The normative understanding of “the clash of religions” assumes external conflict: we think, for example, of christianity's historical struggle with Islam; of the clash between Hinduism and Islam in the partition of the Indian subcontinent; or, in the field of empire, of the imperial contest over the souls and bodies of colonial subjects, in which material rationales for control and expropriation appear as theological motivations, rendering religious conversion virtually interchangeable with cultural conquest. Viewed in this light, the notion of a clash of religions bypasses conflicts internal to individual religions, which are equally if not more important in shaping the content of religious thought. Internal conflicts often play out as debates over the meanings of key concepts in the religions.

In the aftermath of Britain's Nuptial Extravaganza celebrating the Union of Prince William and Kate Middleton, comparisons between that event and the profile of the monarchy in Thailand have emerged. Occupying a central and highly visible position in the public domain, Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX, r. 1946–present) is widely held in great esteem. Yet the silencing of republican sentiment in the run-up to the royal wedding in London echoes the measures deployed with increasing regularity and rigor in Thailand under article 112 of the country's penal code, a law against lèse-majesté that effectively suppresses all open criticism of the Thai monarchy. In 2009 an all-time high of 164 lèse-majesté cases were tried in Thailand's Court of First Instance (“Article 112”). The Thai historian and public intellectual Somsak Jeamteerasakul, among others, has argued that these measures create a climate of fear around the discussion of the place and role of the monarchy in contemporary Thailand. This climate also has a bearing on the production and study of literature, on literary analysis, and on approaches to literary and cultural theory in Thailand.

In about 1855, three decades before frances hodgson burnett wrote her first best-selling children's book, little lord fauntleroy, she was a child—Frances Eliza Hodgson—and she read Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. She found Stowe's novel, like all the stories she encountered, to be “unsatisfactory, filling her with vague, restless craving for greater completeness of form” (Burnett 44). The form the girl craved—that is, the material she believed she needed to complete the narrative—was a black doll. When Burnett obtained the doll, she named it Topsy and used it to “act” out the parts of the novel she found most “thrilling” (53). Casting a white doll she already owned as Little Eva, she played out ever-repeating scenes of Eva laying hands on Topsy, awakening the hardened slave girl to Christian love. Burnett also kept the Eva doll “actively employed slowly fading away and dying,” and in these scenes she took on the role of Uncle Tom (57). At other times, Burnett performed the scene of Eva's death, casting the white doll as Eva and herself as “all the weeping slaves at once” (58). And at least once she designated the doll Uncle Tom and cast herself as Simon Legree. For this scenario, the girl bound the doll to a candelabra stand. “[F]urious with insensate rage,” she whipped her doll (fig. 1). Throughout the whipping, the doll maintained a “cheerfully hideous” grin, which suggested to the girl that Uncle Tom was “enjoying the situation” of being “brutally lashed” (56, 55).

Is the fetish the only way to understand glamour, especially when it comes to the glamour of racialized women? How do we talk about agency and embodiment for a mediated figure? How does celebrity affect a subject whose body has been overembodied yet depersonalized? This essay suggests that the unlikely conjunction among celebrity, glamour, and racial difference may be the place where we are compelled to confront the intimacy, rather than opposition, between person-hood and objectification. Turning to Anna May Wong, an iconic “race beauty” in the early twentieth century, this essay argues that Wong's glamour is achieved neither through her apparently racialized performances nor through her uncomplicated assumption of female agency but rather through a paradoxical staging and erasure of her own body and skin. By asking how a celebrated body might operate subjunctively rather than materially, we can begin to question the imperatives of personhood that drive both celebrity and race studies.

Reactions in France to Jean-Pierre Jeunet's phenomenally successful film Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001) tend to fall into two groups. According to one perspective, the film is a superficial and racially sanitized form of cine-tourism; according to another, it is a profound and sincere celebration of traditional French values. For both groups, the cultural work the film performs coalesces around close-ups of the face of Audrey Tautou, the film's star. This essay asks how Tautou's face and the close-up shot it exemplifies can say so much while showing so little. By drawing on the theoretical history of camera distance, it argues that the formal design of the close-up, which demands simultaneously an analytic and an affective response to the visual image, usefully informs the relations between political reactions to the film and French debates around the question of national identity at the start of the twenty-first century.

