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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.

Since the advent of European settlement, indigenous Australians have been subject to continual change and entrenched inequality. This has been their shared experience even as regional histories have diverged. These essays address the lives of indigenous Australians through a focus on the person. Various contexts are described including family and community groups, regional diaspora and inter-racial relations, along with a striking range of experience, from indigenous heavy metal gangs and rebellious, forthright women to the social dynamics of childhood and the effects of long-term unemployment. Issues are discussed against a backdrop of different regions including the remote north, the desert center, and the densely populated southeast of Australia.Convinced that accounts of indigenous Australians must become more dynamic and diverse, People and Change traces the development of Australianist ethnography as a tool for understanding personhood and places this research in a comparative and theoretical perspective. The collection provides new and nuanced insights on the past, the present and likely trajectories of indigenous Australians today.

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.

This book examines issues of environmentalism and indigeneity in Northern Australia through the controversy surrounding the Wild Rivers Act 2005 (Qld). Like much of the north, one terrain of the Act – the massive Cape York Peninsula – has long been constructed as a ‘wild’ space, whether as terra nullius, a zone of legal exception or a biodiverse wilderness region in need of conservation. The past two decades, however, have seen two major changes in the political and social composition of the region, the first being the legal recognition of geographically extensive Indigenous land rights and the creation of a corporate infrastructure to govern them. The second is that the peninsula has been the centre of national debates regarding the market integration and social normalisation of Indigenous people, becoming the locale for intensive reform of some ‘Indigenous’ policy. Ironically, the Queensland government’s own attempts to ‘settle’ land use through the Actbrought out the tensions within the region’s present political formation. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the examination of how and why the controversy occurred and what it indicates about present imaginaries of the governance and potentiality of Indigenous lands and waters. It shows that historically embedded forms of ‘wildness’ continue to shape debates about Northern Australia’s future, debates in which economic and social development are often confused and conceptualised as beneficent transformations. Ultimately, Wild Articulations contends that close consideration of this event provides insights into the future dilemmas of development and conservation in remote Australia.

The disproportionate U.S, military presence in Okinawa, which began with the 1945 battle followed by twenty-seven years under U.S. military occupation, continues to this day. It has brought deadly accidents, serious crimes, including rape and murder, environmental destruction, and economic stagnation to what remains Japan’s poorest prefecture. These small islands bear 70 percent of the total U.S. military presence in Japan on 0.6 percent of the nation’s land area with less than 1 percent of its population. Yet, even as this burden of bases continues to impose dangers and disruptions, approximately 200 Okinawan women every year have married American servicemen and returned with them to live in the United States. Former Okinawa Times reporter Etsuko Takushi Crissey traveled throughout their adopted country, conducting wide-ranging interviews and a questionnaire survey of women who married and immigrated between the early 1950s and the mid-1990s. She asked how they met their husbands, why they decided to marry, what the reactions of both families had been, and what life had been like for them in the United States. She concentrates especially on their experiences as immigrants, wives, mothers, working women, and members of a racial minority. Many describe severe hardships they encountered. Crissey presents their diverse personal accounts, her survey results, and comparative data on divorces, challenging the widespread notion that such marriages almost always fail, with the women ending up abandoned and helpless in a strange land. She compares their experiences with international marriages of American soldiers stationed in Europe and mainland Japan.

The book highlights the historic and groundbreaking work by doctors, researchers, and healthcare providers to improve the health and well-being of Native Hawaiians. Through program descriptions, essays, personal reflections and research the authors share insights in medical education, clinical care, and community engagement. Mauli means life, heart, spirit, our essential nature. Ola means well-being, healthy. “Ho’i hou ka mauli ola” or bring back the state of vibrant health is the primary objective and the collective professional and personal commitment of the contributors. Most authors are affiliated with the Department of Native Hawaiian Health in the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawai'i and represent varied disciplines, strategies, and innovative projects at work to find solutions to health problems, cures to diseases, improvements to the quality of healthcare available to the Hawaiian and Pacific communities, and efforts to grow new doctors and researchers.

This is a biography of Ta’isi O. F. Nelson, the Sāmoan nationalist leader who fought New Zealand, the British Empire and the League of Nations between the world wars. It is a richly layered history that weaves a personal and Pacific history with one that illuminates the global crisis of empire after World War One. Ta’isi’s story weaves Sweden with deep histories of Sāmoa that in the late nineteenth century became deeply inflected with colonial machinations of Germany, Britain, New Zealand and the U. S.. After Sāmoa was made a mandate of the League of Nations in 1921, the workings and aspirations of that newly minted form of world government came to bear on the island nation and Ta’isi and his fellow Sāmoan tested the League’s powers through their relentless non-violent campaign for justice. Ta’isi was Sāmoa’s leading businessman who was blamed for the on-going agitation in Sāmoa; for his trouble he was subjected to two periods of exile, humiliation and a concerted campaign intent on his financial ruin. Using many new sources, this book tells Ta’isi’s untold story, providing fresh and intriguing new aspects to the global story of indigenous resistance in the twentieth century.

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.