Our Cover
Our cover image is a photograph of Pakistani artist Naiza Khan's site-specific work, Henna Hands (2002), for which she used stencils to apply henna paste in the form of a female nude to a wall in Karachi's Railway Cantonment area. As Khan writes, “Henna, an organic pigment, in its capacity to stain, to mark the body, works as a metaphor to suggest the physicality of the body. The residue it leaves in the skin . . . embodies the notion of vulnerability, and a feeling of sensuality.”Footnote 1 Khan's project was driven by her desire to find a different audience for her work. She notes that “visible alterations and additions to the work [and] censorship of body parts . . . [served as] indicators of how ordinary people have ‘viewed’ these figures.”Footnote 2 “In retrospect,” Khan recently recalled, “I feel this was the beginning of my intervention into public spaces.”Footnote 3 Karin Zitzewitz explores the nature of that intervention in this issue.
In this Issue
This issue begins, like the last one, with a trio of essays, one apiece in each of the genres of “Asia Beyond the Headlines,” “Trends,” and “Reflections” pieces. The “Asia Beyond the Headlines” essay that starts it off is unusual in several ways. It brings together Asian, Latin American, and African studies. The author, Adriana Erthal Abdenur, is a specialist in comparative development, which is a field that, in recent years, has only very rarely been represented in these pages. Abdenur is a scholar based in Brazil, which may well be a first for the JAS. Her essay carries a self-explanatory title: “China in Africa, Viewed from Brazil.”
Following this is a “Trends” essay that also has a very cosmopolitan side to it. The author is a scholar based in Leiden whose goal is to test the continuing relevance of ideas about the politics of religion developed by the influential American sociologist Robert Bellah, who was known for his work on belief and civic life in both Japan and the United States. Titled “‘Civil Religion’ and Confucianism: Japan's Past, China's Present, and the Current Boom in Scholarship on Confucianism,” its author, Kiri Paramore, discusses a series of recent publications that have explored different aspects of the recent revival of interest in Confucius in different parts of East Asia.
Our third piece is “The War of Translation: Colonial Education, American English, and Tagalog Slang,” an essay by Vicente L. Rafael, who is a specialist in Southeast Asian history and cultural studies at the University of Washington. This meditation on the politics of language, a contribution to our most recently developed genre of all, the “Reflections” essay, provides a novel window onto the “role of translation in democratizing expression in a postcolonial context.”
Research Articles
This issue's full-length research articles can be divided neatly into three groups, beginning with one made up of two essays on artistic expression, both amply illustrated with sample works by the artists discussed. The first of these, by anthropologist Doreen Lee and titled “A Troubled Vernacular: Legibility and Presence in Indonesian Activist Art,” deals with such things as efforts “to rebrand Yogyakarta as a city of murals” and the ways that a rural collective has become “a haven for performance arts and community-based projects for Indonesians and foreign artists in residence.” The second, art historian Karin Zitzewitz's “Life in Ruins: Materiality, the City, and the Production of Critique in the Art of Naiza Khan,” zeroes in on the creative work of a single versatile figure. Naiza Khan, the artist in question, uses media ranging from photography and video displays to “drawing, prints, and paintings” to document and interpret the architecture of a distinctive region of the city of Karachi.
These two research essays are followed by a quartet of compelling articles by historians: a pair of studies of colonial South Asia and a pair of essays on East Asia during the middle of the twentieth century. The first of the South Asian essays, Faridah Zaman's “Colonizing the Sacred: Allahabad and the Company State, 1797–1857,” “rethinks the complicated encounter between the East India Company and the built heritage of India in the early nineteenth century” via an “extended case study” of a famous mosque. The second, by Benjamin D. Hopkins and titled “The Frontier Crimes Regulation and Frontier Governmentality,” examines the creation and legacies of codes that imperial authorities developed to divide British colonial subjects into two imagined camps: “the ‘civilized’ inhabitants populating the cultivated plains and the ‘wild tribes’ living in the hills.” The pair of essays on mid-twentieth-century East Asia begins with Margherita Zanasi's “Frugal Modernity: Livelihood and Consumption in Republican China,” which looks at issues such as the “growing tension between urban consumerist trends and central planning” as revealed through the prism of debates over frugality and extravagance. Finishing off the section is “Prisoner Number 600,001: Rethinking Japan, China, and the Korean War 1950–1953,” a foray into transnational microhistory by Tessa Morris-Suzuki that uses the tale of a forgotten individual to suggest the value for historians of being more attentive to the “historical continuities linking the Asia-Pacific War and Chinese Civil War to the Korean War.”
Book Review Essays
Aside from the usual array of book reviews, the reviews covering Japan in this issue all come in the form of multi-book essays. These include a trio of special review essays that look at two new studies of anime, two new examinations of theater in Tokugawa-period Japan, and two new books on Japanese politics. Southeast Asia also appears in this section in the form of George Dutton's extended review of Keith W. Taylor's massive and “long awaited” book, A History of the Vietnamese.
—JNW
