This article attempts an assessment of the putative similarities between generic fascism and the revolutionary nationalism of Sun Yat-sen. Whatever characteristics the two ideologies have in common can be traced to similarities between Sun's thought and pre-Fascist Italian Nationalism. The latter was only one of the elements that contributed to Italian Fascism. A distinction is then drawn between Sun's ideology and that of the Italian Nationalists by identifying the latter nationalism as “exacerbated.” Further distinctions are attempted between such nationalisms and the mature ideology of Italian Fascism. Italian Fascism is viewed as a subspecies of revolutionary nationalism, while revolutionary nationalism itself is understood to include a relatively pacific and potentially democratic species and an exacerbated, potentially authoritarian one.

For the authors of these papers, as is true for many of us, there is a special urgency associated with the acceleration of environmental degradation and its negative impact on individual human lives to which we bear witness in Asia and elsewhere. While truly “natural” disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis are strikingly devastating, it is the destruction of environments from anthropogenic sources that are often the most frustrating. That is, we believe that because human beings caused the problems, we should be able to fix them, and, indeed, as humanists it is axiomatic that we are committed to improving the human condition. Over the past few decades, however, there has been a growing awareness that human interaction with the natural environment may be creating a world, for the most part, unfit for human habitation. It is out of this awareness that the term “Anthropocene” has emerged, describing that epoch during which human activity has reached such a level of intensity that it has had a discernable impact on the earth itself. Thus, as these writers suggest, it is imperative for us as regional specialists to engage in conversations across disciplines and geographic areas that provide opportunities to increase our understanding of the Anthropocene in Asia in all of its local and global dimensions.

The history of the discoveries of Early Man in Indonesia has been marked by bold speculations and surprising successes alternating with frustrated hopes and discouraging lulls from the time when the first explorer in search of his remains set foot on Java's soil. This explorer was Eugène Dubois. He came to the island in 1889 for the outspoken purpose of finding the “missing link” and—he found it. What particular considerations induced him to seek after such a creature—at this time rather an idea than á substantiality—on this seemingly forlorn outpost of the Asiatic continent, we do not know. Dubois never told what prompted, him to look for such a phantom in Indonesia. But the fact is that he quit his position at the Department of Anatomy of the University of Amsterdam and entered the military service of the Dutch colonies as a health officer. In April 1889, he was delegated to “extend his studies to the tertiary and diluvial fauna of Java.” From that year until 1895 Dubois explored all the localities known from earlier investigations to be particularly rich in fossil remains, and assembled from them a large collection of plants and animals.

American military bases and the protests they have elicited have had a major impact on Japanese political culture. But after the end of the formal Occupation, and outside the territory immediately affected, the cultural consequences of the U.S. military presence are much less clear. This article offers a synthetic analysis that integrates diplomatic and social history and relates the strategies of U.S. policymakers to those of anti-base activists. It shows how much the base system has changed over time and how protests have long focused on the same issues, especially sex work and sexual violence, territorial disputes, and nuclear weapons. In each case, Washington and Tokyo worked together to insulate Japanese society, which made it easier for Japanese men and women to tolerate the bases and easier for U.S. servicemen to live within them.

The socio-religious songs composed in village Bengal by the adherents of the mystical sect known as the Bāuls are of great interest to students of folk music and poetry, but they are of no less interest to a student of the history of the religions of Bengal. In his songs, the Bāul expresses his religious beliefs and experience, his view of life and of the world, his thoughts and emotions. They are his only form of worship; there is no treatise embodying the doctrines and practices of this sect. It is only in his songs that we can get a glimpse of what a Bāul is and what he believes in. Famous for their spontaneity of expression and charm of melody, their rustic language and imagery, these songs clearly bring out the various themes that together form the general body of Bāul thought. And there are threads of many religious traditions: tantric; Sahajiyā—both Buddhist and Vaiṣṇava; and Ṣūfī.

This paper begins with an examination of the burgeoning interest in literatures in Chinese. It argues that studies in literatures in Chinese map out a terrain where complex negotiations and interventions for different purposes are carried out. As studies in literatures in Chinese often imply a shift from the nation-state paradigm to the transnational paradigm, which implicitly celebrates diasporic imagination as a counterforce to the power of the nation-state, this paper proposes to examine the intersection of Chinese Malaysian literature and Taiwan literature at two specific moments of transnational literary production—the late 1970s to the mid-1980s and the late 1990s to the present—so as to demonstrate the unstable meanings of the diaspora sign. It highlights the importance of historicization in investigating phenomena of transnational cultural production and the need to reincorporate the notion of “place” into our agenda in conducting cultural critiques. The paper ends with a critique of the global city as a methodological concept and argues for a place paradigm without privileging the global city as a metaphor for transnational space.

