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

Exciting NEW releases available immediately!

• Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia - NEW. Ann Dunham's (President Obama's late mother) book based on field work conducted intermittently over a period of fourteen years that examined rural industries in Indonesia, with a particular focus on metalworking in Java.
• Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History - NEW. Elkins offers an engaging and accessible survey of his personal journey encountering and interpreting Chinese art through Western scholars' writings. The book is a stimulating read, challenging many to reconsider their fundamental assumptions about art history and rethink the art historical project in broader terms.
• Chinese Business in the Making of a Malay State, 1882-1941: Kedah and Penang - NEW. The author demonstrates the complexity of interactions involving new migrants, sojourners and settlers, challenges understandings of state formation and economic growth in colonial Malaya based on ethnic stereotypes and accounts of events limited by fixed political boundaries.
• Leaves of the Same Tree: Trade and Ethnicity in the Straits of Melaka - NEW. This volume demonstrates how problematizing ethnicity can offer a more nuanced view of ethnic relations in a region that boasts one of the greatest diversities of language and culture in the world. Creative and challenging, the book uncovers many new questions that promise to revitalize and reorient the historiography of Southeast Asia.
• Between Frontiers: Nation and Identity in a Southeast Asian Borderland. Based on fieldwork in, and archival research on, the borderland between Malaysian Sarawak and Indonesian Borneo, this book explores what happens when the state actualizes its territoriality. It looks at how the emergence of national space shapes the existence of people living in border zones, where they live between nations.
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• Love and Dread in Cambodia: Weddings, Births and Ritual Harm under the Khmer Rouge. LeVine followed Cambodian men and women to former wedding and birth sites from the Khmer Rouge period uncovering evidence of "ritualcide." Severe dislocation, induced starvation and other murderous activies paved the way for reconstructed communes that did not end in 1979 but continued since Euro-American perspectives have also failed to accept spirit respect as a normative feature.
• Southeast Asia in the Fifteenth Century: The China Factor. The book draws together the great changes that occurred in Southeast Asia during the fifteenth century, and considers the extent to which Ming China's engagement with the region helped usher in the early modern period of Southeast Asian history.
• Industrialization in Late-Developing ASEAN Countries: Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam. Late industrializing countries are able to pick strategies for economic development based on the experiences of countries that preceded them. The outcomes differed significantly and this volume explores these differences through case studies based on an extended research program.
• Information Technology Innovation and the Japanese Economy. Using a newly constructed set of data, this book examines how the Japanese economy has been affected by advances in information and communications technology, and whether Japan's experience with IT advancement was a short-lived bubble or part of a truly revolutionary change in the Japanese economy that will lead to long-term growth. There are also discussions on the similarities and differences between Japan's experience with IT innovation and that of the United States.

Selections of NEW and recent releases of regional interest

• 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.
• 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.

Focus on the arts

• 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.
• 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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