When I was young, it seemed that most Americans had never heard of Burma. Since communication with Burma was constrained, I was curious about its culture, which my family carried so near to their hearts. My first memory of seeing “Burma” involved watching The King and I (1956) on television. I was captivated by Rita Moreno playing Tuptim, a Burmese girl who is given to the king of Siam by the prince of Burma and is secretly having an affair with her escort. The new British governess gives Tuptim Uncle Tom's Cabin to improve her English. The Burmese concubine articulates her frustration by staging an adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel for the king and some European visitors. During the performance, Tuptim attempts an escape with her Burmese lover.

Toward the end of his opening lecture in the hermeneutics of the subject (17–19), Michel Foucault draws a distinction between ancient and modern modes of philosophizing. He bases the distinction on differing conceptions of determining the grounds of the true and the false and the subject's access to them. The distinction and shift are well-trodden ground, as we'll see, even if Foucault marks them in characteristically provocative ways. I will argue, though, that with the advent of the World Wide Web the distinction is incomplete, not least in regard to the religious implications of the three modes and their underlying theological considerations. The World Wide Web, in short, signals the emergence of a new way of being and thinking to rival the ancient and the modern, even as it draws on elements of both.

In spite of great obstacles, modern arabic children's literature has seen remarkable developments lately, both in quality of text and illustrations and in breadth of subject matter. Moreover, the intricate question of which variety of Arabic to use in writing for children can now be answered in different ways, closely linked to different conceptions of Arab culture.

In 2002 Karín Lesnik-Oberstein and Stephen Thomson published an essay entitled “what is queer theory doing with the child?,” addressing work in the 1990s by Michael Moon and the late, great Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on the “protogay” child. Something inappropriate, even scandalous, was their answer, as one might surmise from the accusatory shape of the question. In their reading, Moon and Sedgwick essentialize rather than interrogate the protogay child, such that said child becomes “an anti-theoretical moment, resistant to analysis, itself the figure deployed as resistance” (36). For Lesnik-Oberstein and Thomson, queer theory is insufficiently alert to the lessons of poststructuralist theory and especially to the ongoing interrogation of “child” and “childhood.” Lesnik-Oberstein and Thomson specialize in childhood studies, and Lesnik-Oberstein is a well-known scholar of children's literature. Her 1994 Children's Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child extends and takes inspiration from Jacqueline Rose's The Case of Peter Pan; or, The Impossibility of Children's Fiction (1984), which ushered into children's literature studies a powerful and lasting skepticism about “childhood” and “children's literature.”

Social scientists and political philosophers who assumed that modernity would become progressively secular may have got it wrong. Current history shows us that modern societies, including states, do not inevitably grow more secular. Nor are organized religions inevitably confined to narrower and narrower domains as modernity proceeds. In fact, the current period makes legible the variability of the spaces (institutional, ideational, tactical) of organized religions over time and their expansion into domains once off-limits to religion, domains as diverse as the liberal state, global finance, and cosmopolitanism. Indeed, new types of globality and cosmopolitanism are becoming visible in, and arising from, organized religions. They can coexist with regressive forces in those religions, signaling the complexity of the religions' organizational architecture.

“East Asia” was one of the regions produced by cold war regimes of knowledge and incorporated into the post-1945 formation of multidisciplinary area studies in the United States. While the study of China and Japan has a much longer, pre-1945 history in the United States and Europe, other than an occasional book (often by a missionary or professional traveler), Korea was largely elided from the imaginings that were patched together to form the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century discourse on what used to be called the Orient. This lack of a scholarly tradition may explain, in part, why the study of Korean literature (and history) was marginalized in academic departments through the early 1990s, even though the peninsula served as site of the Cold War turned hot during the Korean War (1950–53) and in many ways remains the linchpin organizing the East Asian geopolitical order and the United States military deployments that stretch from CONUS (the contiguous United States) across the Pacific to the DMZ. If Korean literature is belatedly becoming a discipline considered worthy of scholarly inquiry in United States universities, where East Asia until recently meant China and Japan, it is something of an irony that the recognition is taking place at a time when discipline-bound work has begun to reveal its limitations and the area of area studies finds itself in crisis, being interrogated as part of the post-1945 formation of the national security state and confronted by the turn to the transnational.

