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With the unprecedented number of foreign-born population, South Korea has tried to reinvent itself as a multicultural society, but the intense multiculturalism efforts have focused exclusively on marriage immigrants. At the advent and height of South Korea’s eschewed multiculturalism, Elusive Belonging takes the readers to everyday lives of marriage immigrants in rural Korea where the projected image of a developed Korea which lured marriage immigrants and the gloomy reality of rural lives clashed. The intimate ethnographic account pays attention to emotional entanglements among Filipina wives, South Korean husbands, in-laws, and multicultural agents, with particular focus on such emotions as love, intimacy, anxiety, gratitude, and derision, which shape marriage immigrants’ fragmented citizenship and elusive sense of belonging to their new country. This investigation of the politics of belonging illuminates how marriage immigrants explore to mold a new identity in their new home, Korea.

Vamping the Stage is the first book-length historical and comparative examination of women, modernity, and popular music in Asia. This book documents the many ways that women performers have supported, challenged, and undermined representations of existing gendered norms in the entertainment industries of China, Japan, India, Indonesia, Iran, Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The case studies in this volume address colonial, post-colonial, as well as late modern conditions of culture as they relate to women’s musical practices and their changing social and cultural identities throughout Asia. Female entertainers were artistic pioneers of new music, new cinema, new forms of dance and theater, and new behavior and morals. Their voices, mediated through new technologies of film, radio, and the phonograph, changed the soundscape of global popular music and resonate today in all spheres of modern life. These female performers were not merely symbols of times that were rapidly changing. They were active agents in the creation of local performance cultures and the rise of a region-wide and globally oriented entertainment industry. Placing women’s voices in social and historical contexts, the authors critically analyze salient discourses, representations, meanings, and politics of “voice” in Asian popular music of the 20^th century to the present day.

The medieval Japanese courtier, poet, compiler, copyist, critic, and diarist Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241) is one of the most influential writers in the history of Japanese literature. Descended from a lineage of courtier poets, Teika achieved early success through linguistic and conceptual innovation and is acknowledged as a virtuoso master of the thirty-one syllable waka form. His patrons included members of the regental, shogunal, and imperial families. Teika’s talents were much in demand as a tutor, judge of poetry contests, and compiler of imperial anthologies of waka. Much of his diary, Meigetsuki, survives today in Teika’s own hand, and samples of his distinctive calligraphy are coveted by collectors. Teika, the first study of its kind in English, explores the most important and intriguing aspects of Teika’s life and literary works. Individual chapters examine his biography, early poetic style, poetics, understanding of classical Chinese and China, and a history of the reception of his life and works.

Writing Pregnancy in Low Fertility Japan analyzes the literary representations of pregnancy and childbirth by Japanese women in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century—work notable not simply for the diversity of views it encompasses, but for the wide range of genres in which it has taken shape. These texts reveal complex political, personal, and social concerns, ranging from the role and nature of the woman’s body, to her place in the family, to the meaning of motherhood for individuals and for society. Their authors engage with these issues, drawing on a range of literary techniques and frameworks to talk about the role of motherhood and the impact that it has on their lives and their work. This "pregnancy literature" serves as an important yet rarely considered forum for exploring and debating not only the particular experiences of the pregnant mother-to-be, but the broader concerns of Japanese women about their bodies, their families, their life choices, and their aspirations.

When Kannon (Avalokiteśvara in Sanskrit) appears in multiple manifestations, the compassionate Buddhist deity’s magnificent powers are believed to increase to even greater heights. This book examines the development of sculptures, paintings, and prints associated with the cult of the Six Kannon, which began in Japan in the tenth century and remained strong until its transition, beginning in sixteenth century, to the still active Thirty-Three Kannon cult. The complete set of Six Kannon made in 1224 and housed at the Kyoto temple Daihōonji is an exemplar of the cult’s images. With a diachronic approach, beginning in the eleventh century, individual case studies are employed to reinstate a context for the sets of Six Kannon, the majority of which have been lost or scattered, in order to clarify the former vibrancy, magnitude, and distribution of the cult and enhance knowledge of religious image-making in Japan. While Kannon’s role of assisting beings trapped in the six paths of transmigration is a well-documented catalyst for the selection of six, there are other significant themes at work. Six Kannon worship includes worldly concerns like childbirth and animal husbandry, strong ties between text and image, and numerous cases of matching with Shinto kami groups of six.

