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Genre, Print Culture and Knowledge Formation, 1902–1912
Author:
Unlike previous studies that have examined the late Qing utopian imagination as an ahistorical motif, a literary theme, and a translation phenomenon, in this book Shuk Man Leung considers utopian fiction as a knowledge apparatus that helped develop Chinese nationalism and modernity. Based on untapped primary sources in Chinese, English, and Japanese, her research reveals how utopian imagination, blooming after Liang Qichao’s publication of The Future of New China, served as a tool of knowledge formation and dissemination that transformed China’s public sphere and catalysed historical change.

Embracing interdisciplinary approach from genre studies, studies on modern Chinese newspapers and intellectual history, this book provides an analysis of the development of utopian literary practices, epistemic meanings, and fictional narratives and the interactions between traditional and imported knowledge that helped shape the discourse in early 20th century China.
Volume Editors: and
Contests over heritage in Asia are intensifying and reflect the growing prominence of political and social disputes over historical narratives shaping heritage sites and practices, and the meanings attached to them. These contests emphasize that heritage is a means of narrating the past that demarcates, constitutes, produces, and polices political and social borders in the present. In its spaces, varied intersections of actors, networks, and scales of governance interact, negotiate and compete, resulting in heritage sites that are cut through by borders of memory.

This volume, edited by Edward Boyle and Steven Ivings, and with contributions from scholars across the humanities, history, social sciences, and Asian studies, interrogates how particular actors and narratives make heritage and how borders of memory shape the sites they produce.
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Abstract

Across the Persianate regions of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Eurasia, the discourse of modernization had a deep, perhaps even dominant aesthetic dimension. Apparently disparate anxieties about oriental indolence, homosexuality and unmanliness, flattery and unmeaning speech, and submission to despots all may be understood as elements of a coherent critique of a single literary mode: taghazzul. Insofar as ghazal was a “royal genre” (Ireneusz Opacki), it provided the formal-aesthetic framing for numerous literary and speech genres, and thus for the social and political order. In case studies from across the Persianate zone, this article considers how writers’ refusal of taghazzul, or its excision from their texts, became a recognizable gesture of disaffiliation from the Persianate. In the resulting reordering of the literary field, taghazzul took on new functions in relation to the Western category of lyric.

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In: Philological Encounters

Abstract

This article considers how sound—especially Persian phonology, but also music—and gender came together in articulating an Iranian national identity distinct from the Persianate past. Through analysis of the film The Lor Girl as well as close readings of poetry from the first half of the twentieth century by Nasīm-i Shumāl, Parvīz Khaṭībī, and poet-laureate Muḥammad-Taqī Bahār, the article demonstrates how an erotic attachment to language was fostered, in which the very phonology of Persian became the object of desire. Pharyngeal consonants became markers of Arab male sexual deviancy against which a feminized Iranian nation was to be protected. This eroticized discourse of language also contributed to establishing the Tehrani dialect as the Iranian national standard. The article considers how nationalism and modernity impacted the Iranian soundscape, as well as the impact of developments in Iran on Persian and Urdu in South Asia.

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In: Philological Encounters
Volume Editor:
Javanese literature is one of the world’s richest and most unusual literary traditions yet it is little known today outside of Java, Indonesia, and a handful of western universities. With its more than a millennium of documented history, its complex interactions over the centuries with literature written in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Malay and Dutch, its often symbiotic relationship with the performing arts of puppetry and dance, and its own immense creativity and insight, this vastly understudied literature offers a lens to understanding Java’s fascinating world as well as human ingenuity more broadly. The essays in this volume, Storied Island: New Explorations in Javanese Literature, take a fresh look at questions and themes pertaining to Java’s literature, employing new theoretical and methodological lenses.

Abstract

Opening with a discussion of a controversial painting by the contemporary Muslim cleric and artist, Mustofa Bisri, this essay reflects upon the role that artistic expression can play in the spiritual life of Javanese Muslims. The focus of the essay turns upon an exploration of the performance of Sufi poetry (suluk) in song and dance as it is portrayed in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini, an early nineteenth-century masterpiece of Javanese literature that narrates the imagined adventures of several seventeenth-century wandering students of Islamic religion (santris). These poems, activated through their performance by both men and women as a form of devotional practice, disclose the embodiment of spirit that characterized much of the metaphysical life of Javanese Sufis in earlier times and that still reverberates into the present.

Open Access
In: Storied Island
Author:

Abstract

As a contribution to the study of emotions and ambience in Javanese literature, drama, and culture more generally, I argue that there is a Hamza affect, or more precisely a complex affect-in-action paradigm, which is intrinsic to how plots in the epic of Amir Hamza are built. In the sixteenth-century Java Sea world, where this paradigm was established, it stood out, as other narrative works featured rather different relations between feeling and action. This paradigm became typical of Javanese Hamza storytelling. It found its way into puppetry with other narrative repertoires as well, and helped to promote an action-oriented sensibility in society.

Open Access
In: Storied Island
Author:

Abstract

Javanese literature is one of the world’s richest and most unusual literary traditions, yet it is little known today outside of Java, Indonesia, and a handful of western universities. With its more than a millennium of documented history, its complex interactions over the centuries with literatures written in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Malay, and Dutch, its often-symbiotic relationship with the performing arts of puppetry and dance, and its own immense creativity and insight, this vastly understudied literature offers a lens to understanding Java’s fascinating world, as well as human ingenuity more broadly. The Introduction briefly explores the history of the field. It also introduces the essays in this volume which take a fresh look at questions and themes pertaining to Java’s literature, employing new theoretical and methodological lenses.

Open Access
In: Storied Island

Abstract

The Panji Paniba (1817) can be read as an early protest against the colonial occupation of Java by the Dutch (1816–1942). Channels to voice political opinions, like journals or pamphlets, were not available to the Javanese at the time. Instead, the anonymous author turns to literature to convey his view, creating a new story in the well-known genre of the Panji tale. Panji tales are notorious for their endless entanglements, around a central plot shared by all (that a given Javanese kingdom is attacked by a foreign power, with the aim to seize the daughter of the king). To make sure his main point does not escape the attention the author of the Panji Paniba alerts his readers by an unusual step: by borrowing and building into his own text the central plot of a completely different but no less well-known story, that of Rama and Sita. This famous epic from India in various local guises had enjoyed uninterrupted popularity since it introduction to Java more than a thousand years before. The role of the enemy in the Panji Paniba quite traditionally and in this case perhaps also cautiously is assigned to some regional entity. Gradually, by various narrative and stylistic means in the course of the story the enemy betrays more and more traits of the Dutch.

Open Access
In: Storied Island
Author:

Abstract

The study of Javanese history offers significant examples of both legacies and new interpretations which have transformed how we see the past and present circumstances of the Javanese over the centuries of Islamisation and, consequently, how we might imagine their future. Not so very long ago, Islam tended to be viewed as marginal to ‘mainstream’ Javanese culture: that was the legacy. Now we see it as a topic of major significance in the history of the Javanese: that is the new interpretation. In this chapter, we will look at both the legacy and the new understanding, to see how we have been led to new views of Javanese history, society and culture and to a clearer understanding of how Islam is understood and lived in the real world.

This examination of both the legacy and the new interpretations of Javanese history provides us with a fine example of how our views of the past are often shaped by our experience of the present. It also reminds us how beguiling, misleading and analytically dangerous stereotypes can be and how important it is actually to do research to test such ideas. These are hardly new observations, of course, but it is rather remarkable how hard it has been to arrive at them in the case of the history of the Javanese.

Open Access
In: Storied Island