter, exchange, and transformation, disruption and the emergence of the totally new. Drawing on contemporary theorists in fields of cultural studies and postcolonial studies, this interdisciplinary collection of essays explores the functions of cultural translation in – and as – translocation. They analyze the uneven …

Cultural Transformations: Perspectives on Translocation in a Global Age Read More »

Do we confuse globalization for Americanization? What are the distinctive elements in the interplay of the local and the global? This much needed book is the first full length text to examine globalization from the perspective of both the West and the East. It considers globalization as a general social and economic process, and the …

Globalization East and West Read More »

East Syriac Christianity spread outside the Roman Empire by missionaries of the ‘Church of the East’, formerly known as ‘Nestorian Church’. This volume contains the most recent cutting edge research on this Church in China and Central Asia. World-renowned scholars from universities and institutions in China, India, Europe and North America contributed to the study …

Hidden Treasures and Intercultural Encounters: Studies on East Syriac Christianity in China and Central Asia Read More »

From the late 1970s a revolution in Indian-language newspapers, driven by a marriage of capitalism and technology, has carried the experience of print to millions of new readers in small-town and rural India. This volume analyzes the role of capitalism and technology in shaping identity, “national” or otherwise, and seeks to explain the inner workings …

India’s Newspaper Revolution: Capitalism, Politics and the Indian-Language Press, 1977-97 Third Edition Read More »

Liberalizing, Feminizing and Popularizing Health Communications in Asia provides insights into the manner in which biomedical discourses are communicated and portrayed in Asia in light of the rapidly evolving socio-cultural, technological and epidemiological undercurrents. Highlighting the more pluralized and interactive dynamics in the appropriation and dissemination of medical and public health knowledge, its specific case …

Liberalizing, Feminizing and Popularizing Health Communications in Asia Read More »

Two puzzles of modern India one well known, the other overlooked form the core of this book. For fifty years, the state of Kerala has been famed, first as a home of Communists, then as a perplexing model of development . But why Communists? And why development, especially in a place where the economy usually …

Media and Modernity: Communications, Women, and the State in India Read More »

Chinese citizens are becoming increasingly mobile, both inside China and abroad, as migrant workers, tourists, and students. China is caught between perceived benefits and dangers posed by mobility, complicated by the government’s own conflicting impulses to support and discourage it. Mobility and Cultural Authority in Contemporary China demonstrates this intricate balance through an in-depth look …

Mobility and Cultural Authority in Contemporary China Read More »

Prasenjit Duara is Raffles Professor of the Humanities and Director of Research in Humanities and Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore and emeritus professor of History at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books on Chinese and East Asian history including Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, …

Prasenjit Duara Reader Read More »

The classic secularization thesis of modernizarion has long dominated the study of religion. According to this view, modernizing societies become increasingly secular and rational in worldview, and restrict religion to a private, irrational sphere. Scholars have recently begun to question the secularization thesis, seeking continuities between the pre-modern and the modern, and destabilizing the boundary …

Secularization, Religion and the State Read More »

The Fifteenth century is an enigma in Southeast Asian history – too lage for classical inscriptions, and generally too early for indigenous texts or European observations. The arrival of European ships, ideas and economies in the early sixteenth century has long been seen as the origin of the early modern era in Southeast Asia, but …

Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth Century: The China Factor Read More »