She Wanted to be a Beauty Queen is a good read for anyone, but, together with supplementary material like George Quinn’s comprehensive afterword, is an especially terrific resource for students of Indonesian or Southeast Asian literature.
That animals and plants have been inserted, in increasingly powerful ways, in historical narratives represents a powerful challenge to human-centred accounts that have long been dominant.
Eileen Chong’s poetry defies national categories, making its way into cracks and crevices like an orchid in cement, grown beautiful and a little wild.
The works featured in Joanne Leow’s monograph, Counter-Cartographies: Reading Singapore Otherwise, are examples of (mostly) Singaporeans who refuse to conform to top-down formulations of how to live on this island.
How did the Philippines descend into a demagogic dystopia? How can one explain the rise of the proto-fascist ideology of Dutertismo? And what are the lessons for democracies in the twenty-first century?
Americans like to think that the most cruel excesses of colonialism are reserved for the histories of the British or the French, but Kim A. Wagner draws connections between American behaviour in the Philippines and the tactics of other colonial powers.
Not many Vietnamese books keep track of the experience of living under suffocating communism in the North or keeping up with the get-rich-quick sentiment dominant in the South. Thuận’s Elevator in Sài Gòn captures this with nuance and peculiarity.
In the celebrated writer’s short story collection, human brittleness and the everydayness of identity play out in quiet episodes beneath the crumbling gaze of the Eternal City.
In Vanessa Chan’s The Storm We Made, a family is undone by a secret betrayal during the British and then Japanese colonisation of Malaya.
Over a quarter of a century, Malaysiakini grew from a scrappy start-up to a Malaysian media institution. In some ways, to know the history of this news portal is to know the history of modern Malaysia.
The Uyghurs: Kashgar Before the Catastrophe and Under the Mulberry Tree: A Contemporary Uyghur Anthology are testament to the power of memory as resistance against crackdown and erasure.
Clare Hammond, author of On the Shadow Tracks, did not love the trains she rode. But her exploration of Myanmar’s dilapidated tracks reveals the link between the railways and the military’s power, while documenting the lives on and around ramshackle trains.
Gordon Conochie’s book amounts to perhaps the most detailed autopsy yet of the death of Cambodia’s democracy.
As the forest and the tiger vanish, the myths that enchant them evolve and find their way into other vernaculars beyond folklore and popular beliefs.
Anne Stevenson-Yang recounts the heady giddiness of Chinese economic growth, but concludes that what had once seemed to last forever has turned out to be little more than an illusion.
In their respective books, Ian Johnson and Louisa Lim look at China’s underground historians of one kind or another.
The transnational reproduction of Chinggis worship in Mongolia is part of a concerted effort to bring back an identity-defining practice.
Throughout ancient China, mortuary cultures had been evolving for thousands of years before the Qin dynasty, even long before the date of the oldest extant form of systematic Chinese writing.
In short vignettes, Y-Dang Troeung gives a compelling account of the journey which brought her family from Cambodia’s Kampong Thom to white rural Canada, beyond the feel-good newspaper headlines.
The China-Australian Migration Corridor delves deep into historical foundations, contemporary trends and policy considerations related to movement between China and Australia.
The Second Link curates writing that moves beyond the “exhausted metaphors and dusty tropes” of the longstanding rivalry between Malaysia and Singapore.
Susann Pham’s Vietnam’s Dissidents is a bold piece of empirical work and a welcome and timely addition to the literature on contemporary Vietnam.
The End of August centres voices rarely heard in English-language fiction—Koreans living in Japanese-occupied Korea and the zainichi Korean diaspora of Japan.
Among the Braves is an attempt to tell the story and struggles of a city, through the lives of the people who have been active in a decades-long movement for democracy.
The twenty-six films screening in Retrospective: Wang Sha & Ye Feng are a testament to the legendary comedians’ breadth both as solo performers and a beloved pair.
The Panthay Rebellion is a cautionary tale of what can go wrong when a central government is absorbed in its own priorities, leading to ethnic stereotyping and distrust between communities.
In Southeast Asia, the short story has perhaps been more significant than the novel: it is portable, more easily translated and it also migrates.
In the two novellas, journeys depart from or hope to return to “an eastern port” (Singapore) but instead they both disappear into the obscurities of the seas.
In Hieyoon Kim’s Celluloid Democracy: Cinema and Politics in Cold War South Korea, South Korean cinema is seen as part of a broader democratic social movement.
In eleven short stories, Prasanthi Ram probes the lives and relationships of nine women, exploring the narratives of love (or hate) that we develop within ourselves, alongside the ones shared with our families.
Both Oasis of Now and Tomorrow Is a Long Time are meditations on love, time and space.
Both The Sales Girl and If Only I Could Hibernate are contemporary coming-of-age stories set in Ulaanbaatar that thwart most viewers’ expectations of Mongolian cinema.
Hafsa Kanjwal contends that Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed’s state-building practices helped strengthen India’s hold over Kashmir while also enabling modernisation, which paradoxically reinforced a sense of alienation rather than reconciliation.
One of the interesting ideas thrown up in Hong Kong a few years back has been a certain nostalgia for the late colonial period. But how enlightened was colonial public policy-making?
Touching that sensitive Cambodian topic of land ownership and dispossession, Further and Further Away questions the nature of relationships entertained with the land.
What unfolds in Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book is Shubigi Rao’s documentation of her encounters with texts in varying formats that, at some point in the past, confronted ‘banishment’.
Set in Singapore, catskull is a “neo-noir thriller meets coming-of-age mystery” that explores the violence of the city and the many forms that it takes: physical, racial, institutional.
What sets Rachel Heng’s historical fiction apart is how she moves beyond this understanding of History (with a capital H) by showing how grand events are mediated by everyday interactions.
Saadat Hasan Manto knew that it was not for him to analyse the multitudes people contain, and that often spill out from us without warning.
Japanese Management, Indian Resistance is an important work in understanding the larger ecosystem of foreign capital, more specifically that from East Asia, in India’s political-economic-social terrain.