In 1915, riots broke out in the British colony of Ceylon, the climax of a controversy between Sinhalese Buddhists and a new clement among the commercial “Moors” (Muslims). A court ruling disappointing to the Buddhists, combined with economic complaints against Moors in this centenary of British conquest, led to a communal clash in Kandy during Wesak (Buddha's birthday) in May 1915. During the following two weeks, the riots spread to Colombo and along the west coast, greed increasingly matching creed as a prime motive.

The colonial government reacted slowly, allowing disorder to spread, and then changed to a policy of heavy repression of a presumed anti-British uprising at a time the Empire was fighting for survival.

Three months of martial law ensued, more deaths caused by police and military action than had occurred during the actual riots. Prominent citizens were arrested without cause. Shoot-on-sight orders were issued, and over 8000 were arrested and imprisoned. This colonial maladministration reflected the gap between officialdom and the colonial peoples. Little evidence of a general plot against government came to light. Since, however, headmen, monks and traders had planned anti-Moor action, especially in coastal areas, the question of conspiracy remains unsettled.

The 1915 Riots in Ceylon seriously undermined Ceylonese confidence in British justice, led to peaceful mass protests and a mission to London, and stimulated the maturation of nationalism, with independence as its objective.

This article discusses how the Chinese Communist Party governed death in Shanghai during the first half of the People's Republic of China. It examines how officials nationalized funeral institutions, promoted cremation, and transformed what they believed to be the unproductivity of the funeral industry into productivity (by raising pigs in cemeteries, for instance). I show how each of these policies eliminated possible sources of identity that were prevalent in conceptualizing who the dead were and what their relationships with the living could be. Specifically, in addition to the construction of socialist workers, the state worked to remove cosmopolitan, associational, religious, and relational ideas of self. By modifying funerary rituals and ways of interment, the Chinese state aimed to produce individualized and undifferentiated political subjects directly tied to the party-state. The civil governance of death aimed to produce citizen-subjects at the end of life.

As Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the Japanese occupation was a decisive factor in the shaping of political developments in Indonesia after 1945. It is indeed probable that the impact of those eventful forty months was greater in Indonesia than in Burma and the Philippines, both of which countries had progressed further toward autonomy and self-rule under Western colonial rule than had the Netherlands Indies. It is certainly no coincidence that Japan granted “independence” to these areas during 1943, while in Indonesia a guarded promise of the distant goal of such independence came only as the result of the adverse course of the Pacific War in the latter part of 1944, when Allied landings in Indonesia appeared a probability. It was not until September of that year that, on instructions from Tokyo, the military administration on Java took steps which facilitated the ultimate success of the nationalist revolution in Indonesia. An examination of Japanese policies during the early months of the occupation of Java, the center of Indonesian political life then and now, leaves little doubt that the fate of Indonesia would have been far different had Japan continued victorious in the war.

Following the collapse of the old indigenous social order, tenth-century Korea was engaged in innovative cultural borrowing of a societal scale under the influence of the brilliant and mature Chinese civilization. Among the many institutions borrowed during this period, the civil service examination system (k‘o-chü in Chinese and kwagŏ in Korean), introduced in 958 by King Kwangjong (r. 949–975) of the Koryŏ Dynasty (918–1392), constitutes perhaps the most engrossing case of institutional borrowing in traditional Korea. Aside from its long-range consequences for Korean society and culture, the significance of this particular instance of institutional transplantation lies in the wholesale manner in which the borrowing was made, adopting the system complete with its Confucian examination content as well as its Chinese system of writing. Significant too is the fact that the proposal for this institutional borrowing did not come from a Korean but the king's Chinese advisor, Shuang Chi. It was also to Shuang Chi that the youthful Korean king entrusted the role of cultural innovator in instituting the examination system. The far-reaching social and cultural implications of this undertaking and its great success as a cultural borrowing make this particular case a fascinating subject to study; that is, when fully explored, it may shed light on the problems of ongoing cultural borrowing in Korea today.

The history of “area studies” as an academic discipline remains to be written. When it is, it will have to begin with a little known, historically important Japanese institution in China. That institution, Tōa Dōbun Shoin (East Asia Common Culture Academy or, after 1939, College) in Shanghai, 1900–1945, was established to train young Japanese for business and government service related to China. The author focuses upon the area studies dimensions of this pioneering institution's training and research program. After identifying five requisites of area studies training and research, he moves on to examine the origins, raison d'être, and meaning of Tōa Dōbun Shoin's program and to chart the phases of that program's development through each of the five requisites. In important ways, the center's curriculum, facilities, research, and publications equalled or surpassed the best American post–World War II language and area programs.

Sinology, and the case for the integrity of it: the one key word in that phrase has been as hard to define as the other has been to achieve in practice. If we can scarcely define it, and if there is no hope of achieving it for the masses, why then talk about it at all in the year 1964?

