"Tomiyama Taeko, a Japanese visual artist born in 1921, is changing the way World War II is remembered in Japan, Asia, and the world. Her work deals with complicated moral and emotional issues of ...empire and war responsibility that cannot be summed up in simple slogans, which makes it compelling for more than just its considerable beauty. Japanese today are still grappling with the effects of World War II, and, largely because of the inconsistent and ambivalent actions of the government, they are widely seen as resistant to accepting responsibility for their nation’s violent actions against others during the decades of colonialism and war. Yet some individuals, such as Tomiyama, have produced nuanced and reflective commentaries on those experiences, and on the difficulty of disentangling herself from the priorities of the nation despite her lifelong political dissent. Tomiyama’s sophisticated visual commentary on Japan’s history—and on the global history in which Asia is embedded—provides a compelling guide through the difficult terrain of modern historical remembrance, in a distinctively Japanese voice. Laura Hein is Professor of Japanese History at Northwestern University. This is her fifth edited book on the politics of war remembrance. Rebecca Jennison is Professor of Literature and Gender Studies at Kyoto Seika University. She has been assisting Tomiyama Taeko as a translator since 1990, and has published several articles and translations on the artist’s work."
The Soviet-Polish peace treaty of 1921, also known as the "Riga peace," ended the war of 1919-1920 and may be considered the most important Eastern European treaty of the interwar period. This deeply ...researched book offers the first post-Soviet account of how Bolshevik Russia and Poland came to sign the treaty-a pact that established the central part of the Soviet western border and provided Eastern Europe with a measure of stability that lasted until 1939.
Jerzy Borzecki draws on a wealth of untapped materials in Russian and Polish archives to recreate the negotiations and behind-the-scenes maneuvers leading to and surrounding the treaty. He examines the significance of the agreement not only to its signatories but also to Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Latvia. The Riga peace represented an authentic compromise between Poland and Bolshevik Russia, Borzecki shows, and he offers new interpretations of other crucial aspects of the negotiations as well.
Love stories Manning, Paul
Love stories,
2015, 20150515, 2015, 2015-05-15
eBook
Love Stories offers an ethnography of language and desire
that doubles as an introduction to key linguistic genres and to the
interplay of language and culture.
Walter Laqueur has been writing and teaching for over six decades, primarily in the fields of twentieth century history and politics, always as a shrewd and thoughtful generalist in an age of ...specialization. In this engaging memoir, Laqueur focuses on the political and historical events that shaped his thinking and that have inspired his intellectual work throughout his life. He discusses living and attending school under Nazism; Marxism, the Soviet Union, and the part he played in Cold War politics; and the image his generation had of Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East. Laqueur shares his views on beltway politics and think tanks, and concludes with a look at guerrilla warfare and terrorism, and the future of Europe.
In Making Uzbekistan, Adeeb Khalid chronicles the tumultuous history of Central Asia in the age of the Russian revolution. He explores the complex interaction between Uzbek intellectuals, local ...Bolsheviks, and Moscow to sketch out the flux of the situation in early-Soviet Central Asia. His focus on the Uzbek intelligentsia allows him to recast our understanding of Soviet nationalities policies. Uzbekistan, he argues, was not a creation of Soviet policies, but a project of the Muslim intelligentsia that emerged in the Soviet context through the interstices of the complex politics of the period. Making Uzbekistan introduces key texts from this period and argues that what the decade witnessed was nothing short of a cultural revolution.
For nirvana Cho, Oh-Hyun
2016., 2016, 2016-09-06
eBook
For Nirvana features exceptional examples of the poet Cho Oh-Hyun's award- winning work. Cho Oh-Hyun was born in Miryang, South Gyeongsang Province, Korea, and has lived in retreat in the mountains ...since becoming a novice monk at the age of seven. Writing under the Buddhist name Musan, he has composed hundreds of poems in seclusion, many in the sijo style, a relatively fixed syllabic poetic form similar to Japanese haiku and tanka. For Nirvana contains 108 Zen sijo poems (108 representing the number of klesas, or "defilements," that one must overcome to attain enlightenment). These transfixing works play with traditional religious and metaphysical themes and include a number of "story" sijo, a longer, more personal style that is one of Cho Oh-Hyun's major innovations. Kwon Youngmin, a leading scholar of sijo, provides a contextualizing introduction, and in his afterword, Heinz Insu Fenkl reflects on the unique challenges of translating the collection.
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