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"Essays examine the widespread presence and myths of Asia in American culture in the late 18th and early 20th centuries, exploring the persistence and pervasiveness of America's fascination with the East"--OCLC
A compelling, illuminating and evocative history of Singapore—the world's most successful city-state. In 1965, Singapore's GDP per capita was on a par with Jordan. Now it has outstripped Japan. After the Second World War and a sudden rupture with newly formed Malaysia, Singapore found itself independent - and facing a crisis. It took the bloody-minded determination and vision of Lee Kuan Yew, its founding premier, to take a small island of diverse ethnic groups with a fragile economy and hostile neighbours and meld it into Asia's first globalised city. Lion City examines the different faces of Singaporean life - from education and health to art, politics and demographic challenges - and reveals how in just half a century, Lee forged a country with a buoyant economy and distinctive identity. It explores the darker side of how this was achieved too; through authoritarian control that led to it being dubbed 'Disneyland with the death penalty'. Jeevan Vasagar, former Singapore correspondent for the Financial Times, masterfully takes us through the intricate history, present and future of this unique diamond-shaped island one degree north of the equator, where new and old have remained connected. Lion City is a personal, insightful and definitive guide to the city, and how its extraordinary rise is shaping East Asia and the rest of the world.
A critical analysis of the idea of Europe and the limits and possibilities of a European identity in the broader perspective of history. This book argues that the crucial issue is the articulation of a new identity that is based on post-national citizenship rather than ambivalent notions of unity.
"[A] smart take on modern Chinese nationalism" (Foreign Policy), this provocative account shows that "China"--and its 5,000 years of unified history--is a national myth, created only a century ago with a political agenda that persists to this day China's current leadership lays claim to a 5,000-year-old civilization, but "China" as a unified country and people, Bill Hayton argues, was created far more recently by a small group of intellectuals. In this compelling account, Hayton shows how China's present-day geopolitical problems--the fates of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and the South China Sea--were born in the struggle to create a modern nation-state. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reformers and revolutionaries adopted foreign ideas to "invent' a new vision of China. By asserting a particular, politicized version of the past the government bolstered its claim to a vast territory stretching from the Pacific to Central Asia. Ranging across history, nationhood, language, and territory, Hayton shows how the Republic's reworking of its past not only helped it to justify its right to rule a century ago--but continues to motivate and direct policy today.
In Inventing America, José Rabasa presents the view that Columbus's historic act was not a discovery, and still less an encounter. Rather, he considers it the beginning of a process of inventing a New World in the sixteenth century European consciousness. The notion of America as a European invention challenges the popular conception of the New World as a natural entity to be discovered or understood, however imperfectly. This book aims to debunk complacency with the historic, geographic, and cartographic rudiments underlying our present picture of the world.
The contributors to this collection of seven essays (plus an editor's introduction and a comparative afterword) have framed debates about the construction of commercial culture in China. They all have agreed that during the early twentieth century China's commercial culture was centered in the private sector of Shanghai's economy and especially in the "concession" areas under Western or Japanese rule, but they have differed over the issue of whether foreign influence was decisive in the creation of Shanghai's commercial culture. Between 1900 and 1937, was Shanghai's commercial culture imported from the West or invented locally? And between 1937 and 1945, was the history of this commercial culture cut short by Japanese military invasions and occupations of the city or was it sustained throughout the war? The contributors have proposed various and even conflicting answers to these questions, and their interpretations bear upon wider debates in historical, cultural, and comparative studies.
As the Internet has matured in technology and reach, we have seen an explosion in tech startups all over the world. Not only are some of these startups changing the world and how we live in it, they are also proving to be the engines of job creation—an aspect that will be critical in the future. To support these startups, new ecosystems are popping up all over the globe to help grow these companies, aided by governments, successful entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists. In Startup Capitals, Zafar Anjum brings you a ringside view from the world’s top ten startup cities of the world. Well-researched and highly insightful, this book lays bare the engines of innovation and the lessons that can be learnt from these burgeoning startup capitals.
"The Invention of Martial Arts examines the media history of what we now call 'martial arts' and argues that martial arts is a cultural construction that was born in film, TV and other media. It argues that 'martial arts' exploded into popular consciousness entirely thanks to the work of media. Of course, the book does not deny the existence of real, material histories and non-media dimensions in martial arts practices. But it thoroughly recasts the status of such histories, combining recent myth-busting findings in historical martial arts research with important insights into the discontinuous character of history, the widespread 'invention of tradition', the orientalism and imagined geographies that animate many ideas about history, and the frequent manipulation of history for reasons of status, cultural capital, private or public power, politics, and/or financial gain. In doing so, The Invention of Martial Arts argues for the primacy of media representation as key player in the emergence and spread of martial arts. This argument overturns the dominant belief that 'real practices' are primary, while representations are secondary. The book makes its case via historical analysis of the British media history of such Eastern and Western martial arts as Bartitsu, jujutsu, judo, karate, tai chi and MMA across a range of media, from newspapers, comics and books to cartoon, film and TV series, as well as television adverts and music videos, focusing on key but often overlooked texts such as adverts for 'Hai Karate', the 1970s disco hit 'Kung Fu Fighting', and many other mainstream and marginal media texts"--