NUS Press - Publishing in Asia, on Asia, for Asia and the World

Exciting NEW releases available immediately!

• Phoenix Rising: Narratives in Nonya Beadwork from the Straits Settlements. This book contributes to the ongoinng dialogue on Peranakan Chinese artifacts and culture and extends the research on Southeast Asian textile history through its focus on the still embryonic field of Southeast Asian needlework.
• De Jiao - A Religious Movement in Contemporary China and Overseas: Purple Qi from the East. De Jiao plays the role of a religious movement that promotes new forms of identification to the motherland as substitutes for loosened genealogical links. The books also offers a comprehensive interpretation of the contemporary practice of fu ji spirit-writing, and reconsiders the relation between unity and diversity in Chinese religion.
• Singapore's Borderlands: Tourism, Migration and Anxieties of Mobility. Lindquist's unique ethnographic perspective draws together the worlds of factory workers a nd prostitutes, migrants and tourists to create a compelling account of everyday life in a borderland characterized by dramatic capitalist expansion.
• The Binding Tie: Chinese Intergenerational Relations in Modern Singapore. The book explores how expectations and obligations between generations are being challenged, reworked, and reaffirmed in the face of far-reaching societal change. Goransson's rich material, drawn from ethnographic fieldwork among middle-class Singaporean Chinese, provides insights into the complex interplay of fragmenting and integrating forces.
• The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. In accessible language, Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. Along the way he redefines our views on Asian politics, history, and demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization.
• Asian Aesthetics. The book is divided into five sections, dealing with Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Indian, and Southeast Asian aesthetics. Individual chapters provide in-depth investigations of specific traditions, embracing both classical as well as modern aesthetic forms and at the same time seek commonalities that define the aesthetics of a broader Asian civilization.
• The Singapore and Melaka Straits: Violence, Security, and Diplomacy in the 17th Century. Borschberg provides an unprecendented look at the diplomatic activities of Asian powers in the region, and also shows how the Spanish and Portuguese attempted to restore their political fortunes by containing the rapid rise of Dutch power. The appendices includes copies of key documents, transcribed and translated into English for the first time.
• Merdeka and Much More: The Reminiscences of a Raffles Profession, 1953-67. Professor Tregonning's anecdotal memoir of his years as a member of the Department of History in the University of Singapore, culminating as Raffles Professor, captures the mood and milieu of Singapore as the country emerged from colonial rule to become a self-governing independence nation.

Selections of NEW and recent releases of regional interest

• Transforming Brickfields: Development and Governance in a Malaysian City - NEW. The author offers an ethnographic account of the complex attempts on the part of the state and the community to reconcile techno-rational conceptions of law, development, and city planning with local experiences of place, justice, relatedness, and possibilities for belieft in an aggressively changing world.
• Populism in Asia - NEW. Across Asia, "populist" leaders emerged on an unprecedented scale around the start of the 21st century. Leading Asian scholars in this book consider the many faces of contemporary populism in the region, analyzing the phenomenon through case studies of political leaders with populist credentials and using these accounts to evaluate the achievements and failings of democracy. Benedict Anderson provides a reflective afterword.
• A History of Modern Singapore, 1819-2005 - NEW. This fully revised edition, rewritten by CM Turnbull to take into account recent scholarship on Singapore, includes a new chapter on Goh Chok Tong's premiership and the transition to a government headed by Lee Hsien Loong.
• Penang and Its Region: The Story of an Asian Entrepot. The authors discuss the personal networks that have linked prominent individuals in Penang with neigbhoring areas, and then consider the position of the island as a whole within the Southeast Asian region.
• Urbanization, Migration, and Poverty in a Vietnamese Metropolis: Ho Chi Minh City in Comparative Perspectives. This book presents the results of a major interdisciplinary research project that gathered data on more than 1,000 households in Ho Chi Minh City over a three-year period, and on migration flows at the urban destination and in four sending communities in different regions of Vietnam.
• Impressions of the Goh Chok Tong Years in Singapore. This volume examines the changes that took place during the Goh premiership and assesses its legacy. The 45 essays in this volume review a range of issues from domestic politics and foreign policy to economic development, society, culture, the arts and media. View the book's table of contents.
• Studies on Islam and Society in Southeast Asia. William R. Roff has spent more than forty years studying and writing about the modern history of Islam and Muslims, with special reference to Southeast Asia. This collection reprints a selection of his most notable essays, from historiographical and methodological studies to the development of Islamic educational and other institutions, the nature of the Arab presence in Southeast Asia, and the social significance of the hajj. View the book's table of contents.
• [Re]Negotiating East and Southeast Asia: Region, Regionalism, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. This book seeks to explain two core paradoxes associated with ASEAN: how have diverse states hung together and stabilized relations in the face of competing interests, divergent preferences, and arguably weak cooperation? How has an association of lesser, self-identified Southeast Asian states gone beyond its original purview to shape the form and content of Asian Pacific and East Asian regionalism?
• Paths and Rivers: Sa'dan Toraja Society in Transformation. The product of thirty years of fieldwork, Paths and Rivers offers an unusually deep and broad picture of the Sa'dan Toraja as a society in dynamic transition. The author delves deeply into Toraja social memory to show how people think about their past, and to examine the usefulness of history and myth as a source of identity, a template for action, or a resource for claiming presence.
• Negotiating Asymmetry: China's Place in Asia. This book explores how the real or imagined norms governing past relations may shape China's future position in the region by considering how relationships have changed over the past two centuries. The volume argues that neither the "Chinese world order" of tribute relations nor the Westphalia model of sovereign equality ever operated effectively in Asia, but suggests that the past does offer strong indicators about the shape of a new order in Asia.
• Workers and Intellectuals: NGOs, Trade Unions and the Indonesian Labour Movement. Drawing on extensive interviews, this book documents the resurgence of labour activism and explains how activists and workers perceived the position of NGOs in relation to workers and trade unions.

Focus on the arts

• Latent Images: Film in Singapore (Second Edition). A look at Singapore film production between 2000 and 2007 which covers more than 50 new feature films, and also looks at Singapore cinema in its regional and wider contexts.
• Writing Singapore: An Historical Anthology of Singapore Literature. This pioneering anthology, which covers more than a century of literary production in a variety of genres, places key texts in a historical narrative allowing them to be resad, studied, critiqued, and treasured. View the book's table of contents.
• Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art. Drawing on interviews with artists, cultural officers, curators, art critics, and others in Hanoi, the author surveys the impact artists have had on Vietnam's intellectual life, and reveals a diverse art world. This book is of significant interest to anthropologists and art historians as well as students and scholars concerned with interdisciplinary research on culture and society.

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