By James Millward Mulan is not originally a story about a patriotic Chinese woman. It is not a story about self-sacrifice to defend one’s country. It is not a thrilling tale of martial valor. It is, rather, a commentary on the fruitlessness of war against people who are more like oneself than different, delivered in […]
By Tristan R. Grunow, Yale University As one of the most trying and uncertain academic years in memory finally comes to a close, we as academics, educators, and researchers face a still more daunting task: surveying the current situation with an eye towards the long process of rebuilding. Things look bleak, without question. Many institutions […]
By Paula R. Curtis Is Japanese Studies facing a crisis? There have been energetic discussions about the current status and future of Japanese Studies, amplified in no small part by the roundtable “The Death of Japan Studies” at the 2019 Association for Asian Studies conference in Denver. Speakers considered various influences on the field, from […]
By Kyu Hyun Kim At that moment when the venerable Jane Fonda, perfectly poised and still glamorous beyond belief, opened the envelope and gazed meaningfully around the audience gathered in Hollywood’s Dolby Theater, I knew in my heart that Parasite had nabbed the Best Picture award. The South Korean film had already claimed the Best […]
By Sandra H. Park At the Truman Library last April, I learned of a vast photograph collection donated by the local Center for the Study of the Korean War (CSKW) before its closing. The archivists were still processing this collection, and the photographs I handled featured mostly commemorative or touristic scenes. These were all originally […]
By Leksa Lee, NYU Shanghai On the morning of Thursday, February 13, the Chinese government raised the official number of confirmed coronavirus cases by a third in one day, to 60,000 (one week later, that number is now more than 74,000). Officially, the move reclassified thousands of “suspected” cases as “confirmed” using updated diagnosis criteria. […]
By Weijia Vicky Shen, University of Pittsburgh On November 8, 2019, I attended the “Rethinking India’s Eighteenth Century” workshop at the University of Pittsburgh. The day-long gathering began with me sitting uncomfortably at a round table in the Humanities Center, surrounded by established scholars of South Asia. My anxiety stemmed in part from being the […]
By Lauren Meeker, SUNY New Paltz In conjunction with the 2019 New York Conference on Asian Studies (NYCAS) on October 4-5, SUNY New Paltz hosted a series of workshops on Burmese music with funding from an AAS Council of Conferences (COC) Outreach Grant. The workshops brought together community members with New Paltz students and faculty […]
By Francis L.F. Lee Hong Kong experienced a very special June. The weather was as hot as usual, but the social atmosphere was even hotter. Three large-scale demonstrations and a series of more or less conflictual protests forced the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) government to “suspend” a highly controversial extradition bill. The bill […]
By Catherine Sarah Young It can be easy to spot an artist at an academic conference, and I, together with my colleagues, definitely stood out at the recent AAS-in-Asia in Bangkok. I wore, at times, a floral gas mask with a Cambodian theme, a piece from my Apocalypse Project series (left). My business card was […]
By Ken Ueno I have spent the 2018-19 academic year as a Visiting Professor of Sound Art at the City University of Hong Kong. During that time, I regularly passed by the ice skating rink at the upscale Festival Walk mall as I climbed from the MTR station located in the belly of the mall […]
By Bart Klem Bart Klem is Senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne. In 2011, his article, “Islam, Politics and Violence in Eastern Sri Lanka,” was published in the Journal of Asian Studies. In the #AsiaNow post below, written shortly after the Easter Sunday bombings of several churches and hotels in Sri Lanka, Klem explains […]
