Two decades ago, a group of Indonesian agricultural workers began occupying the agribusiness plantation near their homes. In the years since, members of this remarkable movement have reclaimed collective control of their land and cultivated diverse agricultural forests on it, repairing...
By Kristian Karlo Saguin, author of Urban Ecologies on the Edge: Making Manila’s Resource Frontier
Cities around the world are learning to live with the challenges of increasing urban ecological precarity. In watery Manila, the metropolitan population of around 25 million is constan...
When the crucial years after the Korean War are remembered today, histories about North Korea largely recount a grand epic of revolution centering on the ascent of Kim Il Sung to absolute power. Often overshadowed in this storyline, however, are the myriad ways the Korean population pa...
By Kartik Nair, author of Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror
What makes a vampire burn in the light? We don’t quite know. But in her stylish short film, Suicide by Sunlight (2018), the filmmaker Nikyatu Jusu gives us a vampire who isn’t afraid of the day. With her p...
By Cheryl Narumi Naruse, author of Becoming Global Asia: Contemporary Genres of Postcolonial Capitalism in Singapore
Becoming Global Asia is part of the UC Press Transpacific Series
Though once widely regarded as a punitive, culturally sterile island-nation, or what William Gibson d...
Winner of the 2022 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences, Merchants of Virtue explores the question of what it meant to be Hindu in precolonial South Asia. Divya Cherian presents a fine-grained study of everyday life and local politics in the kingdom of Marwar in eighteen...
In one of the first in-depth ethnographic accounts of coastal Fukushima written in English, Nuclear Ghost tells the stories of a diverse group of residents who aspire to live and die well in their now irradiated homes. Their determination to recover their land, cultures, and histories ...
by Sahana Ghosh, author of A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands
Borders and bordering in South Asia continue to be a hot topic. India and China are currently at an impasse over territorial disputes along its shared border, on the brink...
COURT RULES HINDU NOT A ‘WHITE PERSON’; Bars High Caste Native of India From Naturalization as an American Citizen.
–NY Times, February 20, 1923
Photograph of Bhagat Singh Thind in his U.S. Army Uniform, from 1918. Thind enlisted in the U.S. Army, and trained at Camp Lewis, Washington...
The Tropical Turn chronicles the earliest histories of familiar tropical Asian crops in the ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean, from rice and cotton to citruses and cucumbers. Drawing on archaeological materials and textual sources in over seven ancient languages, The Tropical T...