How did terms like “Asia,” “Eurasia,” “Indochina,” “Pacific Rim” or “Australasia” originate and evolve, and what are their connections to the built environment? In addressing this question,Architecturalized Asia bridges the fields of history and architecture by taking “Asia” as a discursive structure and cultural construct, whose spatial and ideological formation can be examined through the lenses of cartography, built environments, and visual narratives. The first section, on the study of architecture in Asia from the medieval through early modern periods, examines icons and symbols in maps as well as textual descriptions produced in Europe and Asia. The second section explores the establishment of the field of Asian architecture as well as the political and cultural imagining of “Asia” during the long nineteenth century, when “Asia” and its regions were redefined in the making of modern world maps mainly produced in Europe. The third section examines tangible structures produced in the twentieth century as legible documents of these notional constructions of Asia. In exploring the ways in which “Asia” has been drawn and framed both within and without the continent, this volume offers cutting-edge scholarship on architectural history, world history and the history of empires. Written by architectural historians and historians specializing in Asia and European empires, this unique volume addresses the connection between Asia and the world through the lenses of built environments and spatial conceptualizations. Architecturalized Asiawill appeal to readers who are interested in Asian architecture, world architecture, Asian history, history of empires, and world history.
There's kinship, offspring, siblings, kindred, legacies, relatives, heirs, and blood. There's family, right. More like emotions, tension, theatrics, spectacles, tragedy, and the list goes on. Meet the Maxwells and the Rogers. Dramaeveryone has met it; few know how to resolve it.
Introduction by David Leddick In this rare volume of artistic erotic images of the Asian male nude, masculine, sexual and potent young men are seen through the eyes of the Western world. Clifford Baker's most sensual images combine with highly literary quotations by Yukio Mishima.
Performing Southeast Asia: Performance, Politics and the Contemporary is an important reconsideration of the histories and practices of theatre and performance in a fluid and dynamic region that is also experiencing an overarching politics of complexity, precarity and populist authoritarian tendencies. In a substantial introductory essay and essays by leading scholars, activists and practitioners working inside the region, the book explores fundamental questions for the arts. The book asks how theatre contributes to and/or addresses the political condition in the contemporary moment, how does it represent the complexity of experiences in peoples’ daily lives and how does theatre engage in forms of political activism and enable a diversity of voices to flourish. The book shows how, in an age of increasingly violent politics, political institutions become sites for bad actors and propaganda. Forces of biopolitics, neo-liberalism and religious and ethnic nationalism intersect in unpredictable ways with decolonial practices – all of which the book argues are forces that define the contemporary moment. Indeed, by putting the focus on contemporary politics in the region alongside the diversity of practices in contemporary theatre, we see a substantial reformation of the idea of the contemporary moment, not as a cosmopolitan and elite artistic practice but as a multivalent agent of change in both aesthetic and political terms. With its focus on community activism and the creative possibilities of the performing arts the region, Performing Southeast Asia, is a timely intervention that brings us to a new understanding of how contemporary Southeast Asia has become a site of contest, struggle and reinvention of the relations between the arts and society. Peter Eckersall The Graduate Center City University of New York Performing Southeast Asia – with chapters concerned with how regional theatres seek contextually-grounded, yet post-national(istic) forms; how history and tradition shape but do not hold down contemporary theatre; and how, in the editors’ words, such artistic encounters could result in theatres ‘that do not merely attend to matters of cultural heritage, tradition or history, but instead engage overtly with theatre and performance in the contemporary’ – contributes to the possibility of understanding what options for an artistically transubstantiated now-ness may be: to the possibility, that is, of what might be called a ‘Present-Tense Theatre’. C. J. W.-L. Wee Professor of English Nanyang Technological University Performing Southeast Asia examines contemporary performance practices and their relationship with politics and governance in Southeast Asia in the twenty-first century. In a region haunted historically by strongman politics, authoritarianism and militarism, religious tension and ethnic strife, the chapters reveal how contemporary theatre and performances in the present reflect yet challenge dominant socio-political discourses. The authors analyse works of political commitment and conviction, created and performed by Southeast Asian artists, as modes and platforms of reaction and resistance to the shifting political climates that inform contemporary life in urban Southeast Asia. The discussions center on issues of state hegemonies and biopolitics, finance and sponsorship, social liberalism and conservatism, the relevance of history and tradition, and globalisation and cultural practice. These diverse yet related concerns converge on an examination of the efficacies of theatre and performance as means of political intervention and transformation that point to alternative embodiments of political consciousness through which artists propose critical options for rethinking the state, citizenship, identity and belonging in a time of seismic socio-political change. The editors also reframe an understanding of ‘the contemporary’ not simply as a temporal adjective but, in the context of present Southeast Asia, as a geopolitical condition that shapes artistic and performance practices.
Travis Smith has tough choices to make when money, emotions, and loyalties pull him in different directions. Operating in the shadows of Renos flashing lights brings sizzling encounters with exotic sex workers, bundles of dirty money, and unavoidable brushups with local bad guys. He thought quick wits and an air tight hustle were all he needed, but when push comes to shove, the real test begins. When his world is disrupted and the chaos of a casino town start closing in, he finds peace in the slow-growing passion of an outsider, but it may be too late to cash out . . .
A theoretical account of the formation of Sikh diaspora and Sikh nationalism, arguing that the diaspora, rather than originating from the nation, has a major role in the nation's creation.
NATION BU$INE$$ unfolds on the game-saturated streets of Chicago. KASE, a swole brotha covered in tats, with a $30,000 grill, and a fetish for more money and thick women, is a major factor in his mob's lucrative drug trade. Born and bred on the streets, KASE's juice within the Black P. Stones reaches from the corner arab store all the way down state to the max joints behind the walls of Illinois' prison system. While in the joint, KASE drew up a one-year plan to shake the game with enough money to go legit. Well that year has come and gone and KASE still finds himself sitting at the table unable to push his plate away because his plan didn't take into account his greed, or his addiction to the dope dealers' lifestyle. His inability to do so puts not only all he has worked for, but his life in jeopardy.
