Authored Books by FASS Faculty Members (July-Dec 2015)

This list is sorted alphabetically by department, author, and title. Click on a book’s title to be taken to its publisher’s page. Reprints, new editions, and edited books are not included. Please also note that publication dates may be subject to change.


Department of Chinese Studies

The Logic of Chinese Peoplethelogicofchineseppl
Shi Yuzhi
Jiangxi Education Press

Aside from discussing the various principles of thought that the process of scientific exploration should adhere to, this book also pays particular attention to how the Chinese people process information and how they tend to make observations from a certain angle and employ certain normative frameworks in decision making when facing a situation or dealing with a matter. These are deeply rooted in the principles of thought of the Han Chinese, influencing their cognition and behavior. An important point of discussion includes cognitive habits that should be re-examined as they have a negative effect on talent development, limiting the improvement of the cultural standard of the Chinese people, the development of science and technology and the increase in the country’s international competitiveness.

The Truth of Jing Ke’s Assassinating King Qin
jing keShi Yuzhi
Jiangxi Education Press

With a refreshing layout, unique viewpoints and romantic language that captures the spirit of the age, this book offers a correction of misinterpretations of the Jing Ke incident that have occurred over the dynasties, providing detailed and concise analyses and presenting an incisive and insightful overview.

 

 

 

Children and War: Culture, Nation and Education in Modern China, 1937-1945lanjun book cover
Xu Lanjun
Peking University Press

Based on the notion that children are the focal point of the discourse system of various cultural constructions, this book analyzes important topics in modern Chinese literature and the cultural field from 1937 to 1945 that revolve around the theme of “children and the war of resistance”, such as education for national salvation as well as colonial and wartime education for the masses. Current research on children in academia in contemporary China has been largely limited to the specific genre of children’s literature. Hence, based on a more diverse array of popular culture materials that range from comics, movies, children’s games, children’s writings to wartime magazines, this book examines the cultural history and the history of social thought of mid and late twentieth century.

 

Department of English Language and Literature

The Making of Vernacular Singapore English: System, Transfer, and Filtervernacularsingapore
Zhiming Bao
Cambridge University Press

Singapore English is a focal point across the many subfields of linguistics, as its semantic, syntactic and phonetic/phonological qualities tell us a great deal about what happens when very different types of language come together. Sociolinguists are also interested in the relative status of Singapore English compared to other languages in the country. This book charts the history of Singapore English and explores the linguistic, historical and social factors that have influenced the variety as it is spoken today. It identifies novel grammatical features of the language, discusses their structure and function, and traces their origins to the local languages of Singapore. It places grammatical system and usage at the core of analysis, and shows that introspective and corpus data are complementary. This study will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on language contact, world varieties of English, historical linguistics and sociolinguistics.

Tibet on Fire: Buddhism, Protest, and the Rhetoric of Self-Immolation
John Whalen-Bridge
Palgrave Macmillantibetonfire

Extreme conditions lead to extreme protest, and contradictions between the Buddhist-inflected rhetoric of non-harm and the agony of self-immolation have been accounted for variously. The interpreters reate descriptions that reflect, select, and sometimes deflect the reality of the burning corpse, calling attention to a certain place and time. In this volume, John Whalen-Bridge applies Kenneth Burke’s interpretive suggestions to the phenomenon of a Buddhist-inflected self-immolation movement. Tibet on Fire considers the possibility that the self-burnings could be interpreted as an extension of the struggle that constitutes part of what Kenneth Burke called a ‘logomachy.’ The volume seeks to: open up the possibility of multiple motivations, explain the significance of shifting contexts, and explore the pervasive substitutions in which the self-immolator and the Dalai Lama trade places in attempts to understand the Tibetan situation.

 

Department of Geography

Challenging Southeast Asian Development: The shadows of success 
Jonathan Rigg
Routledge 

Over the course of the last half century, the growth economies of Southeast Asia – Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam – have transformed themselves into middle income countries. This book looks at how the very success of these economies has bred new challenges, novel problems, and fresh tensions, including the fact that particular individuals, sectors and regions have been marginalised by these processes.

Contributing to discussions of policy implications, the book melds endogenous and exogenous approaches to thinking about development paths, re-frames Asia’s model(s) of growth and draws out the social, environmental, political and economic side-effects that have arisen from growth. An interesting analysis of the problems that come alongside development’s achievements, this book is an important contribution to Southeast Asian Studies, Development Studies and Environmental Studies.

 

Department of Southeast Asian Studies

Three Centuries of Conflict in East Timorthree_centuries_of_conflict_in_east_timor
Douglas Kammen
Rutgers University Press

One of the most troubling but least studied features of mass political violence is why violence often recurs in the same place over long periods of time.  Douglas Kammen explores this pattern in Three Centuries of Conflict in East Timor, studying that region’s tragic past, focusing on the small district of Maubara.
Once a small but powerful kingdom embedded in long-distance networks of trade, over the course of three centuries the people of Maubara experienced benevolent but precarious Dutch suzerainty, Portuguese colonialism punctuated by multiple uprisings and destructive campaigns of pacification, Japanese military rule, and years of brutal Indonesian occupation. In 1999 Maubara was the site of particularly severe violence before and after the UN-sponsored referendum that finally led to the restoration of East Timor’s independence. Beginning with the mystery of paired murders during East Timor’s failed decolonization in 1975 and the final flurry of state-sponsored violence in 1999, Kammen combines an archival trail and rich oral interviews to reconstruct the history of the leading families of Maubara from 1712 until 2012.
Kammen illuminates how recurrent episodes of mass violence shaped alliances and enmities within Maubara as well as with supra-local actors, and how those legacies have influenced efforts to address human rights violations, post-conflict reconstruction, and the relationship between local experience and the identification with the East Timorese nation. The questions posed in Three Centuries of Conflict in East Timor about recurring violence and local narratives apply to many other places besides East Timor—from the Caucasus to central Africa, and from the Balkans to China—where mass violence keeps recurring.

 

South Asian Studies Programme

The Bengal Diaspora: Muslim Migrants in Britain, India and Bangladeshbengal_diaspora
By Annu Jalais, Claire Alexander, and Joya Chatterji
Routledge 

Recent decades have witnessed the growth of a new interest, both scholarly and political, in migration and diaspora. This book focuses on three groups of Muslim Bengali migrants. One group had migrated across international borders after partition and settled in Britain; the second had crossed borders but had settled in the neighbouring nation state of East Pakistan/Bangladesh in South Asia itself; the third had crossed no borders but had been internally displaced within West Bengal in India, or within Bangladesh after it was formed in 1971.

Based on groundbreaking new research in India, Bangladesh and the United Kingdom, this is the first study to compare internal displacees with international migrants and refugees. The analysis pays attention to the vitally important inter-connections and interactions between the different groups. The authors offer a historical perspective, exploring different phases of migration and settlement, evolving legal frameworks and the shifting formations of ‘community’. They also use the life history approach to present the diverse voices and experiences of migrants. Finally, the book describes the hidden experiences of marginalised and silenced groups, such as women, refugees, ‘infiltrators’, illegal workers and brides. The combination of these historical, sociological and anthropological methods and materials result in an interdisciplinary approach to diaspora and migration, which makes this book a unique contribution to the field.

 

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