I believe we can try to define Sinology, and we can point to some who have achieved it in practice. It might have seemed wisest to ask someone who has at least come close to achieving the Sinological ideal to be its spokesman on this panel. And, in fact, I urged that course upon Mr. Skinner when he first asked me to participate. He ruled that out, not so much perhaps for fear that we'd have to import one, or that such a one could be expected to speak in an unintelligible accent and would read footnotes in seven languages from original sources only—but perhaps, anomalous as it is, from the justifiable fear that the real Sinologist might speak in a way that would confuse his own green and well-worked fields with the entire province, or his own home province with the whole realm. And integrity is what we are here to talk about. For it is that integrality of the whole realm, or world, of Chinese studies that I think should define Sinology. Therefore, let someone who thinks he sees a meaningful and universal ideal, but who does not expect the ideal to be judged by himself, discuss it with the freedom that can come from having nothing personal to defend. Otherwise, it would be indeed presumptuous for me to appear here as the spokesman for Sinology; this dilemma of the spokesman vis-à-vis his subject today clearly is one that does not afflict my colleagues on this panel (for reasons at least partially nattering to them all).

In die pre-modern Chinese codes, Yoshimune (8th Tokugawa Shogun, 1716–1745) found much of use to him in his attempt to reform the administration of justice in early eighteenth century Japan. Building on an interest kindled by studies of Ming law in his native han, Wakayama, Yoshimune gathered about him a cluster of confucianists, including Ogyu Sorai and his brother Hokkei (Kan), and they in turn developed a new Chinese-based jurisprudence with new legislative concepts and roles for law generally. Hokkei did a recension of die Ming penal code supplied with diacritics, and Sorai did a commentary to the code, explaining its meaning in simple Japanese; together these two works vastly increased die accessibility of Ming law to Japanese scholars especially after these works came out in a wood-block publication.

Also, Yoshimune put several other groups of scholars to work on other Chinese legal sources—the T'ang codes, the Ch'ing codes and the eighth century T'angderivative Japanese codes (ritsuryō). At die same time the largest daimyo, Maeda Tsunanori, built up his own extensive collection of Chinese legal sources and encouraged their study in Kanazawa han. Similar studies and uses of Chinese law are found in several han later, notably Kumamoto, Wakayama, Aizu and Hirosaki. Thus a minor reception of Chinese law in Tokugawa Japan has been heretofore largely overlooked between the major eighdi century reception of T'ang law and the massive nineteenth century reception of European law a millcnium later.

The status of Kalhana's poem Rajatarangini was mediated in colonial India in part through its English translations. However, the intent of the translations has been insufficiently analyzed in the context of the interrelationship between Orientalist and nationalist projects and the historical and literary ideas that informed them. The translators of Rajatarangini framed the text as more than a solitary example of Indian historical writing; rather, they engaged with it on multiple levels, drawing out, debating, and rethinking the definitions of literature and history and the relative significance of and relationship between them in capturing the identity of the nation and its regions. This article examines two translations of the text—one “Orientalist” and the other “nationalist”—with the purpose of interrogating these categories, by drawing out the complex engagement between European and indigenous ideas, and the dialogue between past and present that informed their production.

In the sixteenth century, Makassarese in the South Sulawesi courts of Gowa and Talloq began to write. What they chose to write were historical texts that chronicled their origins and preserved the words of their ancestors. Scholars once knew how to make sense of such an event: it could not be but a watershed, a fundamental change or turning point of the first magnitude. Such is the nature of what we liked to call the “transition from orality to literacy,” yet more careful examinations have suggested that this confidence in the very idea of a shift from orality to literacy was misplaced. Literacy and orality are not states of being that are simply manifested in places like Makassar. This article extends the efforts of scholars to grapple with the considerable overlap, symbiosis, and exchange that seem to characterize a boundary once believed to demarcate firmly orality and literacy. Considerable work has gone into documenting the inadequacy of trying to delineate what formal characteristics mark oral and literate productions. For example, Wendy Doniger notes that it is only when we distinguish among texts that were composed orally, preserved orally, or performed orally “that we begin to glimpse the complexity of the problem” (1991, 31). Similarly, what should we do about traditions such as Javanese wayang in which oral performances are based on stories in texts, even though few puppeteers own, consult, or have even seen the written texts (Sears 1996)?

In Bangladeshi student politics, political performances in public spaces play an essential role in establishing patronage relationships and determining local authority structures. As Thomas Blom Hansen has famously argued, “visibility means everything” in such a context. With the emergence of social networking sites like Facebook, new digital public spaces have appeared. Focusing on ruling-party student activists at Rajshahi University, this article examines how student politicians in Bangladesh utilize Facebook to become visible in their everyday politicking. It shows how longstanding performative repertoires in the nondigital public space have gained a new salience through performances in the digital public space. It is those digital spaces that allow the performer to rearticulate even mundane everyday events as political performances. As these new digital public spaces impact the politics of visibility, it is crucial to integrate them in our efforts to understand local politics in South Asia and beyond.