When my first daughter was born a few years ago, I entered a celebrity news blackout, a somewhat discomfiting condition for a sociologist of celebrity. When she entered preschool, though, I resubscribed to Us Weekly and devoured its morsels like a starving man at McDonald's: Kim Kardashian and her then-boyfriend ate at Chipotle on their first date! Ashton Kutcher was mad about his neighbor's noisy construction! Lindsay Lohan is back in rehab! I felt less disconnected from others, comforted by the familiar company, a little dirtier and a little lighter.

The most striking change in children's culture, including children's literature, over the last few decades has been its commercialization and globalization (O'Sullivan, Comparative Children's Literature 149–52). The children's book industry in the United States, the leading market, is increasingly dominated by a handful of large media conglomerates whose publishing operations are small sections of their entertainment businesses. As a consequence, as Daniel Hade observes, “the mass marketplace selects which books will survive, and thus the children's book becomes less a cultural and intellectual object and more an entertainment looking for mass appeal” (511). The influence of these multimedia giants is immense: manufacturing mass-produced goods for children, they sell their products beyond the borders of individual countries, further changing and globalizing what were once regionally contained children's cultures. As a discipline that engages with phenomena that transcend cultural and linguistic borders and also with specific social, literary, and linguistic contexts, comparative children's literature is a natural site in which to tease out the implications of these recent developments.

In October 2006, the Harvard University task force on general education issued a preliminary report describing and justifying a new program of general education for Harvard College. Contending that “[g]eneral education is the public face of liberal education,” the task force enumerated what a person liberally educated in the twenty-first-century United States should know—or, perhaps better, know how to think about in reasoned and nuanced ways (Preliminary Report 3). The report called for seven semester-long courses in “five broad areas of inquiry and experience”: Cultural Traditions and Cultural Change, The Ethical Life, The United States and the World, Reason and Faith, and Science and Technology. In addition, the task force suggested that students be required to take three semester-long courses that “develop critical skills”: writing and oral communication, foreign language, and analytic reasoning (6). Not surprisingly, “Reason and Faith” generated some of the most heated discussion—and it was the first suggested requirement dropped by the task force, replaced in December 2006 by a new category, “What It Means to Be a Human Being.” By the time of the final report, this too was gone, replaced by “Culture and Belief,” an area of inquiry that may include the study of religion but is broader in scope than what was initially proposed (Report of the Task Force 11–12).

When the Japanese Nobel Laureate in literature KenzaburŌ Ōe visited Taiwan for a symposium held in his honor in December 2009, he hardly anticipated the political controversies into which he was thrown. Even before the conference, politicians accused the Academia Sinica, the organizing institution, of kowtowing to China by reducing a trilateral symposium involving Japan, Taiwan, and China to a “cross-strait event” and by replacing the Taiwanese novelist who was to act as Ōe's interlocutor with one more acceptable to China. Aside from the China factor, the underhanded politics tapped into ethnic tensions in Taiwan and the problematic national identity of Taiwan. While the original interlocutor, Li Ang, and her substitute, Zhu Tienwen, are critically acclaimed women novelists just a few years apart in age, Li is of Minnan ancestry and Zhu a second-generation Chinese mainlander whose father fled with the Chinese Nationalist or Kuomintang (KMT) government to Taiwan in 1949 after losing China to the communists. More important, Li is a postcolonial writer, whereas Zhu deploys postmodernism to resist decolonization.

In 1986, when the frenzy of renown was first published, let alone in the 1970s, when I first started working on it, little did I know that a few decades later fame and its history would be a subject of expanding academic study. After all, when I was in the midst of writing it, I was told by my agent that I had better hurry up and finish before no one was interested in fame anymore.