Meditation has flourished in different parts of the world ever since the foundations of the great civilizations were laid. It played a vital role in the formation of Asian cultures that trace much of their heritage to ancient India and China. This volume brings together for the first time studies of the major traditions of Asian meditation as well as material on scientific approaches to meditation. It delves deeply into the individual traditions while viewing each of them from a global perspective, examining both historical and generic connections between meditative practices from numerous historical periods and different parts of the Eurasian continent. It seeks to identify the cultural and historical peculiarities of Asian schools of meditation while recognizing basic features of meditative practice across cultures, thereby taking the first step toward a framework for the comparative study of meditation. The book, accessibly written by scholars from several fields, opens with chapters that discuss the definition and classification of meditation. These are followed by contributions on Yoga and Tantra, which are often subsumed under the broad label of Hinduism; Jainism and Sikhism, Indian traditions not usually associated with meditation; Buddhist approaches found in Southeast Asia, Tibet, and China; and the indigenous Chinese traditions, Daoism and Neo-Confucianism. The final chapter explores recent scientific interest in meditation, which, despite its Western orientation, remains almost exclusively concerned with practices of Asian origin.

This book is a genre study and genre history of prose poetry in China that begins during the Hundred Flowers Movement (1956) with authors Ke Lan and Guo Feng, describes prose poets of the 1980s such as Liu Zaifu, and ends with contemporary artists Ouyang Jianghe and Xi Chuan. The book argues for the distinctiveness of contemporary prose poetry from the prose compositions of Lu Xun, Liu Bannong, and other artists from the Republican period; it instead finds prose poetry’s prehistory in Bing Xin’s translations of Tagore. Building on ideas from Derrida, Heidegger, and Celan, the book defines prose poetry as the result of a series of processes that include condensation, recitation, and refusal; it sees the composition of prose poetry as a simultaneous act of imitation and creation that intervenes in prose. The book covers official or orthodox literature, semi-orthodox literature, and the avant-garde; drawing on the work of Bourdieu, it argues that each is necessary to understand the literary field of the genre, even as they compete to silence each other. The book ends with a call to rethink adaptations and adoptions of the rhetoric of Chinese socialism.

The zoomorphic imagination of Chinese artists was inhabited by some animals as carefully observed and rendered as in any scientific study, by other animals bred from sheer fantasy or concocted from various real beasts, representing various divinities or divine diversity, and by still others appropriated to serve as rhetorical substitutes for certain people or social groups. These are eleven in-depth topical and case studies of the thought and culture which permeated animal representations and the representations that in turn permeated their cultures, stretching historically from the Chinese bronze age to China's encounters with the counter-reformational Catholic Church, and down to the present day. Throughout these chapters is described a world whose creatures one must know in the Chinese way if one is to know the Chinese world.

This collection of essays examines the production of racial difference and its affects in East Asia under Japanese empire and the postwar geo-political order. The contributors turn to materials that demonstrate how race becomes visible or audible in the processes of inclusion and exclusion. From travelogues and records of speech to photographs, radio, plastic surgery, tattoos, postcards, fiction, the popular press, film and soundtracks, these explorations of diverse media demonstrate the links between the apprehension of racial difference, the formation of social and political hierarchies, and the experience of everyday culture under an expanding bio-political realm of imperial sovereignty. By demonstrating the ways in which the politics of inclusion and exclusion worked through explicitly racialized modes of representation, this collection sheds light on affective strategies common to the creation and maintenance of subjectivity across imperial formations. It also resituates theoretical and historical discussions of race and empire within an East Asian context, complicating the history of this region in provocative ways.

Igniting the Internet: Youth and Activism in Post-authoritarian South Korea takes up the new wave of South Korean youth activism that originated online in 2002 and continues today, focusing particularly on the cultural dynamics that have allowed the Internet to so rapidly bring issues to public attention and influence both domestic and international politics. The book examines a decade of youth-driven Internet activism in South Korea by combining analysis of online communities with ethnographic interviews to theorize the “cultural ignition process” – the mechanisms and implications of seemingly volatile Internet-driven activism in South Korea and beyond. South Korea offers a unique perspective for observing Internet politics because it matured into the social media age well before the rest of the world. This is one of the first book-length studies of popular politics and youth activism in post-authoritarian South Korea, and also one of the first books to examine the long-term influence of Internet-generated activism on participants and local politics in any country.